Flagrant: Brocasting Trump, Part III
DOI: https://doi.org/10.59350/y49hf-b4539
In total, Trump appeared on fourteen podcasts or video streams during his 2024 campaign, which together earned a combined 90.9 million views on YouTube and on other video streaming platforms, not even including audio podcast listens, which, because of the decentralized nature of RSS, are notoriously difficult to pin down.
That’s a lot.
In the following series of posts, I am particularly concerned with Trump’s success with the so-called podcast bros – partially because my own research interests are in the area of mediated masculinities, but also because they may have put him over the edge with a key demographic – with Gen-Z men.
Over this series—which began in January 2026 with Logan Paul—I will examine several of Trump’s appearances on largely apolitical “bro” podcasts during the 2024 campaign season, including his interviews with Logan Paul, Theo Von, Andrew Schulz, , and Joe Rogan. In the course of this examination, I will pay attention not only to what Trump said on these shows, but also to the way in which they established a sense of intimacy, and how that intimacy worked to underscore Trump’s reputation for authenticity. Along the way, I will also discuss the podcasts and podcasters themselves and attempt to locate them within the broader scope of the manosphere. Finally, given the passage of time since Trump’s appearances, I will consider to what extent, if any, individual hosts have become critical of his administration’s policies and actions – as Joe Rogan famously has.
Here’s our third installment, on Flagrant.
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On January 28th of this year, the 42-year-old self-proclaimed “anti-woke” comedian Andrew Schulz raised a few eyebrows when he revealed on his Flagrant podcast that the January 24 murder of Alex Pretti by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents in Minneapolis was a “breaking point” for him (Schulz and his co-hosts would incorrectly attribute the murder to ICE agents throughout their conversation, but the agencies, which both operate under the umbrella of the Department of Homeland Security, were working together at the time on Operation Metro Surge).
“All right, let’s do it. Let’s talk about what happened in Minneapolis,” Schulz began. “ICE murdered an American citizen in cold blood and then the Trump administration called him a domestic terrorist … Like plain and simple. I see the administration trying to spin it and it’s fucking disgusting.”
He wasn’t wrong. But having hosted Trump for a softball interview just prior to the 2024 election, Schulz and his co-host, Akaash Singh, were pilloried by some in their audience for their naïve complicity.
“Instead of voting for a woman, you voted for an incompetent sociopath that blamed immigrants for everything. You’re partly responsible for Alex Pretti’s death,” wrote one YouTube user.
“Comedy bros did more to elect Trump than most anybody else, based on the young man vote alone,” another observed. “The attempts to salvage your reputations will and should fail. The damage you did will take us decades to recover from, if we ever do.”
“You voted for this, you soapboxed it, you platformed this,” wrote a third. “There was [sic] no lies or secrets, Donald was very open about his plans. You are apologetic? Apologize for how you contributed to it, and actually do something about it. I am so tired of you guys ignoring your part in the damage.”
For their part, on their January 28th episode, Schulz and Singh, along with their co-hosts Alexx Media and Mark Gagnon, had a rather thoughtful conversation (to be fair, it came after about 21 minutes of jokes about masturbation and penis size) about federal agents’ “abhorrent” and murderous actions and the administration’s subsequent attempt to “gaslight” the American public. Noting that he wasn’t trying to “curry any … good will” with the administration and wouldn’t “stay silent,” Shulz explained to those who might argue that he was exaggerating, that “you have a government enforced militia with no accountability … poor training, obviously you saw from this circumstance, no effort to deescalate. If anything, efforts to escalate the situation, and … it’s absolutely disgusting.”
“They’re doing things that objectively … I don’t care what side of the aisle you’re on, objectively, are unconstitutional,” he later added.
But one wishes he would have found this fire when he was interviewing Trump in 2024. Instead, he chummed it up with the former president, asking questions that seemed designed to allow him to polish his image as a proud father, a tough-as-nails assassination survivor, a savvy negotiator, and a rhetorical genius adept at the so-called “weave.” Evidently beguiled by their guest’s charm, Schulz and Singh offered little in the way of pushback or follow-ups, taking his claims about trade imbalances, border policy, and a possible Iranian assassination conspiracy at face value rather than pressing for more information – or evidence.
