The Breakfast Club host Charlamagne Tha God hasn’t held back his political opinions. Earlier in the month, his comments on Lara Trump’s Fox News program My View about asserting his belief that traditional conservatives in the wake of the infamous Epstein files were preparing to take the Republican Party prompted a response from her father-in-law, President Donald Trump.
“He’s a Low IQ individual, has no idea what words are coming out of his mouth and knows nothing about me or what I have done,” the POTUS wrote on Truth Social. But the popular The Breakfast Club leader has not just outspoken about the president. During a guest appearance on CNN‘s AC360, he responded to Anderson Cooper’s inquiry about whether 2024 Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris should also appear on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, like Trump, by calling out the media’s failure to question the then-GOP presidential candidate’s fascist rhetoric.
Almost a full year later, Charlamagne, who co-hosts The Brilliant Idiots podcast with controversial comedian Andrew Schultz — who coincidentally interviewed Trump on his Flagrant podcast in 2024 — still finds media coverage highly problematic. After sharing the stage with Family Feud host Steve Harvey for the “New Hollywood: Ownership & Media’s Future” session at Invest Fest, the financial education and entrepreneurship conference organized by the media platform and top podcast Earn Your Leisure from founders Troy Millings and Rashad Bilal, in Atlanta, he spoke with The Hollywood Reporter about the media’s inadequacy during the current administration.
“Media is in a very strange place, because you got Fox News, you got CNN, you got MSNBC, those are supposed to be the traditional outlets where people go to get some form of truth. But the reality is they’re playing a ratings and revenue game too. We all know Fox News has an agenda, and they stick to their agenda. They stick to their conservative, MAGA talking points. But CNN and MSNBC have an opportunity to play a really pivotal role. But they seem to be leaning into the Fox News audience, which isn’t a bad thing. I think there should be a balance, right? But I don’t think that there’s enough balance on any of those networks,” he said.
To fill the void, people, according to Charlamagne, have turned to social media and podcast platforms. Meidas Touch — the progressive media platform founded by brothers Ben, Brett and Jordy Meiselas in 2020 that has 5.3 million YouTube subscribers and at least a million followers on Instagram, X and Bluesky — is one of the ones he favors most.
“Their sole agenda is to just tell you the truth about what’s going on. They’re not trying to be down the middle about anything. They’re like, ‘We are unapologetically against what’s going on in the White House.’ And you should be if it’s authoritarian, if it’s fascist, right? If you’re seeing that type of strategy play out in the White House, you should be against it. None of us should be happy that constitutional rights are being violated and that people are wiping their ass with the Constitution, because that’s not America,” he explained.
“I’ve never seen freedom of speech or freedom of the press be attacked in the way it is being attacked now, not in my lifetime. But we got to be unapologetic, honest, unabashed truth-tellers. And that’s why, even being in spaces like this, Invest Fest, [is important]. I don’t think people even understand how important this is for the culture because they don’t want spaces like this to exist; they’re actively trying to dismantle spaces like this,” he said, referencing the event that attracted more than 20,000 attendees featuring Black speakers like himself, Issa Rae and Earvin “Magic” Johnson.
His prognosis regarding the Democratic Party’s ability to become this country’s savior is grim. “Oh, my God, that’s a whole article. To be honest with you, man, they need to blow it all up because they’ve been part of the problem for a long time. Just because you’re the opposite of bad doesn’t mean that the status quo thing you were doing was working either, because that status quo thing that you were doing clearly wasn’t enough for people, and people were sick of that too. So they really just need to blow the whole thing up; that whole old ideology needs to blow up.”
The correction, he said, is simple: “They just need to be a party that focuses on working class people. That’s it. ‘How can I put more food on people’s table? How can I put more money in people’s pocket?’ That’s it. If you can keep people safe and you can keep money in people’s pocket, that’s all people care about. People care about two things: I don’t care what your race is, I don’t care what your gender is, I don’t care what your religion is — if you can put more money in my pocket and keep me safe, then [I’m] probably going to gravitate towards you.”
Charlamagne, who is among THR’s “The 44 Most Powerful Players in Podcasting in 2025,” supports California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s actions as a podcaster and Trump troller. “If 2024 was the podcast election year [with] everybody going on all these different podcasts, 2026, 2028 it’s going to be about politicians who have their own platforms. And I think Gavin Newsom did a really good job with that when he had his Politickin’ With Gavin Newsom, Marshawn Lynch, and Doug Hendrickson. Nikki Haley had her show on Sirius XM. Whenever you see any of these people who want to be in the 2028 race having their own platforms, that’s a good thing. So I gave him credit for that, and even what he’s doing now, that’s law 44 of The 48 Laws of Power. It’s the mirror effect [where] you disarm and infuriate your opponent just by mimicking them. So he’s driving them crazy and exposing the hypocrisy in that party by doing that.”
The New York Times bestselling author doesn’t think any of it is enough to land Newsom in the White House, however. “I think on a national level, he’ll get smoke, because all people are going to do is just go look at California. See when you’re a governor, you actually have a record. So you make you might be good, and you might be getting the attention in the headlines now, but, at the end of the day, they want to go look and see what did you do in California for those eight years? And there’s a lot of things that they can hit them on. I mean $24 billion went for homelessness, and the homelessness problem increased. He’s going to have a lot to answer for.”
Charlamagne doesn’t feel 2024 Democratic presidential candidate former VP Harris running again is viable either. Earlier this year, he floated the idea of the popular The Daily Show host and he still stands by that. “Unless a game changer comes into the party, and I’ve said this before, like a Jon Stewart. And Jon Stewart doesn’t even have to be a part of the Democratic Party. I do think Jon Stewart is somebody who could run and really shake things up.
“And not because he’s a celebrity, but because sometimes, when you look at a person, right, you can tell that what they’re doing is even too small for them. With all the success that he’s had being Jon Stewart on television, hosting for the past 25 years, when I listen to him, when I think about when he went and stood on Capitol Hill and got that bill passed for those firefighters in New York City [or] just listen to him every Monday, you can look at him and tell he’s so much bigger than that [and] should be some type of elected official.”
Should Stewart continue to avoid public office, the Black Privilege: Opportunity Comes to Those Who Create It author, he favors two popular politicians. “Unless somebody like that gets into the game, it’s probably going to end up being a governor. But it’ll be like a [Pennsylvania] Gov. [Josh] Shapiro or [Maryland] Gov. Wes Moore. Those are the people that I look to because just look at their states, look at the things that they’ve done in their states. That’s all you got to pay attention to.”