Joe Biden is back on the late-night circuit.
The 46th President of the United States made his first-ever after-dark talk show appearance during his presidency on The Tonight Show Friday night, chopping it up with host Jimmy Fallon about vaccines, new bills, and the current state of the Republican party.
At the top of the show, Jimmy mentioned being at the Kennedy Center Honors this past month and seeing Republican and Democratic lawmakers conversing, prompting him to ask about bipartisanship.
“All the people that we saw at that event, which was a very wholesome event, are people who are Republicans but they’re the kind…the reason I’m a little bit late to do the taping here is because I did Bob Dole’s eulogy today,” Biden said. “He asked me on his death bed whether I would do his eulogy. We’re friends, we disagree, but we’re friends. We used to have an awful lot of that relationship and they still exist, except that QAnon and the extreme elements of the Republican party, and what Donald Trump keeps sort-of, to me, feeding with the big lie, it makes it awful hard.”
Biden also touched on his infrastructure law and the “Build Back Better” bill, which he hopes will reduce the cost of living and improve living with road and bridge improvements and more. The bill looks to cut health care costs and fight climate change and it passed in the House in November with a likely long road ahead in the Senate.
“We’re going to replace all the lead pipes in America that are causing people to get sick, get cancer,” Biden said. “We’re going to make sure you’re able to send your three and four and five-year-olds to school, which will increase exponentially their chances of succeeding.”
When asked if he keeps up with approval ratings, of which his job-approval rating is declining and currently at 40%, according to a Monmouth University poll, Biden laughed with Fallon and said he doesn’t do so “anymore.”
“Look, people are afraid, people are worried, and people are getting so much inaccurate information to them — I don’t mean about me, but about their situation,” Biden said. “They’re being told that, you know, Armageddon’s on the way. The truth is, the economy’s grown more than it has any time in close to 60 years.”
Check out some of Biden’s appearance above, as well as an additional clip—touching on the environment and Biden’s 2022 hopes—below.