But in his own defense, Schulz noted in the January 28th episode that he had actually pushed back on Trump’s stance on immigration reform by pointing out that the real estate developer may have himself hired illegal immigrants through his businesses, and that it was necessary to have empathy and a pathway toward citizenship. Trump, Schulz remembered, had assured him that his administration would only go after the criminals. “And maybe I naively believed that he would do that,” the podcaster admitted.
This is putting it mildly. It’s hard to square, for instance, Schulz’s vision of a precisely targeted deportation effort with Trump’s 2024 campaign rhetoric, which often promised to conduct the “largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” Such maximalism would seem to preclude a focused and carefully orchestrated enforcement effort sensitive to civil liberties. This would be a mass sweep.
But if Trump’s lack of nuance didn’t bother Schulz, maybe his virulently anti-immigrant demagoguery should have. In a broadly publicized speech at an April 2, 2024 campaign rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, for instance, Trump repeatedly called illegal immigrants “animals.”
The Democrats say, ‘Please don’t call them animals. They’re humans.’ I said, ‘No, they’re not humans. They’re animals,’ Trump said. ‘Nancy Pelosi told me that. She said, “Please don’t use the word animals when you’re talking about these people.” I said, ‘I’ll use the word animal because that’s what they are.’
If Schulz had been serious about pushing back on his guest, he might have asked him to explain these remarks; he might have identified these statements as eliminationist in character and, as such, a rhetorical prelude to launching a war within. And perhaps because of this (or, say, simply because of January 6), he might not have invited Trump on the show at all.
But he did. Recognizing his complicity, but not quite apologizing for it, Schulz admitted, “anybody who wants to criticize us for platforming [Trump], 100%. That is fair. 100%.”
In Schulz’s conception of American politics circa 2024-2025, however, Trump seems to have simply been the current Republican running for office. His departure from ethical, legal, administrative, and even epistemic norms during his first term in office, and his controversial family separation policy and “Muslim Ban” (among other things) were apparently forgotten, swept away by a kind of equivalency in which “both sides” could go too far.
Appearing on the similarly anti-woke podcast, Triggernometry in April 2025, for instance, Schulz, himself a former Democrat, explained to sympathetic hosts Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster that in the past decade or so, it had been the Democrats themselves who had been too extreme in their embrace of wokeism and thus too distant from the values of personal liberty – especially the freedom of speech – that he associated with the political center. Politics, he asserted, was like a pendulum, and recently it had been the left that had been ascendant. But they had lost their way. Sometime after the Clinton era, they had stopped being “cool” and started being scolds.
Trump, in contrast, was cool. He was the one “getting p*ssy left and right … he’s the one saying say whatever the fuck you want,” and it was this image, this association with personal freedom that most appealed to Schulz (although he would later admit to a reporter from the New York Times that perhaps he shouldn’t have used those exact words).
But this didn’t mean that Schulz was a “right-wing MAGA lunatic.” Sure, he had optimism for the second Trump administration, but he didn’t “believe in … taking sides, per se.” Soon enough, he told Kisin and Foster, the right was liable get too extreme and “say crazy fucking shit” and alienate the public just as the Democrats had.
But Trump, he agreed with Foster, had clearly been the better candidate in 2024.
In a two-party system in which politics are typically understood in terms of a binary left-right spectrum, it can seem like such neutrality, such willingness to critique “both sides” for their inattention to “nuance” is representative of a rational center. Politics and partisanship are not co-extensive, however. The refusal to adopt a partisan position is itself political, and, at least in Schulz’s case, suggests that his anti-woke, anti-establishment positions are moderate, if a little edgy.
But if one were to describe Schulz’s politics on the eve of the 2024 election, it would probably be accurate to identify him as a disaffected Democrat, a White, heterosexual, cis-gendered man who had soured on liberals’ turn toward identity politics in the post-Ferguson era. His embrace of Trump was thus in large part a reaction to what he perceived to be a change in Democratic politics; but it can also be attributed to his dim view of Kamala Harris as a candidate, generally.
