Right-wing podcaster Andrew Schulz has turned on President Donald Trump.
If you aren’t a young man in his core demographic, you’ve probably never heard of him. Along with Charlamagne tha God, Schulz co-hosts “The Brilliant Idiots,” a long-running podcast that mixes comedy with inflammatory conversations about race, politics, and pop culture.
In addition to his other podcast, “Flagrant,” Schulz reaches more than 2 million listeners a week and routinely ranks among the top comedy podcasts in the United States. He is far more than just another edgy comedian on the internet.
Donald Trump is sworn in as president on Jan. 20, 2025.
And as you might expect, he built that audience on controversy.
Schulz’s brand is all about pushing boundaries and dismissing backlash as “censorship.” His commentary frequently veers into misogyny, racism, and culture-war grievances. Like Joe Rogan and others in his milieu, Schulz presents himself as politically independent while reliably punching left and validating right-wing resentment.
That combination of reach, credibility with young men, and willingness to normalize reactionary ideas is what made him influential—and what led Trump to sit down with him during the 2024 campaign.
But it didn’t take long for Schulz to regret lending his voice and platform to the mad king. By July 2025, he was already rolling out the familiar “I didn’t vote for this” trope.
“There’ll be people that they’ll DM me like, ‘You see what your boy’s doing? You voted for this.’ I’m like, ‘I voted for none of this,’” Schulz said on his podcast. “He’s doing the exact opposite of everything I voted for. I want him to stop the wars—he’s funding them. I want him to shrink spending, reduce the budget—he’s increasing it. It’s like everything that he said he’s going to do—except sending immigrants back, and now he’s even flip-flopped on that, which I kind of like.”
Schulz, who is 42 years old, lived through Trump’s first presidency. So why he believed Trump would stop wars or reduce the deficit—neither of which he did the first time around—is baffling. And the idea that Trump “flip-flopped” on immigration is pure fantasy; he has been relentlessly consistent on that front.
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But what finally broke through for Schulz, like it has for so many others, was Trump’s use of Immigration and Customs Enforcement as a de facto Gestapo force—invading U.S. cities and trampling constitutional rights. That, apparently, was too much.
“I will say that this was a breaking point for me in the way that the administration responded to it,” Schulz said on his podcast Wednesday, referring to Trump’s siege of Minneapolis. “I didn’t think what’s happening right now with ICE could happen in America. I genuinely did not think that was possible. I thought our institution—I thought the Constitution would hold up.”
Imagine believing that Trump cares about the Constitution.
“When I see it and then immediately defend it,” Schulz continued, “I start to go, we got to be very loud about this. Like, it all of a sudden becomes not, like, liberal catastrophic thinking. It starts to become very reasonable, nuanced criticism of the administration.”
You see that flip? When liberals were warning—using Trump’s own words—about exactly what was coming, we were dismissed as hysterical and “catastrophic.” Now that it’s happening in real time, it’s suddenly “reasonable” and “nuanced.”
Federal immigration agents lob tear gas and flash bangs at protesters in front of the ICE building in Portland, Oregon, on Jan. 3.
I watched the clip several times to see if this was a bit. It wasn’t; he’s dead serious.
Still, fine. If that’s the story people need to tell themselves in order to abandon Trump and MAGA, so be it.
“They have made the most far-left critiques of the Trump administration,” Schulz said. “Their reaction has justified all of it. In one moment, all of their responses—from Trump to Kash Patel—they have justified every single critique.”
The most revealing moment comes when Schulz notes that “people’s antennas are way up.”
Translation: people are finally paying attention, and they’re realizing Trump isn’t being criticized from the left, but from the American side—for dragging the country toward cult-of-personality fascism.
Yes, it’s fair to be furious at Schulz for platforming Trump and nudging his young, male audience in that direction—he helped create the problem. But his reversal may matter just as much, if not more, than his earlier complicity.
Criticism always lands hardest when it comes from former supporters, especially ones who speak the same cultural language as the people still on the fence. We just saw what that kind of movement can do in the Texas state Senate special election last weekend, where—even though Republicans made up 51% of the electorate and Democrats were just 35%—a Democrat won, 57% to 43%.
Democrats didn’t even make up one-third of the state’s voters, and a Democrat still won by a staggering 14 points. That doesn’t happen because everyone suddenly became a Democrat; it happens because Republican and right-leaning voters peel off, stay home, or cross over.
In that district, Latino voters flipped hard. Elsewhere, young voters have been decisive, from Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral victory in New York City to key off-year races in Virginia.
This is the blueprint for November. Trump is so openly corrupt, incompetent, and authoritarian that Democrats already have a structural advantage. But blowout wins don’t come just from turning out the base—they come from fracturing the opposition.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani during his inauguration on Jan. 1.
When figures like Schulz—who spent years advocating for Republicans and mocking liberal warnings—start saying that liberals and even the “far left” were right, it gives permission for others to rethink their loyalties without feeling like they’re betraying their identity.
That’s how you move beyond a single election. Not by convincing everyone to become a Democrat overnight, focused on just throwing out one bum, but by building a broader, more durable governing coalition that’s rooted in shared reality and basic democratic norms.
If people who once dismissed us as hysterical are now repeating our critiques in their own voices, that’s the kind of power you can’t artificially manufacture. And when it hits, it hits hard.
So sure, it’s fine to think “fuck this guy.” I certainly do. But given Schulz’s impressionable audience, it’s better for the country to have him on board than to have him advocating for fascism.
