President Biden’s ‘Late Night’ Appearance Indicates the Tough Road Ahead

Daniel D'Addario
·4 min read
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There was something perhaps apt about Joe Biden’s appearance on “Late Night With Seth Meyers” Monday night being pegged to the show’s 10th anniversary; as Vice President, in 2014, Biden had appeared on the show’s first broadcast, and now he marked the passage of a decade. It was a booking that made sense, but that also called attention to Biden’s most crucial liability in 2024 — the fact that time has passed.

Questions about Biden’s age and acuity have intensified in recent months, even as — as the man himself pointed out on Meyers’ couch — his likely opponent in the November election, Donald Trump, is of comparable age. Appearing for an interview with Meyers after a presidency defined, especially in recent months, by a press-shy approach, Biden was stronger on questions of politics than on television entertainment.

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That’s always been true — certainly, in contrast to his two immediate predecessors, Biden has long lacked the ability to bend the medium of TV to his ends. In a first segment, in which he was flanked by Meyers and by Amy Poehler, Biden called to mind the 2010 episode of “Saturday Night Live” in which host Betty White was supported by an all-star team of guests who did the real comic heavy lifting; he made game attempts to riff on the so-called “Dark Brandon” persona constructed for him online, but appeared ill-at-ease.

Hypothetical comparisons don’t flatter President Biden: In a comparable setting, Obama might have caught the joke, lobbed it back, and then pivoted into whatever he was really there to discuss. And Trump, by this point in his term, would never have been invited on “Late Night” specifically, but certainly did not struggle in making whatever news program had given him a platform into a blistering and strange referendum on whatever topic he chose. Here, Meyers and Poehler were handing the President a gift of sorts — the opportunity to play into a long-running joke that his amiable and aloof personality conceals a mastermind. He seemed a beat behind in catching the joke each time, and missed the opportunity to use it to say anything more substantive. What is “Dark Brandon’s” agenda, his master plan? That joke remained untold.

A second segment, after Poehler left the stage, placed the President on firmer footing, though even his most ardent defenders may need to come to terms with the fact that certain of his long-held rhetorical traits — like trailing off and stopping himself when he spoke angrily about Trump, as he did twice — can read now as his having lost a step. (And his penchant for misstatements, as when he referred to his plan for the rest of this year as “the 2020 agenda,” remains an Achilles’ heel.)

This interview represents one of a very few TV interviews the President has done in recent years; while the so-called “Super Bowl interview” is a relatively new tradition, Biden’s decision this year to skip it for the second time in a row felt either like a missed opportunity to reach a wide audience, or like a concession that he wasn’t up to it. With that in mind, Meyers, a decade in, and quite seasoned at his job, deserves credit for handling a delicate brief well. Any viewer of his show, with its much-touted “A Closer Look” segments prising apart matters of policy, will have an understanding of Meyers’ rooting interest, broadly speaking, in the November elections; with that said, Meyers put fair and clear questions to the President, and did present him both the opportunity to explain his policy on Israel and the implicit case that something had to change. Meyers telling the President that he found the scenes from Gaza “horrifying,” a fleeting moment but as close as the interview came to host-vs.-guest tension, is the sort of thing Biden might hear more of, if he did more interviews. (The President did scoop “Late Night” by telling a press gaggle that he hoped for a cease-fire by next week in a public appearance with Meyers before the show aired, strangely eating an ice cream cone while making global news.)

How did the President do on “Late Night,” in the end? It’s a complicated question, vexed both by what our expectations for a generic 81-year-old might be and by the type of politician Biden is. Unlike the two political outsiders that preceded him, he’s a creature of Washington who seems fairly unimpressed by the entertainment industry. But that also means that, even in the best of times, it’s been a bit lost on him how best to leverage it for his own purposes. Here, he stayed on message, he volleyed back a joke made to him (if woodenly), he came out alive. Is that coming as good news for a person in a Trump-negative frame of mind the ideal? Well, no. But, for Biden and for us all, it’s been a long 10 years.

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