Indeed, as Schulz told Matt Wilstein of The Last Laugh podcast, he didn’t think that having Trump on his podcast really moved the needle on the election outcome. “I think that America had made up their mind, and I think that a lot of people assumed that the vote for Trump was because he’s this populist superstar that everybody loves and they’re obsessed with. And I think what they’re not calculating is, there are a lot of people that were unhappy with the status quo, and they were voting to reject the current administration, which seemingly was saying that they weren’t going to make any changes.”
This very well may describe the rationale of millions of Trump voters in 2024. Yet to support Trump is to ignore (accept?) noxious, autocratic, and just plain absurd behavior (remember sharpie-gate? His statement that there were “very fine people” on “both sides” at Charlottesville? His promise to be a dictator “on day one”?). The willingness to overlook these things, and, as Schulz earnestly put it on Flagrant’s post-election episode, to hope that Trump’s election heralded the dawn of an American “golden age,” must be seen as taking the side of illiberal reactionaries against liberal democracy as it has heretofore been practiced. However, if one calculates that the authoritarian demagogue is the lesser of two evils, one cannot claim to represent the center as it has been traditionally understood. One has thrown in their lot and should not be surprised when despotic desires have despotic ends.
What Schulz probably got right in his post-election analysis, though (despite his protest that the audience had already made up their minds), was his assessment of why Trump’s podcast tour worked out so well for him. The distinctive characteristic of podcasting, he asserted, is its ability to forge a sense of community. Noting how comedians – himself and his co-hosts included – used podcasts as a form of self-promotion to help them sell tickets to their standup shows, Schulz conjectured that Trump was simply following the same playbook, using his podcast appearances to develop a kind of parasocial connection with audiences that would then go out and vote for him. Harris’s mistake, then, was not doing this as effectively – not really connecting with the right podcast audiences and instead relying on a legacy media strategy that didn’t pay the same parasocial dividends.
Given audio media’s reputation for intimacy, this is an important insight with implications for the future of political media strategy, and hence, for democracy. As I have suggested in previous installments of this series, the podcasting circuit provides candidates with something of a shelter from the rigorous questioning of traditional political journalists. Indeed, it is likely that podcast hosts are happy enough to have such high-profile guests to boost their engagement that they are unlikely to risk the access by being prickly (though one could reasonably point out that the question of access is relevant to legacy media as well). But neither are podcasters really trained to ask such questions.
It’s not likely to happen, but I think podcasters need to realize that they have leverage in these situations: They offer political candidates an intimate venue through which they can connect with potential voters and benefit from the community they have already built. The cost of admission could very well be a few difficult questions.
But again, most podcasters just aren’t trained for it. Nor is “journalism” really the point of these shows.
Instead, we are at a moment in which the work of the fourth estate must share space with (if it hasn’t already been superseded by) content produced by the new media royalty. And these new shapers of public discourse are decidedly less interested in playing a watchdog role than they are in staging intimate conversations and building personal brands. What this means for the future of presidential campaigning and for the cultivation of an informed electorate, remains to be seen.
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Featured Image: M Chifftie, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
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Andrew J. Salvati is an adjunct professor in the Media and Communications program at Drew University, where he teaches courses on podcasting and television studies. His research interests include media and cultural memory, television history, and mediated masculinity. He is the co-founder and occasional co-host of Inside the Box: The TV History Podcast, and Drew Archives in 10.
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REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:
Impaulsive: Bro-casting Trump, Part I—Andrew J. Salvati
This Past Weekend with Theo Von: Brocasting Trump, Part II–Andrew J. Salvati
Taters Gonna Tate. . .But Do Platforms Have to Platform?: Listening to the Manosphere—Andrew J. Salvati
Listening to MAGA Politics within US/Mexico’s Lucha Libre –Esther Díaz Martín and Rebeca Rivas
Gendered Sonic Violence, from the Waiting Room to the Locker Room–Rebecca Lentjes
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The Sounds of Obsession: Subtle Menace in the Music of Yash Chopra’s “Darr”
DOI: https://doi.org/10.59350/d7npv-9gn02
The classic Hindi film, Darr (1993), directed by Yash Chopra, is the story of the stalker Rahul, played by Shah Rukh Khan, wreaking havoc on the lives of the innocent lovers, Kiran and Sunil (played by Juhi Chawla and Sunny Deol respectively). As Rahul stalks Kiran, declaring his love for her, the audience is shown a window into the derangement of his psyche: the loss of his mother at a young age, unsent love letters during college, a shrine filled with pictures of Kiran, carving her name into his chest with a knife. His obsessive love turns to violence toward Sunil, and the lovers try to evade his sinister advances as Rahul chases them across the planet.
