Dave Portnoy Admits Softball Interview with Trump Grew Barstool’s Demo: ‘We Were Using Each Other’
Despite frequent appearances on Fox News and a prominent interview last summer with former President Donald Trump, Barstool Sports’ founder Dave Portnoy claims he tries to remain apolitical.
On a recent episode of The Dave Portnoy Show with Eddie & Co, the internet celebrity lashed out at a Politico story for claiming “the Republican Party has become the party of Barstool Sports.”
“Being non-PC and not being woke…that’s not political,” Portnoy said. “Both the extreme rights and lefts are f*cking maniacs. Now the extreme left is the super woke, so that’s where you get the PC stuff from. But there’s some stuff on the right where I’m like whoa you don’t need to be that [anti] PC, I don’t need the f*cking Nazi flag flying around.”
According to Portnoy, believing Barstool is funny shouldn’t equate to being a republican. The Barstool founder also said he’s still surprised by the backlash for his interview with Trump last summer, claiming he only accepted the offer because it was the President of the United States.
“They’re like ‘you gave a softball interview to Trump.’ You think if I f*cking interviewed Obama or Biden I was going to get into hard hitting politics?” Portnoy said. “It would be the same exact interview and I would have said yes one hundred percent of the time. I get it, I go on Fox News. They invite me, you can’t have your cake and eat it too. It does grow our demo and helps Barstool. I firmly believe that.”
It wasn’t just the left or the crowd of unwavering Barstool critics who condemned Portnoy’s decision to sit down with Trump last year. Prominent Barstool Sports personality Dan “Big Cat” Katz slammed Portnoy’s interview with the president shortly after it was released.
“There were no hard questions, there were no, you know, follow-ups,” Katz said of his boss’s interview with Trump. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we were offered this at this specific point in time. And that bothers me because it feels like we’re being used in a political race.”
Asked this week by his podcast co-host if he thought Trump was trying to use Barstool’s audience, Portnoy answered, “one hundred percent, we were using each other.”
