We also have a Mandana White, who has done some of yo.
He's that tough guy.
When Trump took to the stage to claim victory in Palm Beach, Florida, he was joined by a football team sized contingent of family and friends, including the chief executive of the UFC, Dana White.
Nobody deserves us more than him, and nobody deserves us more than his family does. He deserves this, They deserve it as a family.
White, who has admitted to assaulting his wife, took them like to thank some people he saw as crucial to delivering his friend Donald Trump the presidency.
At the Note Boys, Aidan Ross, Theo Vaughan, Bossom with the Boys, and last but not least, the mighty and Powerful.
Joe Rogan and thank you America. Thank you had a good night.
Trump's appearance on podcasts like the Joe Rogan Experience were crucial to securing the support of young men across America who might not have otherwise voted. It was a sophisticated plan based on a close read of voting trends and a little help from Trump's son Baron.
From Schwartz Media. I'm Ruby Jones. This is seven AM.
Today National political correspondent for Time magazine, Eric cordlessa on Donald Trump and the podbros who helped him win.
It's Monday, November eleven.
Hi, Eric, thank you so much for joining us on seven am.
You bet happy to be here.
So you were there in Florida when Trump claimed victory. Can you tell me about Dana White, the UFC boss who was there on stage.
With him, close personal friend of Donald Trump's. Trump likes to be surrounded by his friends. He thinks they kind of loosen him up and help him hone his instincts and his impulses.
This is what happens when the machine comes after you. What you've seen over the last several years, this is what it looks like. Couldn't stop him. He keeps going forward. He doesn't quit, you know.
Dana White at the speech basically suggested that Donald Trump was vindicated, that his adversaries had taken all these different approaches to removing him from potentially ascending power again and failed, and that this was the culmination of a four year attempt to reclaim the White House.
He's the most resilient, hard working man I've ever met in my life. His family are incredible people. This is calm, ladies and gentlemen.
And Dana White, aside from being a close friend of Trump's, was unwittingly in a sense, central to the formation of a core campaign strategy for how they would reach what we call low propensity voters.
Those are voters who aren't reliable.
Right how so, Well, after Trump's first indictment in the New York case in April twenty twenty three, Trump was on the phone with Dana White, and he was.
At his mar Alago club and there was a fight upcoming that Saturday in Miami, and he basically said, kind of randomly to his close aids and advisors were with him, why don't we go?
I think those guys would love me there? And he went. He showed up, and he got.
A raucous standing ovation brought down the house when he walked into the arena. And while he was there, they ran into another popular podcast group, the NLT Boys, who have a really large following of young male viewers and listeners. And a few weeks later Trump went on that podcast, so.
I'm here with your friends and love boys, and they are the modern day Johnny Carson.
Right.
I can't say.
Jimmy of them.
Are these loss no, you know, you know, they.
Have no ratings there.
They got huge audiences on Spotify, and that became the germ for what would be a sustained strategy with the course of a campaign, to have Trump go on these kind of edgy bro podcasts that those young male audiences, white, black and Latino, and so Dana White was central to Trump and his inner orbit recognizing that this was a winning way to reach voters that their surveys and their focus group showed were the most reachable, the people who they could get in their column who were drifting away
from Joe Biden.
The most okay.
And so how did Trump land on who he should talk to and the way that he should engage with these podcasters.
Well it's a really fascinating story.
So in July Trump his campaign had hired this young twenty seven year old Republican consultant who kind of doubles as a right.
Wing influencer online.
His name is Alex Brucewitz, and Susie Wilds, the campaign manager, knew that he was very well steeped in this world and basically said, Alex, you know these people, why don't you come up with a list for how we can go about this and shows the president can go on and then and then pitch them to DJT as they call him in Trump's in orbit, and Alex put together a list. He called Trump the next morning with another communications advisor on the campaign, Daniel Alvarez. Trump was on
the golf course at the time. He said, you know, I have a list of podcasts I like to pitch you on, and Trump kind of cuts him off and says, have you.
Talked this over with Baron?
And Alex says, no, Sarah, I haven't spoken to Baron, And Trump says, call Baron and see what he thinks and let me know. And so then Brucewitz and Alvarez, you know, scrambled to get ahold of Baron. Baron is not the easiest person to get in touch with because Milanie has always tried shield him from the political fray. But Bruce Witz was able to get in touch with Baron, who said, you got to get him on Aiden Ross.
Aiden Ross, who was known for doing these live stream collaborations on video games with the celebrities and whatnot, and that's where they started.
There's a lot of people that are first time voters watching today. You know, and I want to make it very clear to everybody that you're a human being. You're a great human being, and I want you to basically talk to talk in this camera, talk to them and explain why it's very important as a first time voter to go out and vote and why they should vote for you.
I'd love to do that.
And I love having a young audience. This is young. I think you have some ulsters too, because I also know some ulsters that are listening and watching. But it's about the American dream right now, you don't have the American dream.
They went on Aiden Ross.
It got a lot of attention, five hundred thousand viewers at its peak as they were recording and doing it, and then millions in the days and weeks to come.
Baron says, hello, he's a great young guy, but he's a big.
Fan of yours. Let's all Baron. Yeah, Baron's awesome. He's a great kid, amazing.
He's very tall.
And so that set in motion the podcast strategy and from the rest of the you know, remaining weeks of the campaign, Trump went on a narrathon of podcasts like that.
Is Cocaine a Stronger?
Oh? Yeah, yeah, yeah, Yeah, so you way.
Up with cocaine more than anything else you can think of.
Okay, I'll turn you into a damn owl, homie, you know what I'm saying.
To our segments, we re kept the NFL Weekend, and then we drop our our latest interview, which is, I mean, Donald Trump the biggest interview we've we've ever.
