Following Joe Rogan’s interview with former President Trump and the attention it garnered, Rogan has made it known that he’s been in continued talks to nail down an interview with Kamala Harris.
Harris reportedly wanted him to fly to Washington D.C. for the interview and cap it at an hour, but Rogan insists that it would compromise the integrity of his show, and alluded to her team wanting to “control things” to an extent that he wasn’t comfortable with.
He explained, “You could look at this and say, ‘Oh, you’re being a diva,’ but she had an opportunity to come here when she was in Texas. I literally gave them an open invitation. I said, ‘Any time.’ I said, ‘If she’s done at 10 o’clock, we’ll come back here at 10 o’clock.’ I go, ‘I’ll do it at nine in the morning, I’ll do it at 10 p.m., I’ll do it at midnight if she’s up, if she wants to drink a Red Bull and fucking party on.’”
His guest said, “Yeah but I think this idea that you’re being a diva is silly ’cause you’re asking her — you’re offering her the opportunity to do exactly what the other candidate did, right?”
While some Harris supporters have insisted that Rogan should be more accommodating for the sitting vice president, others have acknowledged that with the most popular podcast in the world, the Harris campaign needs him more than he needs her, and Harris is the one applying for a new job.
Rogan responded, “She actually reached out when she found out that he was coming on. Their camp reached out to me so I said ‘great, I’d love to talk to her. But it was very difficult to tie it down, and a lot of — they wanted to travel. See, the thing is, you can’t like — if I go somewhere, then there’s gonna be other people in the room. And they want to control a lot of things, I’m sure, according to the Bret Baier interview on Fox. Like, people are waving him off. That’s a distraction. My whole goal with her and with him is just talk. Just have a conversation like a human being. You find out things about people. You get a sense of them, at least. That was it. I don’t give a f**k what we talk about. I really don’t. I just wanna talk to you. Who the f**k are you?”
Critics could also argue that Harris needed the interview more than Rogan did, as she’s polled poorly with male voters throughout her campaign, and Rogan’s audience skews heavily towards the demographic.
To many, Harris has been afraid of the media since her campaign’s inception, and was notoriously slow to sit down for an official interview or take substantive questions from the media — and even slower to do a press conference, and this is just another example of that. After her media blitz intended to boost her numbers a few short weeks ago, she achieved the opposite of her goal, and lost substantial ground to Trump. In his own interview with Rogan, Trump mocked Harris, saying that he couldn’t imagine Kamala Harris sitting down for an unscripted conversation of that nature for three hours.
Some believe she and her campaign are giving the podcast rules they know they won’t accept so they can skip the interview altogether without looking like they outright refused, and they can instead blame it on Rogan on his team.
