Is Mark Zuckerberg a Trump supporter? JD Vance shares theory ...
Senator JD Vance believes social media entrepreneur Mark Zuckerberg is hiding his support for former President Donald Trump.
Vance joined The Joe Rogan Experience on Wednesday for a three-hour interview on a range of topics from being a vice-presidential nominee, corporations, what it takes to be a strong leader—and Zuckerberg. While Vance said he does not know Zuckerberg "super well," he believes the Meta founder is leaning toward conservative politics due to his testosterone levels. But Vance believes Zuckerberg won't publicly say so.
"My secret theory is that Zuck is now a Trump supporter, but he can't say that publicly, of course," Vance told comedian Joe Rogan. "But hopefully he is."
Newsweek reached out to Zuckerberg's communications team for comment.
Vance and Rogan were discussing how Zuckerberg "has gotten really into mixed martial arts."
"There's very few things that will turn you into a conservative more than martial arts training," Rogan said.
Vance retorted that there are studies that "basically connect testosterone levels in young men with conservative politics."
In 2011, Paul Zak, a professor at Claremont Graduate University, conducted a study on how political preferences would change during the presidential election season by administering synthetic testosterone, or a placebo, to 136 healthy male participants.
Prior to the treatment, weakly affiliated Democrats had a 19 percent higher basal testosterone than those who identified strongly with the party. After receiving additional testosterone, the strength of their party affiliation fell by 12 percent, with 45 percent reporting more warm feelings toward Republican candidates for president.
While many experts have argued these findings, 12 years later, in 2023, a Ph.D. candidate at Claremont Graduate University, published her doctoral dissertation which included an essay titled "Testosterone Administration Induces a Red Shift in Democrats." Rana Sulaiman Alogaily recounted Zak's experiment and argued that the experiment's implications could be that "political advertising depicting emotional themes that raise T could influence swing voters and perhaps elections."
"If you make people less healthy, they apparently become more politically liberal," Vance said on the podcast Wednesday. "That's an interesting observation."
Vance also added that the Democrats want people throughout the country to be "poor health and overweight" so that "we're gonna be more liberal."
This is not the first time testosterone comments have been made against the Democratic Party this election cycle.
CNN's Dana Bash had suggested at the Democratic National Convention that the Democratic Party is trying to put forward male figures "who can speak to men out there who might not be the sort of testosterone-laden, you know, gun-toting kind of guy." Many conservative accounts responded that they are "well aware" that men attending the DNC "suffer" from a lack of testosterone.
Whether this is what is happening to the jiu-jitsu-loving Zuckerberg is unclear, but Zuckerberg told Bloomberg in July that he doesn't plan on playing a major role in the election, declining to endorse a candidate at all.
He said at the time that he has "done some stuff personally in the past" but that he is "not planning on doing that this time, and that includes not endorsing either of the candidates."
In 2023, Zuckerberg donated $5,000 to MetaPAC, according to the Federal Election Commission. The PAC, which was founded in 2011, is meant to contribute to campaigns "with the goal of supporting public policies that build the future of human connection and the technology that makes it possible," according to its website.
Zuckerberg, however, did tell Bloomberg that "seeing Donald Trump get up after getting shot in the face and pump his fist in the air with the American flag is one of the most badass things I've ever seen in my life."
Zuckerberg's personal decision to stray from politics this time around has coincided with his company Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram. The platforms are limiting political content, with Instagram sharing earlier this year that it would stop recommending political posts.
Meta did call out Trump in the past, however, multiple times for posts with misinformation. The Republican nominee's Facebook and Instagram accounts were suspended for about two years after the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
