President Biden has offered a new defense against claims he’s too old to run for another term: At least he knows who his wife is — unlike “the other.”
As he expands his efforts to reassure voters that he is fit for another four years, Mr. Biden took a turn on the talk show circuit, using an appearance on NBC’s “Late Night With Seth Meyers” to slam his challenger. former president Donald J. Trump, with his own struggle with memory.
In a playful but pointed interview broadcast early Tuesday morning, Mr. Meyers sought to help the president address the issue of age, which polls show is a major handicap in the minds of most voters. Mr. Meyers jokingly told the president that he had received classified information indicating that “you are currently 81 years old.”
Mr. Biden continued with the joke. “Who the hell told you that?” asked. “This is sorted!”
He then went on to take on Mr Trump, who is 77, for a video in which he appears to call his wife, Melania Trump, by another name. “You have to take a look at the other guy,” Mr. Biden said. “He’s about as old as I am, but he can’t remember his wife’s name.”
More seriously, Mr. Biden added that the contest is not about how old the candidates are. “It’s about how old your ideas are,” he said. “Look, this is a guy who wants to take us back. He wants to take us back to Roe v. Wade. He wants to take us back to a whole series of issues that are — 50, 60 years ago, they were solid American positions.”
The president has been on the defensive about his memory in recent weeks, particularly since a special counsel, in a report on Mr. Biden’s handling of classified documents, explained that one reason he would not indict Mr. Biden it’s because he would come across to a jury as a “well-meaning, old man with a bad memory.” During his interview with the special counsel, the report said, Mr. Biden did not recall key dates of his vice presidency or the year his son Beau died. Mr. Biden’s defenders attacked the special counsel for bringing it up.
Mr. Trump has had many confusing moments in recent weeks as well. Among other things, he has conflated his Republican opponent Nikki Haley with former Republican Speaker Nancy Pelosi, claimed to beat Barack Obama in 2016 over Hillary Clinton and warned that the country is on the brink of World War II.
The moment Mr. Biden was referring to came during a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland at the weekend, when Mr. Trump praised Mrs. Trump and then, as the audience applauded, said: “Oh, look that, Mercedes — that’s very good.’
Mr Meyers played this clip before Mr Biden went on the show, mocking Mr Trump for appearing to forget Mrs Trump’s name. But Mr. Trump was addressing Mercedes Schlapp, a former White House adviser whose husband, Matt Schlapp, president of the American Conservative Union, is hosting the conference, according to the former president’s spokesman, Steven Cheung. “The clips were taken out of context by disingenuous people,” Mr Cheung said.
However, Mr Trump has previously misspelled Melania’s name on Twitter as ‘Melania’. And during a deposition in the defamation case brought by E. Jean Carroll, Mr. Trump mistakenly identified a photo of Ms. Carroll as Marla Maples, his second wife. A jury found that Mr. Trump sexually abused Ms. Carroll in the 1990s, and a separate court ordered him to pay $83.3 million for defamation.
Mr. Biden joined Mr. Meyers to celebrate the late-night show’s 10th anniversary, a decade after he appeared on the program’s debut episode in 2014 when he was vice president. It was Mr. Biden’s fourth appearance on a late-night talk show since becoming president. He was a guest on Jimmy Fallon in 2021, Jimmy Kimmel in 2022 and “The Daily Show” in 2023.
The audience was important to Mr. Biden, who relied on strong support from younger voters to defeat Mr. Trump in 2020 and needs them again despite surveys showing disenchantment among that generation. But he slipped when asked about his agenda for 2024. “The 2020 agenda is to get the job done,” he said.
Mr. Meyers asked the president about the “Dark Brandon” meme his younger aides have promoted online, a laser-eyed version of the president meant to make him seem cool and hip. Asked if he liked the meme, Mr Biden quipped: “No, I resent it,” then donned Ray-Ban sunglasses.
When Mr. Meyers noted that many on the political right have embraced an outlandish conspiracy theory that he and Taylor Swift are “working as a team,” Mr. Biden quipped: “Where do you get that information? It is classified. This is classified information.”
“But,” he quickly added, “I will tell you that he endorsed me in 2020.”
