Joe Biden sprang a surprise on the Washington press corps on Friday when he gave an interview to the radio host and shock jock Howard Stern.
The president also made news. Asked if he would debate Donald Trump before the election in November, Biden said: “I am, somewhere, I don’t know when, but I am happy to debate him.”
The Biden campaign confirmed to reporters that Biden was willing to face Trump in person. Chris LaCivita, a senior adviser to Trump and the Republican National Committee, posted: “OK let’s set it up!”
Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, has goaded Biden about debating – despite skipping all debates in his own primary this year; withdrawing from his second debate with Biden in 2020; and in 2022 prompting the Republican National Committee to withdraw from the body that organises presidential debates.
Trump’s last White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, also revealed that when Trump and Biden did meet on the debate stage, in September 2020, Trump had tested positive for Covid-19 but declined to tell the public. Trump and members of his family then flouted Covid protocols around the debate with Biden.
The interview between Biden and Stern was announced minutes before the conversation began on air. Reporting the unscheduled stop in New York, the White House pool report said: “At 10.05am, the motorcade made an unscheduled stop at Sirius XM studio in midtown Manhattan.”
Jennifer Witz, chief executive of Sirius XM, said: “We are thrilled that President Biden chose Howard Stern. It’s just another reminder that Howard is in a league of his own, regularly lauded as the world’s best interviewer.”
That would be up for debate but Stern does have a habit of making news – often, in the case of Biden’s White House predecessor, retrospectively.
Trump’s interviews with Stern before entering politics have regularly resurfaced, particularly over Trump’s usually controversial, often lewd and sometimes disturbing remarks.
Wirtz said Sirius XM was “proud to offer distinct and varied insights and commentary spanning the political spectrum”.
Biden was in New York after attending a campaign fundraiser hosted by the actor Michael Douglas on Thursday.
Stern had never interviewed a sitting president before. In 2019, he interviewed Hillary Clinton, the losing Democratic candidate in the 2016 election.
A day after the rightwing-dominated supreme court showed signs of delaying Trump’s federal election subversion trial by indulging his claims about presidential immunity, Stern asked Biden why he had to be careful talking about a court the host called “a joke”.
“It’s a really extremely conservative court, maybe the most conservative in modern history,” Biden said.
He also excused himself for a “Freudian slip” after saying “Trump” while meaning to refer to Richard Nixon.
Much of the interview focused on Biden’s long life in politics, as a senator from Delaware from 1973 to 2009, as vice-president to Barack Obama between 2009 and 2017, and as president since 2021.
Discussing the deaths in a car crash in 1972 of his first wife, Neilia Hunter Biden, and young daughter, Naomi, the president told Stern he then contemplated suicide.
“I used to sit there and just think I’m going to take out a bottle of scotch,” Biden said. “I’m going to just drink it and get drunk.
“I just thought about it, you don’t need to be crazy to commit suicide. I thought, ‘Let me just go to the Delaware Memorial [Bridge] and jump.’”
He also encouraged listeners experiencing mental health issues to seek therapy.
About how he met Jill Biden, his second wife, Biden said: “I got a call from my brother. ‘So I have a girl here at Delaware’ – Jill is nine years younger than I am. He said, ‘You’ll love her. She doesn’t like politics.’”
Before that, while he was single, Biden said, he “got put in that 10 most eligible bachelors list … and a lot of lovely women, but women, would send very salacious pictures and I just give them to the Secret Service.”
The “proudest thing” he had ever done in politics, Biden said, was securing the passage of the Violence Against Women Act, which he introduced in 1990 and which became law four years later. The law was reauthorised and strengthened in 2013, when Biden was vice-president.
The 81-year-old president has attracted controversy through his relative reluctance to sit for interviews with the mainstream press.
On Thursday, a day before Biden chose to speak to Stern, Politico published an extensive report about what it called a “petty feud” between the Biden White House and the New York Times.
“Although the president’s communications teams bristle at coverage from dozens of outlets,” Politico said, “the frustration, and obsession, with the Times is unique, reflecting the resentment of a president with a working-class sense of himself and his team toward a news organisation catering to an elite audience – and a deep desire for its affirmation of their work.
“On the other side, the newspaper carries its own singular obsession with the president, aggrieved over his refusal to give the paper a sit-down interview that publisher AG Sulzberger and other top editors believe to be its birthright.”
Reporting Biden’s interview with Stern, the Times noted that the president “once again told a story about being arrested at a Delaware desegregation protest as a teenager”, but observed: “There has never been any evidence that he ever was arrested at a civil rights protest.”
