LAS VEGAS (AP) — Former President Donald Trump will head to Texas on Friday — his first public campaign event in the state since receiving the Republican nomination — to sit down with the nation’s most listened to podcaster, creating a new opportunity for him to emphasize the hyper-masculine tone that has defined much of his 2024 bid for the White House.
The GOP presidential candidate will hold a press conference in Austin and meet with podcaster Joe Rogan at his studio. This is only the second time he has campaigned in the state, following a visit to Dallas where he addressed members of the National Rifle Association in May. On Friday, his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, will also visit Texas for an abortion rights rally with superstar Beyoncé.
Trump has made masculinity a central theme of his campaign, appearing on podcasts that target young male voters and surrogates who sometimes use profanity.
At a Trump rally on Wednesday, former Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson called Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz a “weak man” and compared Trump’s return to the White House to a father coming home and “he’s angry!” and ready to punish his misbehaving children.
“When daddy comes home, you know what he says?” Carlson asked. “You’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been a bad girl and now you’re going to get a good spanking.’
Rogan and Trump have a complicated relationship. Rogan had previously said that he previously declined to host Trump on his podcast, but that he didn’t want to do so because he didn’t want to help him.
Earlier this year, Trump criticized Rogan after the podcaster said then-candidate Robert Kennedy Jr. was the only candidate that made sense to him. Kennedy has since suspended his bid, endorsed Trump and joined him on the campaign trail.
“It will be interesting to see how loudly Joe Rogan gets booed the next time he enters the UFC Ring??? MAGA2024,” Trump wrote on his social media site in August.
The podcaster is known for his hour-long interviews on “The Joe Rogan Experience,” which is No. 1 in the United States, according to Spotify’s charts. He calls women “chicks” and once laughed when a comedian friend described how he repeatedly forced young female comics to have sex.
Trump is ramping up his immigration rhetoric even further
Trump will also hold a press conference to discuss border security. He escalates his already dark and apocalyptic rhetoric against illegal immigration in the final stretch of the race.
At a rally Thursday in Arizona, Trump blasted Harris for the Biden administration’s record on the border, which he said had “unleashed” an “army of migrant gangs” waging “a campaign of violence and terror against our citizens ‘.
“We are like a garbage can to the world,” Trump said, adding a new insult to the litany he used to describe the state of the nation under the Biden administration.
At a Turning Point event later in the day in Las Vegas, Trump claimed that cities had been “invaded and conquered” by violent immigrants, adding: “We have many cities that are not yet infected.” Trump has long repeated tropes about immigration by portraying migrants as disease spreaders, dating back to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Trump sees immigration as the issue that won him the White House in 2016. He accuses Harris of committing “an evil betrayal of America” and “orchestrating the most egregious betrayal ever inflicted on our people by any leader in American history,” even as crime has declined.
Although migrants have been charged with a number of high-profile crimes that Trump repeatedly highlights, research has shown that immigrants — including those who entered the country illegally — are accused of fewer violent crimes than U.S. citizens.
He has also spread false theories that Democrats are registering immigrants without legal voting status.
As Harris visited Houston for her meeting with Beyoncé, Trump and his allies made illegal immigration the center of their counter-attack Friday morning. They pointed to the murder of a 12-year-old Texas girl, Jocelyn Nungaray, whose body was found in June. Prosecutors have charged two Venezuelan men in the U.S. illegally with capital murder.
