Podcaster Joe Rogan is still complaining about former Vice President Kamala Harris not appearing on his show during the 2024 campaign months later.
“They just got scared. They could have put her in. I would have held her hand. We would have had a conversation. Not that I need to hold, you know, the vice president’s hand,” Rogan said on his podcast this week, four months after the scrapped interview.
He accused the Harris campaign of lying to conceal that they “got scared” of appearing on the podcast, in comments highlighted by Mediaite.
The podcaster spoke to President Donald Trump not long before the election and talked openly about discussions with Harris’s team going awry.
Rogan said he wanted to release the Trump and Harris interviews on the same day but that he was unable to come to terms with the Harris campaign when it came to issues such as scheduling or how long they would speak for.
This comes as a new book citing Harris officials outlines allegations that Rogan sabotaged his interview with Harris to favor Trump, who appeared for three hours on Rogan’s podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, on October 26.
An excerpt from FIGHT: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes outlines the decision by the Harris campaign to hold a rally in Houston in late October:
“Only a few people knew the real reason: the whole Houston rally was built to put her in proximity to Rogan. The ongoing negotiations on that were touch-and-go,” Allen and Parnes write.
Harris deputy campaign manager Rob Flaherty called Rogan’s team on October 18, before the rally was scheduled.
“We could do Friday, the 25th,” said Flaherty, according to the book.
“Wish we had known about this sooner because he has the 25th blocked out as a personal day,” one of Rogan’s people replied.
“What about Saturday morning?” Flaherty responded.
“Only if it’s before 8:30 a.m.,” Rogan’s team member said.
“The tone is different, Flaherty thought. The vice president of the United States is offering to come to your f***ing show, and you keep putting up more hoops. Harris’s team still wanted to make it work, but a new wariness set in,” Allen and Parnes write. “On October 22, the same day the Harris camp announced the rally, the Associated Press reported that Trump would be Rogan’s guest on Friday — the ‘personal day’ Rogan had originally reserved.”
“Mutual friends Elon Musk and Dana White had convinced Trump and Rogan to bury their dispute, according to a Trump aide. There would be no Harris interview,” they add.
Rogan again rejected the allegation on his podcast this week that he somehow sabotaged the interview, arguing that the Harris campaign “got scared” and wasn’t telling the truth to “cover their a**.”
“It’s just normal political bullshit. They just lie. They cover their a**, and they lie. I would have been very happy to have her on, and like I said, the goal was to release both the same day,” said Rogan.
The podcaster said he would have been “nice” and that he would have held her “hand.”
“You probably would have voted for her,” said Adam Curry, Rogan’s guest.
“No, I wouldn’t have done that. I wasn’t going to vote for her,” said Rogan, laughing.
Previously, Rogan claimed to have made concessions to the Harris campaign about the topics they would discuss, saying that the campaign didn’t want to discuss the possibility of legalizing marijuana.
