JD Vance fires back after Joe Rogan calls MAGA supporters 'unintelligent' and 'dorks'

Vice President JD Vance responded this week to criticism made by podcaster Joe Rogan, who described some MAGA supporters as “unintelligent people” and “dorks.”

Rogan made the remarks during a Thursday episode of his podcast while speaking with guest Dave Smith. While he acknowledged that the movement includes “real, genuine patriots,” Rogan argued it also houses extremists.

“That phrase sucks …. make America great again and then it becomes a movement of a bunch of f*cking dorks because a lot of them are dorks,” Rogan said. “A lot of them are these really weird f*cking uninteresting, unintelligent people that have got something they cling to and there’s a lot of people that are just real genuine patriots and they’re all lumped into this one group and you got to accept the dorks, too? F*ck that!”

Vance addressed the comments in an interview with conservative commentator Benny Johnson, where he dismissed Rogan’s characterization.

“I think we have many, fewer dorks than the far left, but everybody’s got some dorks,” Vance said. “We love our dorks. We love our cool kids. We love anybody who wants to save the country.”

Rogan, who has expressed many political positions aligned with the left, endorsed Donald Trump in the 2024 election. However, he has also criticized the Trump administration since the president returned to office. In a separate podcast episode this week, Rogan argued that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton had harder stances on immigration than Trump.

Vance disputed this as well, saying, “I did not see Joe say this. I’m going to text Joe because that is definitely wrong.”

“The numbers from the Obama administration or any other administration – they weren’t doing a tenth of what we’re doing. So Joe is wrong on this,” Vance added. “We’ve been the best administration in American history at deporting illegal aliens. The problem is we also followed the worst administration at letting them in.”

In the first year of the Obama administration’s second term, 409,849 individuals were deported. Last year, more than 605,000 deportations were carried out, according to DHS.