Kamala Harris blasted for 'scripted' SNL appearance days before election

Vice President Kamala Harris was criticized on Sunday for flying to New York City to do a skit on "Saturday Night Live" (SNL), after she ended up not doing a sitdown with podcast host Joe Rogan.

Harris appeared as the mirror image of Maya Rudolph, who regularly plays the vice president on SNL, in a last-minute appearance, just days before the election.

Rogan revealed recently that the Harris campaign reached out to Rogan about sitting down with the podcast host, demanded that Rogan travel to her for it and said their interview could only be an hour long. Trump's interview with Rogan lasted three hours. 

Critics, including Sen. Ted Cruz, hit the vice president for how she run her campaign and for declining to sit down with Rogan while being willing to fly to NYC to do SNL. 

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Brendan Carr, the senior Republican on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), argued on social media that SNL evaded the FCC's "equal time" rule. Trump campaign senior advisor Jason Miller told the Fox News Channel's Jacqui Heinrich that SNL did not extend an invitation to Trump. She added that executive producer Lorne Michaels said just last month that he didn't have plans to invite either candidate.

SNL creator and executive producer Lorne Michaels recently said he had not reached out and did not plan to not reach out to the presidential candidates for a potential cameo ahead of the election.

Michaels told the Hollywood Reporter it would be unlikely for Trump or Harris to appear for the show’s milestone 50th anniversary season, citing the need for "equal time" for both of them.

"You can’t bring the actual people who are running on because of election laws and the equal time provisions," Michaels said. "You can’t have the main candidates without having all the candidates, and there are lots of minor candidates that are only on the ballot in, like, three states and that becomes really complicated."
 

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"That @Kamala Harris decided to do a scripted Saturday Night Live sketch instead of sitting down for a substantive conversation with Joe Rogan perfectly captures the vapid, insular, and condescending way she has run her entire campaign," journalism professor Michael Shellenberger wrote on X. 

He also sounded the alarm on the "equal time" provision and said the Harris sketch was "humanizing."

"While some say it’s cringe, I found it very humanizing. In a tight election, it’s precisely the kind of thing that could move low information voters, which is why the law requires that NBC give equal time to Trump," Shellenberger wrote on X.

Rogan explained during an interview that Harris had an open invitation to sit down with him.

"You could look at this, and you can say, ‘Oh, you’re being a diva,’ but she had an opportunity to come here when she was in Texas, and I literally gave them an open invitation. I said anytime. I said if she’s done at 10, we'll come back here at 10. 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, you know, drink a Red Bull," Rogan told podcast host and satirist Konstantin Kisin. 

"She actually reached out when she found out that [Trump] was coming on. So their camp reached out to me. So I said, ‘Great, I would love to talk to her.’ But it was very difficult to tie it down. They wanted to travel, and see, the thing is…if I go somewhere, then there’s going to be other people in the room. And they want to control a lot of things, I’m sure," Rogan said.

Radio host Ari Hoffman pointed out that Harris' appearance was similar to SNL's skit with Trump in 2015, during which Jimmy Fallon played Trump, and showed the then-presidential candidate as the mirror image of Fallon.

Harris appeared in the sketch alongside her impersonator, Maya Rudolph, at the end of the cold open. In the sketch, Harris appears as a reflection in a mirror to offer advice to Rudolph’s Harris.

Others celebrated the appearance, including MSNBC legal analyst Kristy Greenberg, who said she was "so excited!"

Buzzfeed's Spencer Althouse also said Harris was "great" on SNL. 

Fox News' David Rutz and Lindsay Kornick contributed to this report.