This Past Weekend with Theo Von: Brocasting Trump, Part II
But first. . .
A Brief Synopsis of an Introduction to Bro-casting Trump: A Year-long SO! Series by Andrew Salvati
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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 (white) 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, Shawn Ryan, Andrew Schulz, the Nelk Boys, 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 the second installment, on This Past Weekend with Theo Von.
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With about five-and-a-half minutes remaining in the podcaster and comedian Theo Von’s August 2024 interview with Donald Trump, the conversation turned to the U.S. southern border. Thus far, the interview had not shied away from policy concerns; however, though the questions were earnest, the answers were evasive and superficial. Noting that he had hosted Border Patrol agents on his show in the past, Von reported that one of the biggest problems that the agency faced was that its officers were arresting the same people over and over again. The reason, according to Von, was that “the people that are coming in illegally aren’t being prosecuted.”
The 44-year-old podcaster then asked the president in his lilting Louisiana accent what he would do differently to alleviate the problem and make the border more secure. Like many, it was a question that allowed Trump to indulge in his penchant for superlative and self-aggrandizement.
“So, the borders, well, I did it. I did it,” Trump declared. “We had the best border … we had the wall built. We had more going to come beyond, long beyond what I promised. I built hundreds of miles of wall, and it worked.”
Now, this post isn’t necessarily the venue for relitigating the failures of what was Trump’s signature project during his first administration, for reminding you, dear reader, that despite his promise on the 2016 campaign trail that he would “build a great, great wall on our southern border” (which Mexico would pay for), and despite signing an executive order just days after taking office that directed the Secretary of Homeland Security “to immediately plan, design, and construct a physical wall along the southern border,” by the end of his term in office in January, 2021, only 452 miles of wall had been constructed – much of which was not new, and had merely replaced existing barriers. Such reminders can be found elsewhere.
Rather, the moment captured the credulity which Von freely gave the former president throughout the interview, and thereby highlighted what I suggested in my last post is the problem – or, from the candidate’s perspective, the virtue – of a media strategy that allotted a significant amount of time to non-journalists: it was unlikely that he’d get much pushback.
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And after listening through the episode a few times and trying to put myself in the place of an apolitical Theo Von listener, or one perhaps too young to remember the first Trump administration, I began to more fully appreciate the extent to which his apparent authenticity coupled with a sense that he is not just a political outsider, but an autonomous agent free of obligation to party. Typically, this last part comes out when Trump takes aim at “them” – Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and other unnamed Democratic elites, as well as any other members of the “deep state,” or “establishment” who oppose him.
In contrast to these shadowy figures, Trump presents himself as someone who, largely because of his wealth, remains independent, and as such, is uncorrupted by “them.” He can thus position himself as a man of the people, and in fact frequently trumpeted his own popularity during the episode – with Von only too happy to provide affirmation.
But this turn toward the border and to immigration policy is also significant in retrospect, given that Von has since been critical of the second Trump administration’s mass deportation policies, and of the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS’s) unauthorized use of his image and voice in one of its marketing videos in a way that seemed as if he supported the department’s deportation efforts.
In the now-deleted video (part of which can be seen here), Von looks directly into the camera and says “Heard you got deported dude, bye.”
The comedian quickly took to X (formerly Twitter) to vent. “Yoo DHS I didn’t approve to be used in this,” he said in a post that he later deleted. “I know you know my address so send a check. And please take this down and please keep me out of your ‘banger’ deportation videos. When it comes to immigration my thoughts and heart are a lot more nuanced than this video allows. Bye!”
Roughly a week later, on October 2, 2025, Von returned to the subject on his podcast with an impassioned statement explaining to his listeners the situation with the video and outlined some of his own thoughts on immigration. Contextualizing the clip by saying that it had been made in a parking lot after one of his comedy shows as a joke – though in Von’s telling, what he said still comes off as callous, as the “girl” who approached him with the camera was trying to tell the comedian that her friend had recently been deported – Von went on to talk about the blowback he received as a result of the DHS video, which was in no way an accurate depiction of his complex thoughts on immigration.
“And my father immigrated here from Nicaragua, right?” he explained, his voice beginning to break. “Like one of my prized possessions is I have his immigration papers [from] when he came here. And I have them in a frame … and, so I have tons of thoughts about it, but this was just fucked up, right? It was fucked up. And it was everywhere. It was on all platforms and stuff.”
