I interviewed Kamala Harris before election but it was so weird it was destroyed – I didn't want blame for election loss
The then-Democratic nominee 's appearance on "Subway Takes", where guests admit their favourite hot take, would alone have lost her the election - so she and the host agreed to erase it.
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Kareem Rahma, who hosts the series, has revealed he sat down with Kamala in summer last year, just months before November's election.
He told Forbes in an interview posted to TikTok: "Her take was really confusing and weird, not good, and so [we] mutually agreed we shouldn't publish it."
Kareem claims the Democratic Party reached out to him to say that Kamala and Tim Walz, her vice-president running partner, were "really interested" in being on the show.
The presenter said he got "lucky", because he "didn't want to be blamed for her losing".
Doubling down, Kareem said Kamala's take was "really, really bad, and it didn't make any sense".
Finally putting viewers out of their misery, he revealed that Kamala's take was "bacon as a spice".
Kareem is a Muslim, meaning he can't eat pork-based products and has never eaten bacon - making it a particularly odd choice for Kamala to go with.
Kareem previously showed footage of the awkward encounter to the New York Times - which reported he was "taken aback" by Kamala's statement.
The newspaper reported that she pushed on with: "Think about it, it's pure flavour."
And it completely blind-sided the host.
Kareem revealed back in November to the NYT that the bacon-spice was not the hot take originally pitched by Kamala's team.
The democrats said she would be taking aim at people who remove their shoes on aeroplanes.
So when the misplaced pork take came along, he was baffled.
Two senior campaign managers for Kamala said the topic of bacon had been previously raised with Kareem as a subject for the show, the paper reported, though the host and his manager refute this.
Harris's campaign reportedly apologised for the blunder and offered to re-film the episode, but Kareem declined.
Kareem previously said his main reason for not airing the interview was because he didn't want to upset the Muslim community by spending air time on trivial matters when something as serious as the Israel-Hamas war was ongoing.
He said: "It was so complicated because I'm Muslim and there's something going on in the world that 100% of Muslims care about.
"And then they made it worse by talking about anchovies. Boring!"
Whilst Kamala's interview never made it off the tape reel, Tim Walz's was posted in August 2024.
He decided to talk about gutter maintenance.
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