Originally advertised as “a violent love story” on its movie poster, the film largely follows the conventions of 1990s Bollywood, but Chopra and screenwriter, Honey Irani, create distortions of genre expectation through Shah Rukh Khan’s character. One of said genre conventions is the inclusion of original song sequences, composed by Pt. Shivkumar Sharma and Pt. Hariprasad Chaurasia (as the duo “Shiv-Hari”), with lyrics by Anand Bakshi. Despite their non-threatening surface exteriors, various musical devices combine with the filmmaking to give the songs a layer of menace that elevate them above the standard fare of contemporaneous Hindi film music. This creates a multi-tiered listening dynamic wherein the pleasant becomes grotesque in context.
The songs of Darr have become classics in the world of ’90s Bollywood film songs. But, behind the catchiness and fulfillment of industry expectation lies a multi-layered psycho-drama created by the songs’ interactions with Darr’s story and characters. This interaction exists not solely in lyrical concerns but also in the subtle musical gestures crafted by the minds of Shiv-Hari. At a surface level, listening to the film’s soundtrack is enjoyable; there are catchy melodies, lush orchestrations, and timeless performances by now-legendary singers. However, the deeper one listens with an analytical focus, the more disturbing, intriguing, and artistically edifying the songs become.
While the film begins with an idyllic, romantic tone, the music soon introduces an element of the sinister. After a brief introductory scene of Kiran, who is seen alone reading a letter from her fiance Sunil (although Yash Chopra already hints at Rahul’s presence in this scene), we find her with her friends at their school. We hear “Kiran, I love you” announced through the school’s public address. The music of “Jaadu Teri Nazar” (roughly “Your look is magic”) then begins diegetically, sung by Shah Rukh Khan’s Rahul (unbeknownst to Kiran).
By today’s standards, the early lyrics contain a definite romantic red flag in the lines “Tu haan kar, ya naa kar / Tu hai meri Kiran” (“whether you say yes or no, you are mine Kiran”), but in the world of early 1990’s Bollywood, this type of courtship is nothing out of the ordinary. However, Shiv-Hari’s orchestration implies something more sinister, ending the song with a repetition of the line “tu hai meri Kiran” with aggressive orchestral chords.
The actual nature of the song and truly the thesis statement of the entire film is then revealed. Kiran is seen on a train which enters a tunnel and becomes pitch black. We hear a voiceover say the words “Pyaar jab had se guzar jaae to pooja ban jaata hai, aur pooja bhatak jaae to junoon” (“when love crosses a boundary it becomes worship, and when worship goes astray it becomes obsession”). Upon emerging from the tunnel, “Jaadu Teri Nazar” begins again non-diegetically featuring more obviously sinister lyrics, such as “bekhabar meri taqdeer hai tu / tu kisi aur ki ho na jaana / kuch bhi kar jaaonga main deewaana” (“unaware, you are my destiny / don’t you become someone else’s / I am crazy and will do anything”). With this, “Jaadu Teri Nazar” becomes a cipher for the film’s stated theme of love turning into obsession.
Another thematically important part of Darr‘s soundtrack that directly connects to “Jaadu Teri Nazar” is an instrumental track labeled “Obsession (Dance Music)” on the film’s commercial soundtrack release. After proceeding to terrorize the lives of Kiran and Sunil in various episodic scenes, we see Rahul in his apartment, playing the melody of “Jaadu Teri Nazar” on his harmonica. Chopra then cuts to a fantasy sequence scored by “Obsession (Dance Music).” We see Kiran dancing in a shapeless void, assumedly in Rahul’s imagination.
