Trump adviser who vowed to eat his own shoe if Biden won is refusing to fulfil his promise

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Andrew Feinberg

White House Correspondent

A former adviser to Donald Trump’s failed re-election campaign is refusing to make good on a promise to eat his own shoe after Joe Biden won the race for the White House.

Harlan Hill, a consultant to the 45th president, made the rash pledge to McKay Coppins of The Atlantic, who interviewed him at an Election Night party in Washington, DC, last November hosted by ex-Trump strategist Steve Bannon.

The gathering, taking place inside a large tent on a city rooftop, was described by the journalist as “giddy, almost fevered”, its over-confident atmosphere one in which “bravado reigned”.

Cornering Mr Hill, Mr Coppins asked how sure he was that Mr Trump would win a second term.

“Oh, he’s gonna win. One hundred percent,” Mr Hill answered.

Asked what he would do if his candidate did lose, the adviser said: “I’ll eat my shoe. We’ll do it in a live-stream.”

So far, Mr Hill has failed to deliver on that pledge.

“As the race turned against Trump in the days that followed, Hill was not browsing recipes for boiled loafers,” Mr Coppins wrote. “He was tweeting furiously about a massive - and entirely fabricated - conspiracy to steal the election from the president.”

Like many supporters of Mr Trump - who left office in disgrace last week after his insistence the election had been “stolen” from him by Mr Biden led an angry mob of would-be insurrectionists to storm the US Capitol Building on 6 January, leaving five dead - Mr Hill remains in denial.

“Trump won,” he told Mediaite, flatly, when pressed on precisely when he intends to tuck into his brogues like the starving Charlie Chaplin in The Gold Rush (1925).

Until October, Mr Hill had been a regular contributor to Fox News before being banned from the network after calling Mr Biden’s then-running mate Kamala Harris - now the US vice president -  “an insufferable lying bitch”.

The controversy saw him ordered to remove the logos of American Airlines and AT&T from his firm’s website.

“We have found no record of this person working for us, and he certainly never will in the future. We have contacted him and demanded he remove our name and logo from his website,” an AT&T spokesperson told CNBC at the time.

Mr Hill’s ill-advised boast has reminded many of the case of British author Matthew Goodwin, who said he would eat his own book if then-Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn polled higher than 38 per cent in the 2017 general election.

Mr Corbyn did indeed lose but won 40 per cent of the vote, prompting Mr Goodwin to honour his word and chew a fistful of pages from Brexit: Why Britain Voted to Leave the European Union live on Sky News.