In 2024, Shawn Ryan supported Donald Trump’s presidential run, but in the past year, the podcaster and veteran has grown increasingly critic
Torri Lonergan at MMFA:
In 2024, Shawn Ryan supported Donald Trump’s presidential run, but in the past year, the podcaster and veteran has grown increasingly critical of the president. Ryan has criticized Trump’s foreign policy decisions, his foreign and domestic economic agenda, and his immigration policies.
Ryan has been particularly focused on the Epstein scandal and Trump’s mishandling of the files, a dissatisfaction he shares with others in right-wing media. Ryan’s frustration with Trump’s refusal to release the Epstein files has led him to publicly question if boosting Trump during the election was a mistake, saying, “At the time it felt great. … Was that a good thing?”
Ryan’s support for Trump has waned
Shawn Ryan supported Trump’s re-election, telling Trump in August 2024, “I’m behind you.” On election day, Ryan posted, “Praying our national gender reveal is a boy.” [Vigilance Elite, The Shawn Ryan Show, 8/26/24, Twitter/X, 11/6/24]
At the beginning of Trump’s second term, Ryan reiterated his support, saying, “Things really seem to be turning around, I think, way faster than anybody ever imagined.” Ryan also applauded several of Trump’s early actions, including shutting down the CBP One app and nominating Kash Patel as FBI director. [Vigilance Elite, The Shawn Ryan Show, 2/10/25, Twitter/X, 1/20/25, 1/30/25]
By November, Ryan seemed far less enthusiastic, telling his audience: “Nothing I voted for happened." In December, Ryan expressed regret about interviewing Trump during his campaign, saying, “I fell into this shit in the last presidential election of giving people a fucking platform. ... Every fucking time I have a politician, whether it's fucking Trump or some fucking congressman, they all fucking lie." [Media Matters, 11/24/25; Vigilance Elite, The Shawn Ryan Show, 12/4/25]
Right-wing podcaster Shawn Ryan, who was an ardent backer of Donald Trump in 2024 and early 2025, has now regretted ever supporting him.
They entered in tight formation. There was Eddie Gallagher, the alleged war criminal Navy SEAL granted clemency by President Donald Trump; Tom Satterly, the Delta Force sergeant major made famous by Black Hawk Down; Christian Craighead, the SAS soldier who led a rescue mission for hostages held by al-Shabaab in Nairobi; DJ Shipley, a second-generation SEAL who served on the prestigious Team Six. And—leading this squad of vets-turned-influencers into the launch event for Tucker Carlson’s new nicotine pouch last December—there was Shawn Ryan.
Ryan’s military exploits are less notable—a short stint as a Navy SEAL, a slightly longer career as a security contractor, both for Blackwater and the CIA. His triumphs as a podcaster, however, are significant. In October 2024, the Shawn Ryan Show hit first place on the Spotify podcast chart. He has hovered near the top ever since. Ryan has more than 4 million subscribers on YouTube—a viewership that nearly doubled last year alone.
Ryan’s style blends the deeply confessional with the darkly conspiratorial. His guests range from MAGA politicians and manosphere mainstays to UFO enthusiasts and exorcists. But the staple of his show is fellow veterans. “We’re probably one of the communities that are treated the shittiest,” Ryan told an interviewee in 2023, “flushed down the toilet and forgotten.” Since it debuted on Christmas Eve in 2019, the Shawn Ryan Show has specialized in hosting special forces veterans excavating their deepest traumas. Combining a military ethos with an anti-establishment message has made his show a hit and, in certain circles, made Ryan a celebrity. “People just blow past you to try to get to him,” Shipley told me.
At Carlson’s nicotine pouch party, held in a converted barn near Ryan’s home in Tennessee and themed “Cowboy Christmas,” his new fame was on display. Guests huddled around Ryan. At one point, Carlson—between conversations with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and podcaster Theo Von—walked over to pay his respects.
Ryan, like many other podcasters, has veered into Republican politics in the last few years. In the runup to the election in 2024, his show was a destination for Trumpworld figures, including JD Vance, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Tulsi Gabbard. Eventually, Trump himself came on the show. Ryan’s appeal isn’t the flexible curiosity of Joe Rogan, or the toxic masculinity of Andrew Tate. Instead, he reiterates a singular message, utilizing his time inside the special forces to punch it home: Every institution has secrets, elites lie to keep them, and the process exists for one reason: to screw you.
