President Biden made his late-night show debut as president Friday, appearing on NBC’s “The Tonight Show” hosted by Jimmy Fallon to tout his newly passed infrastructure bill and sell his social spending legislation still mired in Congress.
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In a virtual, pretaped appearance — Biden was already ensconced in his Wilmington, Del., home when the show aired — the president joked about his falling poll numbers.
When Fallon asked if he paid attention to his approval ratings, Biden quipped, “Well, not anymore.”
He added that he’ll started paying attention again when his numbers, which hover in the low 40s, move back up to the 60s.
The appearance marked Biden’s third time on the show. He spoke with Fallon in 2016 as vice president and in 2020 as a presidential candidate. And it was a relatively staid event, given the backdrop of the pandemic and inflation.
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Biden explained that the reason he was late to the taping was that he had been delivering a eulogy for Robert J. Dole, the late Republican senator and presidential candidate, with whom he often disagreed but maintained a close friendship.
He lamented the fading of such cross-party amity. “We used to have an awful lot of that relationship,” Biden said. “And they still exist, except that the QAnon and the extreme elements, the Republican Party and what Donald Trump keeps sort of, seems to me, feeding the ‘big lie,’ it makes it awful hard.” The “big lie” refers to Trump’s repeated false assertion that he won the last presidential election.
Biden also talked about the discomfort he and his wife, Jill, felt — “we come from middle-class backgrounds” — upon moving into the White House residence, which includes a full staff ready to attend to their every need.
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“We’re not used to people waiting on us,” Biden said, adding that in the White House, “there’s somebody to, you know, make your breakfast, or someone to pack your clothes, or someone to carry your bag.”
Biden said he has emphasized to the staff that they no longer need to come in to prepare breakfast for the Bidens. “We can make our own eggs or, you know, pour a bowl of cereal,” he said.
“You make your own eggs?” Fallon asked.
“Well, I don’t,” Biden conceded. “Jill does.”
On a more substantive note, Biden urged Americans to get vaccinated and boosted against the coronavirus.
“The bottom line is that the way to avoid this virus is to get two shots and then get the booster shot,” Biden said. “It’s available. We have the medicines available. It will make a gigantic difference. And even if you don’t care so much about yourself, think about your kids, your brother, your sister, your co-worker.”
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Biden appealed, as he has in the past, to the public sense of duty. “It’s patriotic to get this done,” he said. “Not a joke.”
Biden also celebrated the passage of his bipartisan infrastructure bill, saying it would “create millions of jobs” and “change the quality of life for an awful lot of people around the country.”
And he talked about his “Build Back Better” social spending bill, which Senate Democrats are eager to pass by year’s end, although as Biden lamented, he does not “have a single Republican vote right now to pass it.”
Biden framed that bill in part as an anti-inflation measure, something the White House has been doing more recently as consumer prices have continued to rise. It would cut child-care costs, the president said, and overall would “really reduce, essentially, the cost of living for people in a reasonable, rational way.”
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He added, “It’s going to be tough, but I think we can get it done. And if we don’t get it, we’ll keep adding until we get it done.”
Despite the challenges of the presidency, Biden said that having served as vice president for eight years, he knew better than most what the job entailed.
“No one should feel sorry for me,” Biden said. “It’s a greatest honor anybody can have in their whole life, in my view, to be president of the United States.”