Could There Be a Hot Ones Presidential Debate?

If Kamala Harris or Donald Trump appeared on Hot Ones, would they really have to suffer through the spice on-camera like everyone else? According to host Sean Evans, absolutely. “Listen, I’m a chicken-wing talk-show host of the highest dignity, all right?” Evans told Vulture before a live Hot Ones event in Chicago on August 28, adding that the sauce “would 100 percent be real.” But don’t hold your breath for a Harris or Trump episode in the near future: Evans said no presidential-candidate episodes are in the works right now. (In 2020, he suggested to Philip DeFranco that every major campaign had reached out; this year, he said it’s “been kind of quiet.” First We Feast declined to comment on the possibility of presidential candidates appearing on the show.) Theoretically, if candidates agree to be on the same episode, Evans said he would be “down to moderate a debate, Hot Ones–style,” maybe with a new topic after each wing. “You’d have to change your approach doing something like that,” he said of hosting an “actual power broker.” “I’d kind of look at it as a new challenge should that opportunity ever arise.”

Beyond politics, Evans said he doesn’t see limits on new types of guests who could be featured in the future. He thinks the format could work with a lunch lady at a junior-high cafeteria and sees the definition of celebrity as “forever evolving.” He noted that not every episode comes together as smoothly as it did with Ariana Grande, who Evans said “loves the show” and reached out to him personally to book herself as a guest. For presidential candidates, there would be additional logistics to consider. “You know … a lot of them are very old,” he said with a laugh. “The concerns would be medical. I don’t want to be in the history books for that reason.”

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