Shiv-Hari’s music starts out calmly, almost entirely with percussion instruments. The fervor of the percussion increases, as does the intensity of Kiran’s dance and the rate of cuts in the visuals. Frenzied imagery and intense music combine to reflect Rahul’s increasingly spiraling self-control. Kiran’s titillating movements to the music in Rahul’s mind further showcase his derangement. The inclusion of the melodic material of “Jaadu Teri Nazar” in “Obsession (Dance Music)” helps to create the idea in the listener’s mind that this melody represents Rahul’s obsession over Kiran. After a brief guitar interlude, the music grows to a climax characterized by wordless choir singing and crashing percussion. At its highest dramatic point, the men in the choir sing the same melody as the line “tu hai meri Kiran” from “Jaadu Teri Nazar” three times before the music ends with Kiran standing in the rain with open arms.
Yash Chopra zooms in towards Kiran as the sound of Rahul’s harmonica playing “Jaadu Teri Nazar” intercedes into the audio of the film, signaling the end of Rahul’s fantasy. Screenwriter Honey Irani’s choice of the harmonica for Rahul’s instrument further clarifies his character. Its sound is tied to classic cinematic images of loneliness. The 1975 Hindi film, Sholay, sees Amitabh Bachchan’s character Jai playing the harmonica while observing Radha (Jaya Bachchan). In Sholay, Radha is a widow—for her to remarry would be a social taboo. Jai’s circumstances have forced him into a life of crime for survival—his playing the harmonica while simultaneously falling into a love that is doomed from the start is paralleled in a contorted way in Darr‘s Rahul. Sholay is one of, if not the most, famous film in the history of Indian cinema—such a comparison would likely occur to contemporary viewers of Darr. This association is triggered sonically through the harmonica’s strained timbre. The instrument even at a physical level could represent Rahul’s frame of mind: it is a rare instrument where one has to both exhale and inhale in order to produce sound. The song “Tu Mere Saamne” echoes this action as it features Rahul heavily breathing in and out at a menacing cadence.
“Tu Mere Saamne,” the final song in the film, sees a dangerous evolution in Rahul’s obsession. It occurs after Sunil and Kiran steal away to Switzerland for their honeymoon, where Rahul finds them and befriends them, as they have never seen his face. His now face-to-face intervention in their lives triggers another fantasy of Kiran in his mind. Despite being a love song on its surface, Shiv-Hari begin the song with forceful orchestral bombast and men’s chorus (which precede the aforementioned heavy breathing), akin to the ending of “Jaadu Teri Nazar” and parts of “Obsession (Dance Music).” Anand Bakshi’s lyrics draw parallels between Rahul and Sunil. “Tu Mere Saamne” (“You are in front of me”) is eerily close to the first words heard in the entire film: Sunil’s words in Kiran’s mind as she reads the love letter he had sent to her (“Jaan, main tumse door hoon. Lekin, tum mere saamne ho.” This translates to “Love, I am far from you. But you are in front of me.”). Sunil’s love is true, but Rahul’s love has crossed the threshold.
Rahul’s early fantasy of Kiran picturized in “Obsession (Dance Music)” did not include Rahul in her presence. This new fantasy changes that dynamic. The line “Tujhko dekhoon ke pyaar karoon” (“Should I gaze at you or make love to you?”) is intermingled with lyrics indicating disbelief yet confirmation that Kiran is now his possession. “Jaadu Teri Nazar” stated “Tu hai meri, Kiran”–simply “You are mine.” The iteration of this sentiment in “Tu Mere Saamne” reaches a point of completion with the line “Tu meri ho gayi”–literally, “You have become mine.” The mukhda (a term that translates literally to “face” that refers to the initial memorable portion of a song) finishes with the line “Kaise main aitbaar karoon” (“How can I trust [this reality]?”). Udit Narayan’s vocals, as well as the contour of the melody line, are fairly simple, unadorned, reflecting the single-minded arrested development at play in Rahul’s psyche (the same could be said for Narayan’s vocals in “Jaadu Teri Nazar”).