What Von seemed to be doing here was saying that, though he may have supported a tough line on illegal immigration and had little tolerance for those who had been admitted into the country with a criminal record, he could not necessarily get behind the Trump DHS’s indiscriminate deportation scheme, which was sweeping up immigrants who had come into the country the “right way” alongside those who maybe hadn’t.
However in listening to Von’s Trump interview from 2024, it’s hard not to hear the future president laying the groundwork for what would become a maximalist strategy on immigration. “We have over 20 million people, in my opinion, right now, that came into our country [the number of unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. was estimated at 14 million in 2023]. Many come from prisons, jails, mental institutions, many terrorists,” Trump claimed, later adding that “we’re going to spend a lot of time getting the criminals out … we have a lot of people, hundreds of thousands of murderers. We have people, drug dealers … it’s not even believable.”
Although it would have been difficult at the time of the recording to imagine the terror that Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) sweeps would unleash on communities like Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, and Portland in the months following his return to office, we can hear in his attempts to vilify unauthorized foreign nationals, and in his fear-mongering about how many of them were bad actors, a justification for the use of blunt force rather than nuanced policy.
And it seemed like Von agreed, at least in principle, with the law-and-order logic underpinning Trump’s statements. “Oh, I don’t think people should be allowed to be in our country if they’re criminals,” he stated.
To give this conversation a charitable reading, it is perhaps likely that Von assumed that, once in office, Trump’s administration would have the tools to determine which foreign nationals were authorized to be in the country and which were not. Further, he may also have believed ICE would know who among this group had a criminal record – and not conduct mass roundups based on race.
Yet, as we should have all probably known by the summer of 2024, for Trump and his chief advisers, blunt force (and cruelty) was the point. Recall the so-called “Muslim Ban” instituted during Trump’s first term, which was hardly an example of a well-calibrated policy, but was rather a “total and complete shutdown” of travelers and immigrants from seven Muslim-majority countries (though even this wasn’t without its conflicts of interest as it excluded several countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates where Trump had business dealings).
Even the wall, which was conceived by Trump insiders in 2015 as a mnemonic device intended to help their boss to remember to mention illegal immigration at his campaign rallies, was deemed effective precisely because it was not subtle. As Trump 2016 campaign adviser Sam Nunberg told Business Insider, “I think one issue is people did understand walls … the wall in 2016 was symbolic of Donald Trump: common sense, practical solutions, simplified answers – as opposed to long nuanced, detailed policy speak.”
President Donald J. Trump’s signature is seen on a plaque on the border wall Tuesday, Jan. 12, 2021, at the Texas-Mexico border near Alamo, Texas. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead) (PDM 1.0)
And this would be a fair characterization of Trump’s remarks on This Past Weekend – when Von asked earnest policy questions, Trump offered simplified, seemingly common sense responses that presented his own approach to the problems of government as something different than politics-as-usual, different because it was guided by an intensely practical, no-nonsense ethos.
Like his appearance on Logan Paul’s Impaulsive, Trump’s calm, yet forceful tone of voice on This Past Weekend tended to support his overall credibility as a leader capable of bringing logical solutions to a crisis-ridden government – of brining decisive, masculine order to the chaos in Washington. Such was the impression that listeners may have gotten, for instance, from Trump and Von’s discussion of the president’s first term executive order mandating price transparency for hospital care, which Von asked Trump about specifically, and which, Trump claimed, “would have brought down the cost of care by 50, 60%” if Biden and Kamala had enforced it.
But Trump’s appeals to common sense also provided cover for what might have otherwise been an embarrassing bit of hypocrisy. When Von began to turn the conversation toward the power of lobbyists, asking why it was that the government couldn’t seem to do anything about the so-called revolving door, Trump explained that there was a “whole constitutional thing there” (the First Amendment right to petition the government), and agreed with Von that it was “a problem and … a big problem,” adding that “we were [in his first term] doing things about it.”
What his administration did, was issue an executive order banning executive branch employees from becoming lobbyists for a period of five years. This move may have seemed like it indicated a genuine desire to “drain the swamp,” as Trump routinely promised to do on the campaign trail in 2016, but, as ProPublica revealed in a 2019 report, his administration had actually hired 1 lobbyist for every 14 political appointees that it had made since taking office (281 in total), which was four times more than Obama had appointed six years into office.