Done, we've ever had by far, and either one of the most polarizing individuals in the world right now. It is a long time coming. Obviously, wanted to give a big shout out to Dana White for making this whole entire thing happen.
You fight this past week and how did it work out?
How you think, mister President.
I think he probably did pretty good.
I've watched enough Holming and ultimately and Joe Rogan Show, who has the most popular podcast in America.
You're making fun of Elon one time.
You're doing it in Elon and President.
It's great.
You have like comedic instincts, like when you said to Hillary you'd be in jail, Like that's great timing. But it's like that kind of stuff was unheard of as a politician, Like no one had done that.
And I think it's funny you need at least the attitude of a comedian when you're doing this business. This is a very dangerous business versus it's a very tough business.
When it's the most dangerous. Well for a job, yes, I mean other than going for and being a firefighter or being a cop. It's the most dangerous.
It's the most us for being president is the most dangerous.
Especially you.
I mean when you haven't even got through the election.
There's been two.
Assassinations coming up after the break the Joe Rogan Effects.
Eric.
During the election campaign, Donald Trump appeared on several podcasts that appeal to young men. Joe Rogan's audience is reportedly eighty percent mail, with more than half of those men under the age of thirty five. And in the fortnight before the election, Joe Rogan had Elon Musk on his show, He had JD Vance and he also spoke to Donald Trump and ultimately Rogan endorsed Trump.
So did this strategy work well?
From what we've seen thus far, Trump did much.
Better with those voters than he did in the previous go rounds. I mean, he made strides with young voters overall on all age brackets eighteen to forty four Latino men, black men. I mean, the campaign's strategy was really to max out the men and hold the women. As a top aide to president former President Trump and President Electrump now told me, and so, you know, the podcast.
Strategy was a way of reaching these viewers.
I mean, they found in their data analysis that the voters who were most susceptible to changing their mind one way or the other, because the reality that they had determined was just glaring was that Americas had deeply entrenched views of Donald Trump.
You know, they love them, they hate them, whatever.
But the voters who were not reliable voters, but who preferred him to first Biden then Harris were this sort of young male demographic, this young male group, and they said, they're not super politically engaged. They don't follow traditional media. They engage and they interact with news and politics through these sort of nonlinear, unconventional sorts of media, and that
podcast were most efficacious way to reach them. And as far as what we can tell from the data so far, they did an effective job at getting those votes that they determined they needed to win the election.
And Eric Joe Rogan has a long history of making a defensive comments.
Aiden Ross is friends.
With Andrew Tait, who's been charged with sex trafficking and rape. So was there a risk here that Trump would turn some voters off while chasing the young men who love these guys.
Yeah, I mean I think, you know, there's a certain segment of the American polity that views a lot of these podcast hosts as quite misogynistic. They're laddish, right, these there are sort of these testosterone laced bull sessions, if you will. But I think what Trump really tapped into was a kind of tyrannical imposition of political correctness in America.
That they felt that there was a censoriousness overtaking American society, and that what they liked when Trump would go on to these podcasts with people who speak in a kind of natural vernacular, they speak like the common man and women, and that Trump had a kind of cultural fluency where
he could relate in this level. A sort of initial analysis of the way American voters responded to Trump on the podcast circuit was that he was authentic, he was natural, and that you know, if there was a controversy based on something he said, then they could just sort of deride it as oh, look, you know, the progressive media is castigating him again because he talks like normal people.
I mean, and that was kind of I think a big sense of what he was tapping into and what was a major cultural grievance at this moment in time.
His voters were making their mind up.
And while doing that, presumably Trump and his team had to make sure that they didn't lose women voters or too many women voters. So how did they thread the needle on that?
That was a tough one, and I think Trump and his top lieutenants knew it at the outset because this was the first presidential election post Dobbs after Supreme Court that was, you know, tilted heavily by three of Donald Trump's appointments, you know, took away a constitutional right to abortion. I think their idea on abortion was to thread the needle of saying, we're just going to leave this to the states.
This is a states.
Rights issue, and we're not going to weigh in on any kind of national federal restrictions.
Now.
When I interviewed Trump in April, I mean, I asked them some very pointed questions about the functional outcome of that policy stands. I sort of asked them at one point, do you think states should be able to monitor women's pregnancies to know whether they've gotten an abortion after the band and he basically said, states can do what they want, and so basically, states could I have an abortion policy in any which direction and that it would be under
their prerogative. And so at some point that was insufficient, as top lieutenants decided, and then Trump in October came out and said that he would veto a national abortion ban. I think the other big thing that they tried to do was make the election about the economy, immigration, and crime as much as they could, because those were the issues where you could.
Tap into the anxieties of well.
To do suburban women who were the most willing to vote for Trump in this cycle per the data, and so far from what we've seen, it did turn out that way.
Eric, thank you so much for your time.
Thank you great to be with you.
Also in the news today, Qatar has withdrawn from being a mediator between Israel and Tamas, citing a refusal by both sides to negotiate in good faith. Hamasa's political office has been based in Qatar's capital Dollar since twenty twelve. And a country has played a key role in trying to broke a deal between the two sides since October
seven last year. A diplomatic source told newswire AFP that the Qataris have informed the US government that they would be ready to re engage when both sides demonstrate a sincere willingness to return to the negotiating table. And President Joe Biden is preparing to host President elect Donald Trump in the Oval Office this week, a tradition not kept by Trump when he refused to accept the results of
the twenty twenty election. President elect Trump has been working on building his team in recent days ahead of being inaugurated on January twenty. In this first major move since his victory speech, Trump picked campaign co chair Susie Wilds to be his chief of staff. She'll be the first woman ever to hold the role.
I'm Ruby Jones. This is seven am. See you tomorrow.