US President Joe Biden took his campaign message to a TV audience on Monday evening, but mistakenly dated his 2024 agenda to four years ago.
Biden was the ‘surprise’ guest on NBC’s ‘Late Night with Seth Meyers’, the show once hosted by David Letterman and Conan O’Brien.
When Meyers asked, “what’s your 2024 agenda?” the 81-year-old Democrat said, “Look, the 2020 agenda is to finish the job.”
The president was presented as the special anniversary guest, as he appeared on Meyers’ first broadcast in 2014, back when he was Barack Obama’s vice president.
The president used the interview to tease a possible endorsement from pop star Taylor Swift and make light of his memory issues by projecting them onto his rival, likely Republican nominee Donald Trump.
“You got to take a look at the other guy,” he told Meyers. “He’s about as old as I am, but he can’t remember his wife’s name.”
This was a reference to a video Meyers had played before Biden’s appearance, showing a scene from the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) over the weekend, and accusing Trump of mistakenly addressing his wife Melania as ‘Mercedes’.
According to Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung, however, the candidate was addressing Mercedes Schlapp, whose husband Matt organized the conference.
“The clips were taken out of context by disingenuous people,” Cheung said.
The late night comedy circuit is friendly ground for Biden, as Meyers, Jimmy Kimmel of ABC, and Stephen Colbert of CBS are all outspoken Democrats.
Monday was Biden’s fourth late night appearance since he became president. He went on Jimmy Fallon’s ‘Tonight Show’ in 2021, Kimmel’s show in 2022, and a special episode of ‘The Daily Show’ in 2023, guest-hosted by one-time Obama White House staffer Kal Penn. The genre is popular with young college-educated voters, who skew heavily Democrat.
Biden defeated Trump in 2020 by winning the most votes ever in US history. Recent polls, however, show Trump decisively prevailing in a rematch. Democrats have been scrambling to find ways to defeat the former president, from lawsuits and attempts to disqualify him from the ballot, to persuading former late night powerhouse Jon Stewart to come back from retirement and host The Daily Show again.
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