Given that they had provided ingress to the executive branch, it is perhaps unsurprising that they would eventually provide egress, executive order notwithstanding. Indeed, on the final day of his first term, Trump revoked the order without giving explanation, clearing the way for members of his administration to secure lucrative lobbying gigs. Such contradictions, however, were more or less concealed behind Trump’s populist rhetoric, behind his apparent recognition that conflicts of interest are a problem in politics, or that medical debt is crushing Americans.
But taking a sound studies perspective, we can also see – or hear – how Trump’s tone of voice, which admittedly seems less energetic than it was during his Logan Paul interview, tended to convey an assurance that what he said was an authentic expression of his own thoughts and perspectives. Again, this was not the kind of stream-of-consciousness raving that we have come to expect from his rallies, but rather a low-key, intimate conversation about relevant issues and facts – or, at least facts as Trump saw them.
The implication here is that Trump as a political leader is free to operate in ways that mere politicians and government officials simply can’t because of their obligations to party, to donors, or to lobbyists. What is likely missed in all of this, however, is that what Trump is describing is a thoroughly authoritarian approach to political power, one that is of a piece with his claim that “I alone can fix it.” Positioning himself outside the political establishment – and even independent of the Republican Party of which he is nominally the leader – Trump can offer himself as a political messiah and claim the moral authority to act without regard for democratic processes in the name of a specious popular mandate.
In other words, by contrasting himself with “them,” and by holding himself at a distance from the dominant political order, Trump clears himself of the obligation to work with any group or individual that he deems to be opposed to his own quasi-populist agenda.
And for Von and those in his audience who are fed up with the status quo, that is a powerful appeal.
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Featured Image: Theo Von, Edited James Tamim, Wikimedia Images (CC BY-SA 2.0)
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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 Salvati
Taters Gonna Tate. . .But Do Platforms Have to Platform?: Listening to the Manosphere—Andrew 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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Hate & Non-Human Listening, an Introduction
In January 2026, WIRED reported that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has begun using Palantir’s AI tools to process public tip-line submissions. The system does not simply store or relay these reports. It processes English-language submissions, condensing them into what is called a “BLUF”—a “bottom line up front” summary that allows agents to quickly assess and prioritize cases.
Efficiency is the dominant framing as the system promises speed, clarity, and control over overwhelming volumes of information. Yet such efficiency depends on a prior reduction as expression is detached from the conditions of its articulation and reconstituted as data. In this form, listening no longer risks misunderstanding, it eliminates it.
Nor does this infrastructure operate in isolation. It relies on distributed participation in which listening is recast as vigilance. A recent ICE public X (Twitter) post encouraged residents to report “suspicious activity,” assuring them that doing so would make their communities safer.
The language is familiar, even reassuring. But it depends on a prior act of interpretation: that certain voices, presences, or behaviors are already legible as threat. Listening here becomes pre-classification—identifying danger in advance and acting on that identification as if it were already known. Rather than an isolated case, this development signals a broader transformation in how immigration and enforcement are governed. As legal and policy analyses increasingly note, artificial intelligence is becoming “one of the fundamental operating tools of policing,” deployed across domains ranging from speech and text analysis to risk assessment and document verification. Systems such as USCIS’s Evidence Classifier, which tags and prioritizes key documents within case files, and platforms like ImmigrationOS, which aggregate data across agencies to guide enforcement decisions, do not simply process information—they reorganize it. What matters is not only what is said, but whether it aligns—across time, across records, across bureaucratic expectations. Listening becomes continuous and anticipatory, oriented toward detecting inconsistency, deviation, and risk before any claim can be made or contested.
A very different narrative circulates alongside these developments. A recent BBC article suggested that AI chatbots can function as unusually “good listeners”—patient, nonjudgmental, even compassionate. Users describe these systems as offering space for reflection, sometimes preferring them to human interlocutors. Yet what is at work is not attention or relation, but pattern recognition trained to simulate understanding. Taken together, these examples reveal a shared transformation. Across both enforcement systems and everyday interaction, listening is increasingly detached from sensation, exposure, and accountability, becoming a process of extraction and classification rather than relation. As Dorothy Santos argues in her account of speech AI, machines do not simply assist human listening; they assume its position, becoming “the listeners to our sonic landscapes” while also acting as the capturers, surveyors, and documenters of our utterances. What follows from this shift is not just a change in who listens, but in what listening is. Listening no longer names an encounter between subjects; it describes a technical operation distributed across infrastructures that register, store, and act on sound without ever hearing it.
