The popular YouTube show “Hot Ones” declined a request from then-presidential candidate Kamala Harris to appear, citing a desire to avoid political content.
This detail emerged during a recent episode of “Pod Save America,” where senior aides to Harris reflected on challenges faced during her campaign.
“’Hot Ones,’ which is a great show, they didn’t wanna do any politics, so they weren’t going to take us or him,” senior campaign adviser Stephanie Cutter said, according to the New York Post. “So that was the issue.”
“Hot Ones” is a show where host Sean Evans interviews celebrities and special guests as they eat progressively spicier chicken wings.
According to Cutter, Harris’ team faced similar pushback from other non-political media outlets they approached. In contrast, now-President-elect Donald Trump did not encounter the same challenges, the senior aides revealed.
“I don’t think he had the same problem,” Jen O’Malley Dillon, Harris’ campaign manager, told the podcast. Trump “certainly was able to tap into some cultural elements in ways that we couldn’t,” she added.
“Pod Save America” co-host Dan Pfeiffer said Harris was “better suited” for the show than any other candidate in history.
“The idea that it would be more politically problematic to have on Kamala Harris, the sitting vice president of the United States, than Donald Trump, a man who’s been convicted of a crime and tried to violently overthrow the election,” Pfeiffer complained.
In the same episode, the Harris team addressed why their candidate never appeared on “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast, despite receiving an invitation. The decision has been widely debated, as the podcast is the world’s most popular and boasts a significant young male audience—a demographic Harris struggled to connect with.
Senior campaign adviser David Plouffe made a surprising claim, suggesting that host Joe Rogan may have had ulterior motives, using the invitation as “leverage” to secure an appearance by now-President-elect Donald Trump in his Austin-based studio.
“So what’s clear is we offered to do it in Austin, people should know that,” Plouffe said. “It didn’t work out. Maybe they leveraged that to get Trump in studio, I don’t know.”
