The corporate media spent nearly a decade painting Donald Trump as everything short of a Bond villain — and now Joe Rogan says America is seeing the ugly fallout in real time.
During a fiery sit-down with Tennessee Rep. Tim Burchett on “The Joe Rogan Experience,” the podcast king unloaded on what he called the nonstop “Trump Derangement Syndrome” churned out by legacy media outlets, arguing the constant hysteria has helped create a climate where violence against Trump gets rationalized — or even cheered.
The conversation came after yet another frightening security incident involving the president, this time at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in Washington, where an armed suspect allegedly breached security before chaos erupted. The scare reopened old wounds from the 2024 assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania — the rally shooting where Trump famously turned his head at the last second and took a bullet across the ear instead of the skull.
And Rogan had little patience for internet conspiracy theorists still insisting the Butler shooting was staged.
“There’s a lot of people running around out there saying that that first Trump assassination was a setup, and that it was a hoax, and that Trump did it to try to get people to be more sympathetic to him,” Rogan said. “Anybody who says that doesn’t know anything about guns.”
Then came the line that vaporized the “false flag” crowd. “There is not a person on Earth that could nick your ear at 140 yards, reliably,” Rogan said, mocking the idea that Trump somehow volunteered for a Hollywood-style near-death stunt involving live rounds flying past his head.
That Butler moment instantly became one of the defining images of the 2024 election cycle: Trump bloodied but standing, pumping his fist while Secret Service agents swarmed him. Since then, conspiracy theories from both the left and right have flooded social media, despite federal investigators maintaining the shooting was genuine and carried out by lone gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks.
Burchett wasn’t buying the idea that Butler was merely a security “mistake,” either. “If Tim Burchett sneaks into the back of a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert and gets close to the stage, that’s a breakdown,” the congressman joked. “What happened in Butler was a complete capitulation.”
That line landed like a brick because the questions around Butler never really disappeared. Critics have spent months wondering how a gunman managed to get onto a rooftop with a clear line of sight to a former president while security teams somehow missed it. Even now, the Secret Service remains under scrutiny after multiple breaches tied to Trump events.
But Rogan argued the deeper issue isn’t just security failures — it’s the relentless demonization campaign against Trump that’s seeped into American culture for years. “People hate him so much and the narrative in the media, this Trump Derangement narrative that you see in the media is so strong and people are so programmed by it,” Rogan said.
He painted a picture familiar to millions of Americans exhausted by wall-to-wall political hysteria: regular people grinding through work, raising families, and relying on headlines and cable-news soundbites to shape their worldview. “For the average person that has a very involved job, you’re working all day, and then you have a family, and you have a life,” Rogan said. “You don’t have time to really go into depth about what’s real and what’s not real.”
Then he dropped the hammer on one of the media’s favorite obsessions during Trump’s first term — Russia collusion. “You got that Russia collusion stuff shoved down your throat by mainstream media for years, and you believe all of it 100%,” Rogan said. “So you really believed he’s a terrible person, Russian agent … so you want someone to kill him.”
That accusation — that years of overheated political rhetoric have helped poison unstable minds — has become a growing talking point among conservatives after repeated threats and attacks targeting Trump. Even some critics of the president have acknowledged the country’s political climate has become dangerously unhinged.
Meanwhile, the same media class that spent years insisting Trump was an existential threat to democracy suddenly acts shocked when deranged activists allegedly decide to take that rhetoric literally.
Funny how that works.
