DONALD Trump appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast on Friday night in a lengthy three-hour chat about his attempted assassination, UFOs and the “one big mistake” he made while in the White House.
The former president said he made “bad choices” when he selected members of his cabinet – claiming he owes his “success” to his own decision-making.
Trump appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, on Friday
Trump, gesturing to his ear and describing his attempted assassination in July
Trump with a bloody face after he was shot at a rally in Pennsylvania
He told The Joe Rogan Experience: “The one mistake… I will say it always comes back to the same answer, the biggest mistake I made… I picked some people that I shouldn’t have picked.”
Trump described them as “neocons, or bad people, or disloyal people”.
A ‘neocon’, short for neoconservative, is someone who has conservative or right wing politics, believes strongly in the free market and is a proponent for military intervention abroad.
Trump, 76, named his longest-serving White House chief of staff John Kelly and John Bolton, his national security adviser, as among those he regrets selecting.
Both men are vocal critics of the Republican nominee – with Kelly recently doubling down on claims that Trump is a fan of Adolf Hitler and warned he would “govern like a dictator if allowed”.
Kelly, who worked with Trump from 2017 to 2019, recently called him “the definition of a fascist” in an interview with the New York Times.
Meanwhile Bolton told The Daily Beast that “Trump is too stupid to be a true fascist”.
Trump dubbed Kelly a “bully” and an “idiot” on Rogan’s show.
He also showed off the “tiny little mark” on his ear from an assassination attempt at one of his rallies in Pennsylvania, in July.
Speaking about it, he said: “When I got shot, it wasn’t surreal.
“When I was laying on the ground, I knew exactly what was going on.
“I knew exactly where I was hit.
“They were saying you’ve been hit all over the place because there was so much blood from the ear.”
He added: “It’s not like some of the wrestlers some of the UFC fighters… But it makes me a tougher guy.”
When Rogan asked him if he had been given any classified information on the existence of aliens, Trump simply said: “They told me a lot”.
Speaking about Joe Biden’s 2020 election win, Trump told Rogan: “That election was so crooked, it was the most crooked election.
“They were supposed to get legislative approval to do the things they did, and they didn’t get it in many cases, they didn’t get it.
“Like for extensions of the voting, for voting earlier. All this different things. By law, they had to get legislative approvals.
“You don’t have to go further than that. If you take a look at Wisconsin, they virtually admitted that the election was rigged, robbed, and stolen.”
When Rogan asked if Trump had an evidence to prove his claims about election rigging – the former president steered the conversation to claims that Hunter Biden had a laptop delivered from Russia just before the election.
Podcast host Rogan has made headlines in the past over controversial comments about the Covid pandemic, vaccines and the AIDS epidemic.
He has previously refused to host Trump on his show – saying in 2022 that he didn’t want to help the Republican party’s campaign.
Rogan previously said: “I am not a Trump supporter in any way, shape, or form. I’ve had the opportunity to have him on my show more than once – I’ve said no, every time…I don’t want to help him. I’m not interested in helping him.”
On Friday’s episode he said to the former president: “There’s probably no one in history that I’ve ever seen that’s been attacked the way you’ve been attacked and the way they’ve done it so coordinated and systematically.
Rogan added: “You have said a lot of wild s**t.”