When President Trump sat down for an interview with Joe Rogan for his podcast, it was a big deal. The interview went for a full three hours, completely unedited. It was a huge hit, accumulating more than 50 million views.
The Harris-Walz campaign was under immense pressure to have Kamala also appear on the podcast. Would it have made a difference in the election? No, but the campaign knew it would have been an ideal way to appeal to male voters, and many Democrats were upset, thinking it would have made the difference.
With the election over, the campaign is still trying to explain why the interview never happened. I’m sorry, but the current claim from Jennifer Palmieri, a senior adviser to Doug Emhoff, doesn’t pass the smell test, and it reeks of post-defeat blame game garbage.
“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 said on Wednesday, according to a report from the Financial Times.
Palmieri also said news leaking that Harris was in talks to do Rogan’s show created a “very weird dynamic” with the podcaster.
“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,” Palmieri said at a conference organised by The Clearing House, a payments group owned by large US banks.
A representative from Harris’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
The blame game must not have gone over well at KamalaHQ, however, and Palmieri promptly backtracked in a post on X/Twitter. There, she said the interview never happened due to scheduling issues and claimed that “the campaign had made decision to pursue the interview and the Vice President was prepared to do it.”
For his part, Rogan said he was willing to accept some conditions the campaign had on topics, which actually surprised me. What didn't surprise me was that the campaign also wanted to know if the interview would be edited.
“There was a few restrictions of things they didn’t want to talk about, but I said, ‘I don’t give a f**k.’ I go, ‘Get her in here, like whatever you want to talk about.’ And they want to know if I edit,” Rogan said. “I’m like, ‘There’s not going to be any editing, there’s no editing. We’re not going to edit.'”
Why would the campaign want to know this, unless they were hoping there would be an opportunity for Kamala's answers to be altered to make her sound better, like what happened with her "60 Minutes" interview?
There's more evidence that Palmieri's explanation for why the interview didn't happen is pure bunk. While she says it came down to a scheduleing issue, according to Rogan, he was willing to accommodate Kamala’s schedule to record the interview while she was in Texas for infamous rally where Beyoncé spoke for a few minutes on Oct. 25.
“She had an opportunity to come … You could look at this and you could say, ‘Oh, you’re being a diva,’ but she had an opportunity to come here when she was in Texas. And I literally gave them an open invitation,” Rogan asserted at the time. “I said, ‘Anytime.’ I said, ‘If she’s done at 10, we’ll come back here at 10.’ I go, ‘I’ll do it at 9 in the morning, I’ll do it at 10 p.m., I’ll do it at midnight if she’s up, she wants to, you know, drink a Red Bull and f****n’ party on.’”
But the Harris-Walz campaign didn’t take him up on the offer.
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Rogan went out of his way to accommodate Harris, and the campaign passed. So, was this really a scheduling issue? Obviously not. Was this really about concerns of backlash? Come on, really? How many people were convinced she needed to do the podcast to appeal to male voters?
Why don't we just be honest about why the interview didn't happen? Harris largely stuck to interviews with friendly networks and interviewers, and even those didn't work out well for her because she's terrible off the cuff. That's why the campaign wanted to know if the interview would be edited. They knew Kamala couldn't handle the interview without looking stupid. They couldn't and still can't say this, so the blame game is being waged. Plain and simple.
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