Joe Rogan balks after U2 frontman Bono kvetches to Kimmel about Trump USAID cuts

A tale of two hosts found U2’s frontman checked on his DOGE claims only days after ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel had encouraged criticizing President Donald Trump.

As absence make the heart grow fonder, so too has it appeared to intensify Trump Derangement Syndrome. While talking heads hadn’t dropped discussing the GOP leader during the four years he was out of the White House, efforts at maligning the administration prompted weigh-ins at every turn, including from Bono who ran into a realtime fact check from Joe Rogan.

Days after appearing on “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” where he’d asserted “There will be trouble” over the exposure from the Department of Government Efficiency, leading to the implosion of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), Bono faced pushback while claiming an extraordinary death toll.

After asserting to the host of “The Joe Rogan Experience” that, while not proven, the end of USAID funding had resulted in the deaths of 300,000 people, the host responded, “The problem is, for sure, there have been a lot of organizations that do tremendous good all throughout the world. Also, for sure, it was a money laundering operation.”

“For sure, there was no oversight. For sure, billions of dollars are missing — in fact, trillions that are unaccounted for, that were sent off into various — they don’t even know where ’cause there’s no receipts,” he continued. “The way Elon Musk described it, he said if any of this was done by a public company, the company would be delisted and the executives would be in prison. But, in the United States, this is standard.”

NEW: Joe Rogan sets the record straight after Bono claimed 300,000 people have died because of DOGE.

“[USAID] was a money laundering operation… there’s no oversight, no receipts. There is a lot of fraud, a lot of money laundering.”pic.twitter.com/KX2iHjeoHA

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) May 31, 2025

“When [President Joe] Biden left office, when it was clear that Trump won, in the 73 days they spent $93 billion from the Department of Energy on just radical loans, just throwing money into places. And there’s no oversight. No receipts … there’s a lot of fraud, a lot of money laundering,” said Rogan, who went on to agree that the legitimate humanitarian work should not have ended. Rather, a solution should have been devised to maintain the aid without fraud.

Only days earlier, Bono had joined Kimmel, who, near the end of the interview, prompted the musician, “Whose side are you on, Trump or Springsteen?”

“There’s only one boss in America,” responded the guest before he was made to respond to a Truth Social post of Trump’s from earlier in the month.

(Video Credit: Jimmy Kimmel Live)

“I’m sure you’re aware our president gave you a little shout out,” said Kimmel as he held up a printout of Trump’s post and read, “‘HOW MUCH DID KAMALA HARRIS PAY BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN FOR HIS POOR PERFORMANCE DURING HER CAMPAIGN FOR PRESIDENT? WHY DID HE ACCEPT THAT MONEY IF HE IS SUCH A FAN OF HERS? ISN’T THAT A MAJOR AND ILLEGAL CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTION? WHAT ABOUT BEYONCÉ? …AND HOW MUCH WENT TO OPRAH, AND BONO???’”

Of getting lumped together with Beyoncé, Oprah and Springsteen, Bono said, “I’d play tambourine in that band,” before addressing the claim for which the president had called for an investigation. “U2 and I have never, we’ve never paid or played a show to support any candidate from any party. It has never happened.”

“It’s called Truth Social. It seems to be very anti-social and it’s not very true,” he went on with a dig at Trump. “I co-founded the ‘One’ campaign, which is by design bipartisan, and we’ve got a lot of very religious Catholics, evangelicals, conservatives who are very, very, very angry with the person that they voted into office having demolished instruments of mercy and compassion like USAID or PEPFAR which has saved 26 million lives of people who had AIDS around the world.”

“That’s the America that we love. That’s the America that we all want to be part of, and they are not happy, and there will be — there will be trouble,” concluded Bono on that point.

Hours after marking the end of his tenure as a Special Government Employee leading the advisory group of DOGE by joining Trump in the Oval Office, Elon Musk took his own shot at Bono’s criticism of the work exposing waste, fraud and abuse by tagging the self-explanatory X account, @IfindRetards.

“Got a big one here,” wrote the world’s richest man of Bono before sharing a clip from “South Park” that begged the question, “Is Bono the biggest piece of crap in the world?”

Got a big one here @IfindRetards

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 31, 2025

Staff Writer

Native of Brooklyn, NY, Kevin Haggerty is a graduate of Hunter College where he studied Cultural Anthropology and Geography. An avid reader and truth seeker, he currently resides in Texas with his wife and their dog and, when he isn’t researching current events and their impacts, you’ll find him spending time with friends and family or working on his next novel.

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