One of Kamala Harris’s campaign aides has shed light on the real reason why the vice president didn’t end up appearing on Joe Rogan’s podcast.
Harris’s team was in talks for her to appear on the most popular podcast in America, but the sitdown ultimately failed to materialize.
Rogan has since claimed that a series of demands from the campaign was the reason why it didn’t go ahead.
But, according to Jennifer Palmieri, senior adviser to the second gentleman Doug Emhoff, the negotiations actually broke down because progressive Harris campaign staff feared “backlash” from the wider Democratic party if she went ahead.
“There was a backlash with some of our progressive staff that didn’t want her to be on it, and how there would be a backlash,” Palmieri told a conference on Wednesday, the Financial Times reported.
Palmieri, a former adviser to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, is one of the first of Harris’s campaign staff to share details about the decision, which many in the party viewed as a mistake.
The adviser added that there was a “very weird dynamic” between the campaign and Rogan after news leaked that Harris was in talks to go on the show.
“Because all of a sudden he’s on his heels about how his audience is going to react to this, and the demands that they were going to put on him to be tough on her,” she said.
The new details come hours after Rogan divulged a list of what he called “hilarious” requirements that Harris’s campaign issued in order for her to agree to appear on his show.
In Tuesday’s episode, the podcaster revealed that he and the Harris campaign had “multiple conversations” about her potential appearance on the show and that he gave her an “open invitation” to come by.
But a series of demands from her campaign ultimately blocked the interview from going ahead, Rogan claimed.
“They had requirements on things she didn’t want to talk about,” he said. “She didn’t want to talk about marijuana legalization — which I thought was hilarious.”
Rogan understood that she wanted to avoid the subject because of her record as a prosecutor.
The podcaster also previously claimed that Harris had demanded that he would have to travel to her for the interview and that the interview could only last one hour.
Donald Trump, by contrast, sat for a three-hour long interview with the podcaster in late October. Rogan ended up endorsing Trump one day before election day.