In episodes that can stretch more than five hours, the former SEAL conducts emotional interviews, interwoven with esoteric grievances. Ryan’s role as a CIA contractor, he tells listeners, gave him a front-row view of the deep state in action. “It’s hard to find someone with more credibility than someone that says, ‘I was in the establishment, and that’s why I know how corrupt it is,’” said Reece Peck, a CUNY professor studying right-wing influencers. As Ryan’s website proclaims: “We’re better than entertainment, we’re the REAL thing.” Whether riffing on aliens, Democrats, or homegrown terrorism, Ryan spins half-truths, evincing at times a ridiculous level of credulity. (He asked an exorcist last October, “What do you think is going on with this UFO type stuff? Is it demonic?”) The mix of bravado and deep state paranoia fits the Trump ethos.
In January, during Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s confirmation hearings, Ryan’s name entered the Congressional Record. “On the Shawn Ryan Show, you said and I quote, ‘I’m straight up saying that we should not have women in combat roles. It hasn’t made us more effective,’” Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) said to Hegseth. He responded that he was talking “not about the capabilities of men and women” but “about standards.” The news cycle moved on, and Hegseth quickly provided many more scandals.
But the moment was revealing of something beyond sexism. Anyone who listened to the entire episode would find Ryan represented a different vision of the military. “I think women do have a place in combat,” he told Hegseth. The problem was that the DOD, he said, was itself unsalvageable. “I feel like that’s how we fix it,” Ryan said. “You abandon it.” Even Hegseth seemed taken aback.
In Ryan’s answer is a model of the men scarred by the “forever wars”: a loner militant, suspicious of all institutions.
Friends died overseas, as Ryan often discusses on his show, fighting for a cause that served primarily to benefit companies like Halliburton. Those who came back from the Middle East did not transform into hippie peaceniks. To them, the withdrawal from Afghanistan was the ultimate betrayal. It made the entire effort seem meaningless.
“I was on the mission that captured Saddam Hussein,” Chris VanSant, a retired Delta Force team leader who has appeared on Ryan’s show, told me. “When that happened back in 2003, honestly, we thought we would go home after that, but we didn’t.” The aftermath, followed by the messiness of the Afghanistan withdrawal, made it feel “like a lot of it was in vain,” he said.
Ryan is still fighting—only now against the military-industrial complex he once served. “I don’t think we’re the good guys anymore. I don’t agree with a lot of the shit I was involved in as a SEAL or CIA contractor,” Ryan told Joe Rogan in September 2024. “I just keep going down the rabbit hole, diving into the military-industrial complex, all the lies that the government has been telling us, all the unreleased classified shit. It’s overwhelming.”
Last week, Ryan got one more boost. As part of a podcast push, Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom sat with Ryan for a four-plus-hour episode. After gifting Newsom a gun, Ryan described himself as a moderate, telling the governor, “I got painted out to be a MAGA troll or something because of a lot of the people that I’ve interviewed—including Trump himself. And while I do lean conservative, I am not that far right.”
Newsom similarly played the common man; he told Ryan he is a fan of Joe Rogan, is interested in UFOs, scored 960 on the SAT, and can’t pronounce “bona fides.” Despite their political differences, the two men bonded. And Ryan seemed to win over a new market in the process.
“I don’t know Shawn Ryan’s politics,” said Pod Save America co-host Tommy Vietor on a follow-up episode of Newsom’s own podcast, in which the group spoke with the governor about his appearance. “I did come away just feeling like he really wanted to connect with you as a human being, and he seemed curious, and I really respected that.”
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In December 2015, Ryan started a self-defense training company called Vigilance Elite. Such companies were a common career move for former military operators. Ryan created a YouTube channel to promote the firm. In videos, he presented himself as a renegade initiate into the warrior and intelligence elites, spilling their tactical secrets to you. His mode was, from the beginning, confessional. Ryan appeared to realize that his disappointments—the pain of the SEALs, the thirst for action, the banality—were a brand. Soon after, he dropped Sean Palmisano and became Shawn Ryan.
[...]
Ryan has recently outgrown his military niche and begun working to expand his appeal.
“I want to take the Rogan slot,” he said in 2022. “I’m going real broad. I’m honestly getting bored with the special operations stuff.” Before long, he was conducting friendly interviews with conservative superstars. When Trump came on his show last August, Ryan lobbed softballs: “We have a government that’s not functioning right now. How are you going to gain the trust back of the American people within the government?…Are we going to see anyone held accountable?” “Everybody is behind you guys,” he told JD Vance the following month, “including me.”
In his conversation with Hegseth, Ryan lashed out at Democrats for “turning pedophiles into some kind of sexual preference that everybody’s okay with” and “wanting to put fucking pedophiles on the map and make it okay to molest my fucking kids.” Yet he acted surprised when Vice President Kamala Harris didn’t accept an invitation to come on his podcast. “That paints me in a picture where it’s like, ‘Oh, he’ll only have this party,’” Ryan complained to Forbes. “But I’m open to everybody.”
