Some three weeks after Donald Trump’s massive win in the 2024 election, the masterminds behind Kamala Harris’ failed campaign – Jen O’Malley Dillon, David Plouffe, Quentin Fulks, and Stephanie Cutter – made their way to the friendly confines of the Pod Save America podcast to speak for the first time about what went wrong.
While the episode was billed as a “candid interview” led by co-host and former Obama staffer Dan Pfeiffer, the quartet spent 90 minutes blaming everyone but themselves for the crushing defeat.
On Wednesday’s show, Megyn broke down all of the ridiculous excuses pedaled by Team Harris. But one of the highlights was the justification for why the vice president never managed to follow in her opponent Donald Trump’s footsteps and make an appearance on Joe Rogan’s hugely popular podcast.
The Excuse
Rogan’s three-hour “conversation” with Trump racked up over 50 million views on YouTube, and the sit-down eventually led the enormously popular podcaster to endorse the GOP nominee. All the while, Harris never made it to Austin, Texas, for an appearance.
Rogan previously shared that the Harris-Walz campaign wanted to limit the interview to an hour and have him travel to her (two conditions he said he rejected), and now Team Harris is offering their side of the story.
Pfeiffer said “one of the… more tedious post-election debates is about should Kamala Harris have gone on Rogan” and asked Cutter – Harris’ senior advisor for strategy messaging – to talk “about how close you came to doing it” and “why it didn’t happen.”
The former Obama advisor blamed scheduling conflicts:
CUTTER: There’s a lot of intrigue around this. A lot of theories. It’s pretty simple. We wanted to do it. I hate to repeat this over and over, but it was a very short race with a limited number of days and for a candidate to leave the battleground, to go to Houston, which is a day off the playing field in the battleground. You know, getting that timing right is really important.
So, we had discussions with Joe Rogan’s team. They were great. They wanted us to come on. We wanted to come on. We tried to get a date to make it work, and ultimately we just weren’t able to find a date.
Cutter was forced to admit, however, that the vice president did find time to go to Texas – a non-battleground state – for a rally featuring Beyoncé in which the pop star did not perform.
CUTTER: We did go to Houston, and she gave a great speech at an amazing event.
PFEIFFER: The Beyoncé event?
CUTTER: Yes, well, I’m going to call it ‘Reproductive Freedom’ because Texas is ground zero for the impact of these Trump abortion bans… We were hoping to be able to fit it in around that and ultimately weren’t able to do it. As it turns out, that was the day that Trump was taping his Joe Rogan, so, which they had never confirmed to us. We kind of figured that out in the lead up to it. She was ready, willing to go on Joe Rogan.
Ultimately, Cutter said she does not believe the interview would have moved the needle despite Rogan’s large audience being made up of the very voters Harris needed to court – men. “It would have broken through – not because of the conversation with Joe Rogan, but because of the fact that she was doing it and that was really the benefit of it,” she claimed. “Will she do it sometime in the future? Maybe. Who knows? But it, you know, didn’t ultimately impact the outcome one way or the other.”
Megyn Reacts
Megyn wasn’t buying what Cutter was selling. “Who gives two sh-ts whether she is going to go on in the future? She lost,” she said. “The only freaking point was to do it before the election… Who cares if she is going to go on in the future? Literally, no one.”
In Megyn’s view, the reason Harris did not make time for Rogan is clear. “She clearly didn’t want to sit with Rogan because she couldn’t,” she explained. “But here again, the campaign won’t be honest about the ineptitude of their candidate – their ‘exquisite’ candidate. Okay.”
While Megyn joked that the American people will “look forward to whether she does it in the future,” she does not agree with Cutter’s assessment that it wouldn’t have made a difference in the election. “They try to make it sound like… she couldn’t leave the swing states for a day, but she went to Houston, Texas – which is not a swing state – and that was for the Beyoncé event where she didn’t sing,” she concluded. “She blew it.”
You can check out Megyn’s full analysis by tuning in to episode 956 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s Triumph (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.