Just a few minutes ago, we, like many Americans, got done watching George Stephanopoulos’ much-hyped ABC News interview with President Joe Biden, a pre-taped sit-down conversation that, officially or not, has generally been positioned as a referendum on Biden’s ability to rule the world/get through an entire 20-minute conversation with someone without doing something genuinely worrisome. (Something that a lot of people have been getting kind of freaked out about over the last week, after Biden appeared, let’s call it, out of sorts at his first major debate with presidential rival Donald Trump.)
We’re not political analysts here at The A.V. Club—at least, no moreso than anyone who, like most of us, spends at least 8 hours a day with our heads submerged into the roaring river of sewage that makes up most internet discourse in 2024—but we are TV nerds. And so we can report that Biden and Stephanopoulos’ interview contained all the riveting energy and drama of a concerned child repeatedly asking his dad if it isn’t maybe time to hang up the ol’ driver’s license before he puts his Ford through the plate glass window of a 7-Eleven. (Except, in this case, the vehicle in question is the United States’ executive branch and attendant military apparatus, and the 7-Eleven is [insert horrible thing happening in 2024 of your choosing here].)
To his credit, Stephanopoulos pulled no obvious punches, trying, repeatedly, to get Biden to commit to things like taking a neurological test to reassure voters/donors/panic-stricken fellow Democrats, or asking, point-blank, if Biden was deluding himself about his ability to run the country up through his 85th birthday, or what he would do if top-level Dems came to him as a group and asked him to step down. Biden, meanwhile, didn’t produce any of those obvious “Oh that’s not good” moments that made the debate a genuinely harrowing experience for anyone watching from the left, even as he basically shot down any narrative that wasn’t “I sure did have a bad night, huh? Damn this cold!” Instead, he fell back on familiar lines: Donald Trump is a lying sociopath; Biden’s polling isn’t as bad as it looks; the sheer fact of his basically functional daily presidency is all the cognitive testing anyone should need to see.
All told, it’s hard to imagine anyone walking away from the whole thing with even an ounce of their minds changed—which means the only real winner here might actually have been ABC News, which touted the hell out of what ended up being a pretty milquetoast conversation, moving it up to a plum Friday night primetime spot after originally intending to air it on Sunday.