Donald Duck got a spicy sit-down on “Hot Ones.” VP Kamala Harris had no such luck.
Not that it would have changed the outcome of the election, but the Harris campaign had wanted the Democratic presidential candidate to appear on “Hot Ones,” the popular chicken-wing-eating show on YouTube that has featured an array of celebrities blinking back tears as they sample increasingly piquant sauces and banter with host Sean Evans.
But “Hot Ones” declined a request for the VP to appear on the show, because “if remember correctly, on ‘Hot Ones’ they didn’t want to delve into politics,” Harris campaign strategist Stephanie Cutter said on Tuesday’s episode of the “Pod Save America” podcast.
“‘Hot Ones,’ which is a great show, they didn’t want to do any politics, so they weren’t going to take us or [Donald Trump],” Cutter said.
Reached by Variety, BuzzFeed, which produces “Hot Ones” under its First We Feast banner, declined to comment.
Following Trump’s victory over Harris in the presidential election, there’s been a wealth of armchair-quarterbacking comparing Harris’ more traditional-media strategy to Trump’s focus on non-mainstream influencers popular with young men — with whistle stops that most notably included Joe Rogan.
On the “Pod Save America” episode, a post-mortem titled “Top Harris Campaign Staff Tell Us What Went Wrong In 2024 Election,” host Dan Pfeiffer cited Trump’s pursuit of appearances on “political-adjacent” podcasts — and asked members of Harris’ team why they didn’t do the same. He cited “Hot Ones,” opining “Never in time has there been a candidate better suited for a podcast than for Kamala Harris on ‘Hot Ones.’”
In the lead-up to the election, Harris did appear on nontraditional outlets, including Alex Cooper’s “Call Her Daddy,” Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson’s “All the Smoke” and Shannon Sharpe’s “Club Shay Shay.” “Everywhere we could [book a podcast], we did it,” said Jen O’Malley Dillon, Harris’ campaign manager. But she also said Harris had support from “athletes and others” who were “just not super-interested in getting their brand caught up in the politics of this campaign” and that “I don’t think [Trump] had the same problem.”
In addition to “The Joe Rogan Experience,” Trump appeared on Theo Von’s “This Past Weekend,” Bryson DeChambeau’s “Break 50,” Mark “The Undertaker” Calaway’s “Six Feet Under” and Barstool Sports’ “Bussin’ With the Boys.”
“All of his podcasts were reaching the audience that we were struggling to pull in… young men,” Cutter acknowledged, “and we saw that, we knew that.”
More so than Trump, who did barely any interviews with mainstream outlets, Harris stuck to traditional TV and radio shows. She also made a cameo on “Saturday Night Live,” which prompted NBC to grant the Trump campaign free commercial airtime during its NASCAR Xfinity 500 and its “Sunday Night Football” telecasts to satisfy the FCC‘s equal time requirement.
Meanwhile, the Harris camp had been negotiating with Rogan about a potential interview. According to Rogan, the Harris campaign offered a date to record the podcast, “but I would have had to travel to her and they only wanted to do an hour. I strongly feel the best way to do it is in the studio in Austin.” That’s not the whole story, according to Cutter: Harris offered to come to Rogan’s Austin studio on Oct. 25 (when she was in Texas for a rally in Houston featuring Beyoncé) — the same day, as it turned out, that Trump recorded his episode. “She was ready, willing to go on Joe Rogan,” Cutter said. “It would have broken through not because of the conversation with Joe Rogan but because of the fact that she was doing it.” On the “Pod Save America” episode, Harris senior adviser David Plouffe said “maybe [Rogan’s team] leveraged [Harris agreeing to an interview] to get Trump in the studio, I don’t know.” All that said, however, Cutter maintained that Rogan’s podcast “didn’t ultimately impact the [election] outcome one way or the other.”
“Hot Ones” episodes with stars in the hot seat have featured Ariana Grande, Jennifer Lawrence, Paul Rudd, Margot Robbie, Viola Davis, Ryan Reynolds, Idris Elba and more. The show has run 23 seasons with more than 350 episodes since launching in 2015.
This August, in “celebration of 90 years of Donald Duck,” the “Hot Ones” released a “custom episode” in partnership with Disney featuring the famously temperamental waterfowl chowing down on a “special curated set of Disney hot sauces” over cauliflower wings.
Pictured above: Kamala Harris, “Hot Ones” host Sean Evans
