When Joe Rogan kicked off his podcast on Wednesday, he floated a surprising — though clearly tongue-in-cheek — proposal for Donald Trump: once he leaves the White House, why not run for governor of California?

“What Donald Trump should do is, when he leaves the office, run for the governor of California!” Rogan declared on his widely-heard podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience.

He laughed at the notion himself, adding:

“Just take over California and fix it. It would be hilarious if he did. It would be one of the funniest thing of all time, if an 82-year-old man steps into the office of governor of California.”

Then, in imitation of Trump:
“‘We’re going to fix everything. You’ve got a problem with water, I know how to get the water!’ It would be f*cking hilarious.”

Rogan introduced the idea after discussing a friend who was “fleeing LA” — a move Rogan himself made when he relocated from California to Texas a few years ago. He explained his reasoning:

“There’s something that happened because of the pandemic, and the Black Lives Matter protests and the riots — whatever the temperature of society was, it’s like it hit ‘Societal Global Warming.’ Where it’s like, ‘It’s time to investigate Greenland. It’s time to move north, like, this is a bad climate now, this sucks!’”

Rogan’s guest, commentator Konstantin Kisin, agreed that Southern California initially appears idyllic (“paradise” when you step off the plane), but argued that governors like Gavin Newsom have mismanaged things so badly that people are actually leaving paradise. Rogan echoed the sentiment: when he first moved to California in the 1990s, he said, it was “much more moderate” and while left-leaning it was not dominated by politics. But he observed a distinct shift during Barack Obama’s second term — and it has only worsened since.

The suggestion that Trump run for governor comes on the heels of Rogan’s scathing critique of Newsom, whom he recently labelled a “bullsh*t artist” who had “ruined” California. In turn, Newsom challenged Rogan publicly, daring him to put him on the podcast for a proper back-and-forth.

Of course, the idea remains facetious: if Trump were to pursue this path, he would have to wait — the next governor’s race in California is in 2026, meaning the earliest realistic start would likely be 2030.

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