TikTok Creator Spiked a ‘Boring’ Interview With Kamala Harris After Her Team Refused to Let Him Ask About Gaza
AP Photo/Paul Sancya
Muslim social media star Kareem Rahma told The New York Times for a piece published on Monday that he declined to post an interview with Kamala Harris he recorded in August, which he categorized as “boring.”
Rahma has more than 540,000 followers on TikTok and almost 400,000 on his Instagram “Subway Takes” accounts. The content creator’s format is simple. The 38-year-old asks ordinary people for hot takes on a New York City subway, and they deliver.
The interviews are generally short – one minute to up to about 90 seconds.
Times features reporter Reggie Ugwu first spoke to Rahma over the summer, just before the TikTok star flew to Pennsylvania to interview Harris and her running mate Democratic Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.
Walz’s interview was shared by Rahma on Aug. 27 and saw the vice presidential nominee declare, “The most neglected part of home ownership is the gutters.”
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Harris’s interview with Rahma was never shared on Instagram or TikTok by him, and he told the Times why. Ugwu reported:
Two-and-a-half weeks after our initial meeting, I visited Rahma again. He seemed harried and wore a faded T-shirt and relaxed-fit jeans. The interview with Harris hadn’t gone as planned.
What happened was a dispute over Harris’s take. Rahma said he had been told that the vice president would be taking a stand against removing one’s shoes on airplanes. When they sat down, however, Harris had surprised him with a different take: “Bacon is a spice.” (Two senior campaign officials said this topic had been raised in advance. Rahma and his manager dispute this.)
Rahma, who doesn’t eat pork for religious reasons, was taken aback.
“I don’t know,” he says, in an unpublished video recording of the interview, his voice rising to an unusually high pitch. Harris elaborates that bits of cooked bacon can be used to enhance a meal like any other seasoning. “Think about it, it’s pure flavor,” she says.
Per the Harris Hot Takes interview seen by Ugwa, Rahma pressed Harris for alternatives to bacon and asked her for a hot take about airplanes.
The content creator also disclosed he agreed with the Harris campaign and the Democratic National Committee beforehand not to bring up the violence in Gaza. Ugwu reported:
But, on the advice of a staffer, Harris decides to declare her love of anchovies on pizza — an alternative the campaign had floated earlier in an email. Rahma wraps the discussion one minute later.
“Well,” he says, with an awkward laugh. “I’m 100 percent unsure on both of those.”
Afterward, Rahma said, he felt unsure of what to make of the sit-down with Harris. He had been apprehensive about potential criticism from other Muslims, and the bacon talk had thrown him off.
“It was so complicated because I’m Muslim and there’s something going on in the world that 100 percent of Muslims care about,” he said. “And then they made it worse by talking about anchovies. Boring!”
The campaign apologized for the bacon take and proposed a reshoot. But, after publishing the Walz interview, Rahma ultimately decided not to move forward with it.
In the end, Rahma told Ugwu he had reservations about not discussing the Middle East with Harris and decided not to post their interview.
“It was so complicated because I’m Muslim and there’s something going on in the world that 100 percent of Muslims care about,” Rahma told the Times. “And then they made it worse by talking about anchovies. Boring!”
He also disclosed, “I never wanted to be a politics person… the more I think about it, the more I feel like I got lucky.”
