Gov. Gavin Newsom’s press office escalated his long-running feud with Joe Rogan on Thursday, posting a Trump-style message that said the podcast host was “too chicken” to have him on and that he would “crush” Rogan if he appeared.
The post also said Rogan was being “relegated to irrelevancy,” a jab that turned the California Democrat’s online team into the latest voice in a fight that has moved from podcasts to politics and back again. Newsom was identified in the post as “Governor GCN.”
The exchange matters because it revives criticism Rogan has aimed at Newsom since 2023, when he called the governor a “f---ing con man” in a discussion with Patrick Bet-David about the 2024 election. Rogan also said then, “Nobody wants President Newsom either,” and accused him of trying to mandate vaccines for children when it was “totally unnecessary,” of being caught in public without a mask and lying about being outdoors.
Newsom himself had already taken the fight public in October 2025, posting from his own X account and accusing Rogan of being too chicken to have him on. The latest burst came after Rogan, on “The Joe Rogan Experience” in March, revisited Newsom’s office mocking Nick Shirley’s daycare fraud investigation and then broadened his criticism of the governor.
In that clip, Rogan said Newsom could not ruin a city, then ruin a state, and then tell voters he would fix it as president. He said California had the highest unemployment and the highest homelessness, claimed money was missing in the state and argued Newsom had killed Hollywood.
The back-and-forth has become part of a larger political brand fight for Newsom, who is trying to present himself as more than California’s governor while taking punches from one of the country’s biggest media personalities. For Rogan, the feud offers a clean line of attack: California as a warning, not a model.
That is why the latest post lands now, in 2026, not as a joke but as a reminder that neither side has shown any interest in letting the argument go. For readers, the question is no longer whether Newsom and Rogan will keep trading shots. It is whether the governor wants the podcast mic badly enough to keep daring Rogan to open it.
Separately, Newsom’s wife was the subject of another recent political fight after Trump administration firings prompted her to say they showed a war on all women, underscoring how the governor’s circle has stayed in the middle of the broader partisan crossfire.