IMAGE: SPLC Video
Radio host and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones said he regrets ever meeting Donald Trump. “I’m so fucking sick of Donald Trump, man. God, I’m fucking sick of him,” Jones said in a leaked interview obtained by the Southern Poverty Law Center from filmmaker Caolan Robertson.The footage is an outtake from the 2019 documentary You Can’t Watch This, which followed five high-profile “political dissidents” after they’d been deplatformed.“Part of me, the selfish part, wishes I’d never met Donald Trump, wishes I’d never met Roger Stone. Because, unlike previous things I’d done that were game-changing, those were just time-space continuum reflections of the third big change I was involved in,” Jones said in the clip. “And that was bringing Donald John Trump into office.”Jones thrived during the Obama years. His Infowars website, radio show, and lifestyle brand moved from Texas curiosity to national phenomenon. Jones pitched himself as an oppositional force to Democratic control of the U.S. government, and his message reached millions of people. Then came Donald Trump, who went on his show while he was running for office, and drew the world's attention to one of the biggest purveyors of baseless conspiracy theories. Then things began to fall apart.Jones went through a messy and public divorce where he claimed, in court, to be a performance artist. The families of the victims of the Sandy Hook shooting sued Jones for claiming their dead children were “crisis actors.” He even fought, and lost, a legal fight to keep using Pepe the Frog. Deplatformed from Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, his influence has waned. He’s currently under federal investigation in connection to the January 6 riots on Capitol Hill. By all accounts, Jones was doing much better when Obama was in office.“It’s the truth and I’m just gonna say it, that I wish I never would’ve fucking met Trump,” Jones said in the leaked clip. “I wish it never would have happened.”