Lata Mangeshkar’s vocals in the next stanza overlap with the ending of Udit Narayan’s stanza with considerable echo effects added. This adds to the dream-like, imagined quality of the song—Rahul’s brain at the height of delusion. Mangeshkar’s vocals are shallow with an almost child-like lilt, fitting the simplistic melody. Shiv-Hari composed a tune paralleling the simplistic logic at play with Rahul’s derangement. The Kiran that sings in the song is a cheap imitation—a tulpa in Rahul’s mind. His imagined Kiran sings “Toot gayi tootke main choor ho gayi / Teri zid se majboor ho gayi / Tera jaadu chal gaya…” (“I am broken, I am shattered / Your persistence has compelled me / Your magic has worked”)—a twisted and delusional perspective on romance befitting a murderous stalker.
The danceable, but somewhat menacing instrumental interludes of the song also connect with the earlier sequence set to “Obsession (Dance Music).” The use of a prominent clarinet solo, an uncommon occurrence in Bollywood film songs, adds to the phantasmagorical quality of the song by introducing a foreign timbre. The visual is that of a strange liminal space, a place with no coherent scenery but with raining rose petals. Rahul plays piano as Kiran writhes suggestively. This particular visual shows that Rahul has now placed himself next to her in his own fantasy as opposed to just seeing her. He is no longer simply declaring that she is his—she has become his.
(The following two paragraphs contains significant spoilers)
Throughout the finale of the film, where Rahul is found out and killed by Sunil, Shiv-Hari’s background score is dominated by a particular theme that had been first introduced earlier, always connected to Rahul’s fixation with Kiran. It is characterized by two notes constituting a rising major sixth interval which morphs into a rising perfect fifth interval before deteriorating into a winding chromatic melody that eventually loses intelligibility. The first mentioned interval, the major sixth, traditionally has a romantic quality, especially at its iterated tempo in Darr–a soaring, almost Wagnerian yearning. The second interval, the perfect fifth, is acoustically at rest. But, with the pitch level at which it is presented in relation to the earlier major sixth, it is contorted–it implies a different musical key, an incompatibility. This particular interval happens to be the same as the beginning of “Jaadu Teri Nazar.” This theme’s association with Rahul indicates its mirroring of his emotional incapacity. What he views as love, in this case represented by the major sixth, becomes contorted into his obsession with Kiran, the perfect fifth that connects to “Jaadu Teri Nazar.”
The melody that succeeds these two intervals is simultaneously chaotic and tragic—chaotic in light of his murderous actions, tragic as Rahul’s final end symbolizes a human life wasted on mental derangement. At the end of the film, Shiv-Hari use the theme to paint this tragedy, iterating it twice, first with a subdued muted trumpet, then with a wordless female chorus, as Rahul utters his last words. Yash Chopra reiterates the overarching theme of the entire film one more time by playing an a cappella version of “Jaadu Teri Nazar” over one final shot of Rahul’s lifeless body.
Both the songs and background score of Darr showcase an approach to soundtracking wherein the sonic content not only operates in close coordination with the mood and atmosphere of the film, but with the characters, storyline, themes, and intrinsic reference points orchestrated by Yash Chopra and his crew. Shiv-Hari’s music is not simply color and vibe, but multi-faceted content that rewards close listening just as repeat viewings of the film can illuminate the finer nuances of the plot. It is music that contains a sub-surface circuitry that, even when the listener is unaware of its complexities, creates a richer artistic statement than music that has a similar surface (a similar color and vibe) without the same profound approach to its unseen infrastructure. Shiv-Hari’s soundtrack’s rich subterrain integrating with and projecting onto the visual and narrative elements of Darr creates a rare cinematic totality.
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Featured Image: Still from “Jaadu Teri Nazar” by SO!
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Zane Merritt is a composer, guitarist, teacher, and scholar. He holds a PhD in music composition from the University at Buffalo (SUNY). His recent activities include designing and teaching a course on Bollywood and its music, collaborations with Nepali poets, setting their recitations to original music, and releasing a classical guitar album that places arrangements of Indian film music alongside the western classical canon.
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REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:
“Gendered Soundscapes of India, an Introduction“–Monika Mehta and Praseeda Gopinath
The Queer Sound of the Dandiya Queen, Falguni Pathak–-Pavitra Sundar
“Out of Sync: Gendered Location Sound Work in Bollywood“—Priya Jaikumar
“So Jao”: Sound, Death and the Postcolonial Politics of Cinematic Adaptation in Vishal Bhardwaj’s “Haider” (2014)—Abhipsa Chakraborty
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