This shift is what I call “nonhuman listening.”
Nonhuman listening names both an infrastructural condition and a set of practices through which listening is reorganized as a technical operation. It describes a mode of perception distributed across systems that capture, process, and act on sound without exposure to it as experience, as well as the procedures—classification, ranking, prediction—through which sound is rendered actionable in advance. At stake is not simply the emergence of new technologies, but a reorganization of what listening has long been understood to do. Listening unfolds across thresholds of perception, attention, and care, shaped by what can be sensed, cultivated, or ignored. From its earliest formulations, it has been understood not as passive reception but as an ethically charged capacity. Aristotle’s distinction between akousis (hearing) and akroasis (listening) marks this divide, reserving listening for forms of attention capable of judgment and response. In this sense, listening has always named both openness and control: a posture of receptivity toward others and a way of organizing the world.
Nonhuman listening amplifies an older logic: not all voices are heard, and not all forms of speech register as meaning and listening does not begin from neutrality. Norms organize it in advance, determining what registers as signal, who gets to hear, and whose speech counts as intelligible. Meaning and noise do not inhere in sound itself; they emerge through historically sedimented expectations about voice, difference, and belonging.
Sound studies has long challenged the assumption that listening inherently connects or humanizes. Listening does not operate as an immediate or intimate relation; it relies on frameworks that precondition perception. Jonathan Sterne shows that claims about sonic immediacy function less as empirical truths than as ideological formations—narratives that naturalize particular social arrangements while obscuring how listening renders some forms of speech legible and others unintelligible. Listening does not simply receive the world—it organizes it.
At the same time, theoretical and experimental approaches foreground the instability of this organization. Voices do not exist as stable entities prior to their mediation; they “show up as real,” as Matt Rahaim writes, through specific practices and infrastructures that render them intelligible, contested, or indeterminate. Jean-Luc Nancy conceptualizes listening as resonance, emphasizing exposure—the possibility that listening might unsettle the subject—while also underscoring that such openness never distributes evenly. John Cage and Pauline Oliveros treat listening as a disciplined practice that requires cultivation and can fail as easily as it attunes. Listening is not given; it is trained.
Across these accounts, listening operates within regimes of power. Jacques Attali locates listening within governance, where institutions determine what can be heard, what must be silenced, and what becomes disposable. Trauma and memory studies intensify these stakes. Henry Greenspan shows that listening to testimony never occurs as a singular or sufficient act, and that extractive modes of attention can reproduce violence rather than alleviate it. Ralina L. Joseph’s concept of radical listening reframes listening as an ethical orientation—one that demands accountability to power, difference, and fatigue, and that attends to how speakers wish to be heard. As she writes, “the easiest way to refuse to listen is to keep talking.”
Taken together, these accounts point to a more difficult claim: listening is not simply uneven—it is directional. It can orient toward exposure and relation, or toward certainty and verification. When listening turns toward certainty, it no longer encounters speech as an address. It apprehends it in advance while certain voices register not as claims or appeals, but as warnings or threats.
Such orientation has precedents that are neither abstract nor metaphorical. During the 1937 Parsley Massacre, Dominican soldiers used pronunciation as a test of belonging. Suspected Haitians were asked to say the word perejil (parsley); those whose speech did not conform to expected phonetic norms were identified as foreign and often killed. Listening here did not register meaning or intent. It functioned as classification—reducing speech to a signal of difference and acting on that difference as if it were already known.
This logic persists in contemporary enforcement practices, albeit in different registers. Recent encounters with U.S. immigration agents reveal how accent continues to operate as a proxy for suspicion and a trigger for intervention. In multiple reported incidents, individuals have been stopped or detained and asked to account for their citizenship on the basis of how they sound: “Because of your accent,” one agent stated when asked to justify the demand for documentation . In another case, an agent explicitly linked auditory difference to disbelief, telling a driver, “I can hear you don’t have the same accent as me,” before repeatedly questioning where he was born.
In these moments, listening again operates as pre-classification. Accent is not heard as variation, history, or movement, but as evidence—an audible marker of non-belonging that precedes and justifies further scrutiny. What is at stake is not mishearing, but a mode of listening trained to stabilize difference as risk. Speech becomes legible only insofar as it confirms or disrupts an already established expectation of who belongs.
