Kamala Harris’s campaign aides have revealed that the hit YouTube show Hot Ones turned down their offer off an interview with the vice president during her presidential election campaign.
Speaking about what went wrong for Harris for the first time since her loss to Donald Trump, campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon and senior campaign adviser Stephanie Cutter told the Pod Save America podcast that the Democrat had struggled to catch a break on some non-political podcasts.
“It’s my understanding that you guys wanted to do a bunch of the larger, more popular, not specifically political, podcasts. Can you talk a little about why that may not have happened?” host Dan Pfeiffer asked.
Pfeiffer gave the example of Hot Ones, in which A-list celebrities answer questions while eating spicy chicken wings.
Everyone from Ariana Grande to Jennifer Lawrence to Will Smith has been filmed taking on the so-called Wings of Death on the popular show.
Cutter revealed that the popular show refused an interview with the Democratic candidate.
“I think if I remember correctly on Hot Ones that they didn’t want to delve into politics,” she said.
“And that’s across the board,” Dillon chimed in. “I do think we had a lot of support in a number of, you know, athletes and others that were just not super interested in getting their brand caught up in the politics of this campaign and I don’t think [Trump] had the same problem.”
Dillon conceded that Trump was “able to tap into some cultural elements” in ways the Harris campaign could not, hinting at the president-elect’s three-hour appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast.
“I think that that had an impact on us that there were places that we knew we had support that we desperately wanted to go and have conversation that we thought would be interesting and relevant and fun, and we couldn’t get there,” she said.
Harris appeared on the popular Call Her Daddy podcast, along with All the Smoke. She was also a guest on Charmalagne Tha God’s The Breakfast Club, and Club Shay Shay.
Trump, meanwhile, sat down with podcasters like The Nelk Boys and Theo Von. He also went on Logan Paul’s Impaulsive podcast, where he was gifted a t-shirt featuring his Fulton County, Georgia mugshot. The president-elect also joined Kick influencer Adin Ross on his show in August and, towards the end of the campaign, he appeared on Rogan’s podcast, where he reached an audience of nearly 40 million.
Cutter added that when Trump appeared on popular podcasts, the conversation “wasn’t political.”
“We did lots of outreach to many of the same podcasts that he went on. Ultimately, you know, as we said with everything in this campaign we had to pick and choose because of the limitations on time,” Cutter said.
Trump’s 18-year-old son Barron and his friend Bo Loudon were reportedly responsible for getting Trump to appear on Ross’s show and helped advise the 78-year-old how to reach young “bro” voters.
Earlier this week, Donald Trump Jr suggested that his father was considering opening up the briefing room to podcasters like Rogan when asked if it was “time to take away” seats belonging to traditional media.
“We’re gonna break some news here,” Trump Jr replied. “Because I literally had this conversation with—I was flying back…I was on the plane with my father, I think it was coming back from the SpaceX launch with Elon [Musk] last week. And we were talking about the podcast world and some of our friends and Rogan and guys like you.”
Trump Jr said his father was considering his options “given how the media has behaved.”
