The day before the U.S. general election, Pat McAfee revealed that he was in fact one of the many popular podcast hosts to receive requests from the Donald Trump and Kamala Harris campaigns — which he turned down.
During his weekly segment with Bill Belichick, the legendary NFL coach who interviewed Trump on the Let’s Go podcast at SiriusXM on Monday, McAfee explained his decision to reject the political interviews on The Pat McAfee Show.
“One day before an election, interviewing a president, you’re cut out for it, I’m not,” McAfee told Belichick. “We’ve had both political parties reach out about their candidates coming on. And I clearly said, ‘we’re not the ones that should be asking these things.'”
“We interviewed Donald Trump on Let’s Go..
I know we invited both candidates on and it was a lot of fun” ~ Bill Belichick #PMSLive pic.twitter.com/ta53gmHSO6
— Pat McAfee (@PatMcAfeeShow) November 4, 2024
Belichick confirmed that Let’s Go invited Harris on as well, though host Jim Gray’s longtime relationship with Trump appears to have convinced the former president to join the NFL show the week of the election.
This election cycle, Harris appeared on sports interview shows Club Shay Shay and All the Smoke in addition to the former Barstool Sports property Call Her Daddy. On the other side, Trump joined Barstool’s Bussin’ With the Boys as well as the MMA-adjacent Joe Rogan Experience and This Past Weekend with Theo Von.
But despite McAfee’s strong public opinions on several hot-button issues in this campaign, he chose to sit it out.
McAfee came out against the participation of Algerian boxer Imane Khelif in the Paris Olympics, joining an online uproar led by J.K. Rowling and Elon Musk after some within boxing alleged that Khelif was intersex. Khelif was born female and cleared to compete by the IOC.
Most recently, McAfee joined in on Aaron Rodgers’ rant against U.S. aid to Ukraine amid its yearslong war with Russia, stating the money should instead go to domestic disaster relief in Hawaii and North Carolina. That argument that FEMA could not afford disaster relief because of aid to foreign countries has been specifically dispelled by the agency on its website.
Still, when it comes to interviewing politicians, McAfee believes he is not the man for the job.
It’s fair to wonder how ESPN factored into McAfee’s decision. Of course, he easily could have interviewed the candidates on the streaming-only final hour of the show. But in the past, ESPN blocked talent like Bill Simmons and Dan Le Batard from interviewing politicians. At the same time, former SportsCenter host Sage Steele frequently cites an interview she conducted with Joe Biden as an effort by ESPN to prop up the administration and the president’s cognitive decline, which led to him stepping down from the ticket last summer.
While McAfee often claims his show is a politics-free zone, that isn’t always true. In this case, he made a call to keep a closely divided election out of the Thunderdome and away from his show.
About Brendon Kleen
Brendon is a Media Commentary staff writer at Awful Announcing. He has also covered basketball and sports business at Front Office Sports, SB Nation, Uproxx and more.