Indeed, along with military vets and politicians, UFO theory promoters are some of the most frequent guests on his show. In Ryan’s telling, this obsession with the paranormal began after Ryan went to Mexico to partake in psychedelic therapy in 2022. “I came back and I just was like, whatever I want to do, I’m doing,” he told Cooper, the conservative podcaster. The following year, Ryan believes God spoke to him in Sedona, Arizona, where he also says he witnessed a UFO while on a hike.
Whatever happened in the high desert, it’s also true that talking about UFOs is a commercially viable way of channeling an audience’s distrust of the government. “Most regular people are more going to click on a UFO link than they are a deep dive into the atrocities the CIA has committed,” said A.J. Bauer, a University of Alabama professor studying conservative media. Such content, he argued, allows listeners “to experience this sense that the government is hiding something” without dwelling on their own responsibilities.
Shawn Ryan (born Sean Palmisano) has become the latest MAGA-adjacent podcaster to reach stardom in recent years.
California Governor and podcast personality Gavin Newsom has continued his right-wing media tour, feeding into the anti-trans hysteria with his signature coiffure and million-dollar smile.
Earlier this year, the Governor said he “completely aligns” with some of the gender politics of far-right extremist Charlie Kirk and faced widespread backlash from constituents.
Nonetheless, he appeared to double down on the sentiment and then some this week on the Shawn Ryan Show podcast. The whopping four-hour conversation (which was not exclusively about LGBT issues) started by questioning the participation of trans athletes in women’s sports, cascaded into sowing doubt about evidence-based gender affirming care, and landed on fake news about schools providing litterboxes to kids who say they’re animals.
Newsom emphasized that he thinks conservatives are exploiting and weaponizing rhetoric about trans kids—but that hasn’t stopped him from feeding into it. Intentionally or not, Newsom has lent his Democratic branding and credibility to entertain the musings of anti-trans actors. Meanwhile, the far right has openly admitted to manufacturing a crisis around trans athletes to serve as a “beginning point” and get “opponents of the LGBT movement comfortable with talking about transgender issues,” as per Terry Schilling of the American Principles Project.
On this latest podcast, the meandering conversation started on America’s so-called “masculinity crisis”—a reference to real problems facing boys and men, such as higher rates of suicide and social isolation, or a nod to conservative pearl-clutching about the perceived “feminization” of American boys, depending on who you ask.
“Most of these kids, many of them [are] not even having any relations, sexual relations, with other women,” Newsom said.
The conversation went from lamenting how American youth don’t have enough sex, to hand-wringing about whether the LGBT rights movement may be pushing “sexuality” onto kids.
“Speaking of sexuality and divisiveness,” Ryan said, “One of the things in the last administration that really divided people was gender affirming care, LGBTQ [sic].” They incorrectly equated sexual orientation and gender identity, leading to a conversation about what Newsom called “the trans issue.”
“That's now no longer about celebrating your rights. It's about denying other people theirs,” Newsom said. “Marriage equality was about everyone's right [...] But your child may not have that same opportunity to get on the podium if a trans athlete is competing.”
Science shows no one biological attribute, including sex, fundamentally determines one’s athletic success. For every Lia Thomas or AB Hernandez winning medals, there are countless other trans athletes across the country whose names are unknown; athletes who are average or below average. Like all people, trans athletes’ abilities vary greatly. But athletes at all ages and ranks are being attacked by anti-trans activists in the name of sport, from gold-medal Olympians to children playing Little League.
Newsom’s rhetoric also falsely implies that the rights of trans women and girls are innately in competition with those of presumed-cis people. In reality, anti-trans vitriol routinely leads to violence against everyone; it fuels witch hunts against athletes even accused of being trans, such as the case with Imane Khelif. It has resulted in death threats, anti-trans harassment and doxxing campaigns against countless young girls, both cis and trans.
After one such case in Newsom’s own state, where the young athlete AB Hernandez overcame literal angry mobs over her participation in youth sports, the California Interscholastic Federation (CIF) amended its rules for a so-called “compromise,” giving a consolation spot to any presumed-cis girl who lost to a presumed-trans one.
[...]
Meanwhile, Newsom continues to self-identify as a “champion” for LGBT rights, even as LGBT organizations have condemned his anti-trans pivot. Reports have also emerged that he was trying to kill LGBT protection bills behind the scenes throughout the last year or so.
“I’m more open-minded than I've ever been,” Newsom says of anti-trans sentiments. “I think the sports issue really opened that door for me, the nuances in the space.”
For the love of Jehoshaphat, Gavin Newsom, will you stop giving legitimacy to anti-trans talking points by going on right-wing podcasts such as Shawn Ryan’s?!