Early analyses of digital surveillance anticipated a more radical transformation than they could yet fully name. Writing in 2014, Robin James identified an emerging “acousmatic” condition in which listening detaches from any identifiable listener and disperses across systems of data capture and analysis. The 2013 Snowden disclosures make clear that this shift was not theoretical but already operational. State surveillance had moved from targeted interception to total capture, amassing communications indiscriminately and deriving “suspicion” only after the fact, as a pattern extracted from within the dataset itself. Listening no longer responds to a known object; it produces the object it claims to detect. What registers as “suspicious” does not precede analysis but materializes through algorithmic filtering, where signal and noise become effects of the system’s design rather than properties of the world. Under these conditions, listening ceases to function as a sensory or interpretive act and instead operates as an infrastructural logic of sorting, ranking, and preemption. Contemporary platforms extend and normalize this logic. They do not hear sound; they process it, rendering it actionable without ever encountering it as experience.
The essays collected in this series extend this transformation across distinct but interconnected domains, tracing how nonhuman listening operates through sound, speech, and platformed media. Across these accounts, listening no longer secures meaning or relation; it becomes a site of contestation, where sound is mobilized, processed, and weaponized within systems that privilege circulation, recognition, and response over truth. Next week, Olga Zaitseva-Herz situates these dynamics within the context of digital warfare, where AI-generated voices, deepfakes, and synthetic media circulate as instruments of psychological manipulation, designed to provoke affective responses that travel faster than verification.
Contemporary speech technologies make this continuity visible at the level of language itself. As work in the Racial Bias in Speech AI series shows, particularly as Michelle Pfeifer demonstrates, speech technologies do not simply fail to recognize certain speakers; they formalize assumptions about what counts as intelligible language in the first place. In these systems, the voice is not encountered as expression but as input—something to be parsed, categorized, and aligned with existing datasets. When AI systems encounter African American Vernacular English—especially emergent idioms shaped by Black and queer communities—language is flattened into surface definitions, stripped of cultural grounding, or flagged as inappropriate. Speech is not heard as situated expressions; it is processed as deviation from an unmarked norm.
What emerges is a form of hostile listening: not the misrecognition of a human listener, but a condition in which recognition is structurally focused. Racialized language becomes perpetually at risk–mistrusted or excluded–not because it fails to communicate but because it exceeds the parameters through which the system can register meaning. Hate here is not expressive or intentional; it is procedural, embedded in the standards that determine what can be heard as language at all.
In this sense, the problem is not that listening has been replaced. It is that it continues—without exposure, without relation, without consequence for those who perform it. What appears as neutrality is the absence of risk. What appears as efficiency is the removal of encounters. Under these conditions, harm does not need to be spoken. It is heard into being in advance—stabilized as signal, confirmed as threat, and acted upon before it can be contested. The question that remains is not whether machines can learn to listen better. It is whether we can still recognize listening once it no longer requires us at all.
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Kathryn Agnes Huether is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Antisemitism Studies at UCLA’s Initiative to Study Hate and the Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies. She earned her PhD in musicology with a minor in cultural studies from the University of Minnesota (2021) and holds a second master’s in religious studies from the University of Colorado Boulder. She has held visiting appointments at Bowdoin College and Vanderbilt University and was the 2021–2022 Mandel Center Postdoctoral Fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Her research examines how sound mediates Holocaust memory, antisemitism, racial violence, and contemporary politics. She has published in Sound Studies and Yuval, has forthcoming work in the Journal of the Society for American Music and Music and Politics. She is a member of the Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University’s (HEFNU) Virtual Speakers Bureau and has been an invited educator at two of its regional institutes, and is current editor of ISH’s public-facing blog. Her first book, Sounding Hate: Sonic Politics in the Age of Platforms and AI, is in progress. Her second, Sounding the Holocaust in Film, is a forthcoming teaching compendium that brings together key concepts in Holocaust studies with methods from film music and sound studies.
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Series Icon designed by Alex Calovi
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REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:
Your Voice is (Not) Your Passport—Michelle Pfeifer
“Hey Google, Talk Like Issa”: Black Voiced Digital Assistants and the Reshaping of Racial Labor–Golden Owens
Beyond the Every Day: Vocal Potential in AI Mediated Communication –Amina Abbas-Nazari
Voice as Ecology: Voice Donation, Materiality, Identity–Steph Ceraso
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