President Joe Biden is taping an interview today with Seth Meyers for his NBC late night show.
This will be Biden’s latest late-night appearance since taking office. As president, he has previously appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live and The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, as well as The Daily Show. He also did an interview with Stephen Colbert when he was president-elect.
Biden has been in New York for what was described as a campaign meeting, but few details were provided.
Biden is continuing a tradition started by Barack Obama of appearing on late-night shows as a way of reaching audiences via a more relaxed and friendlier environment than a Sunday show or news conference. In 2009, Obama became the first sitting president to make an in-studio appearance on a late-night talk show, when he visited The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Donald Trump skipped that tradition, as he was so often the butt of late-night comics’ jokes. But Trump did host Saturday Night Live in 2015, as he was in the midst of the presidential campaign.
The White House has long said that it wanted the president to try to reach the public in non-traditional ways, something that is likely to accelerate as the general election kicks into high gear. Biden did, however, skip the tradition of sitting down with the Super Bowl host network for a pre-game interview, in this case CBS. But he did debut on TikTok later that day.
