President Joe Biden’s highly anticipated interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos, which was initially described as “extended,” could last just 15 minutes, a new report says.
The interview will be the president’s first since his disastrous debate performance against Republican nominee Donald Trump last week. A new video has emerged showing the former president mocking Biden as a “foolish old man.”
The news that Biden’s interview with the former Clinton staffer will likely last a quarter of an hour was first reported by The Daily Beast. In the same report, a Biden spokesman called the accusation “false” and insisted it would last longer.
On Wednesday, Biden, 81, unexpectedly appeared on a Zoom call with campaign staff members in a defiant mood.
“Let me say this as clearly as possible, as simply and directly as I can: I’m running… nobody is pushing me to leave. I’m not leaving. I’m in this race to the end and we’re going to win,” he said.
The first interview with President Joe Biden will air Friday night as part of an hour-long ABC special.
ABC previously confirmed that early excerpts of the interview will air Friday at 6 p.m. ET on World News Tonight, then in its entirety in a one-hour special that same night at 8 p.m. It will air again Sunday as part of This Week.
Stephanopoulos is a host of Good Morning America and This Week. He joined ABC News in 1997 after working for the Clinton administration in Washington.
In those announcements, ABC never commented on the length of the interview, but if the network’s special is an hour long, it’s unclear how the network could fill it with a 15-minute Q&A session.
What is clear is that the interview is scheduled to take place during the president’s campaign appearances in Wisconsin. According to The Daily Beast, another source said the interview could last about 20 minutes.
The website adds, citing ABC executives, that there is hope that Biden’s long-winded nature will lengthen the article.
There has been a private discussion within the Biden campaign about what he can do to counter last Thursday’s debate, where the raspy-voiced president gave some convoluted and incomplete answers.
Biden’s lack of public visibility in situations that are not strictly controlled has been evident throughout his presidency.
The 36 news conferences he held through June 30 were fewer than any president in the same period since Ronald Reagan, according to Martha Joynt Kumar, director of the White House Transition Project.
Biden gave a total of 128 interviews, compared to 369 for Donald Trump at the same stage of his presidency and 497 for Biden’s former boss, he said.
During Wednesday’s Zoom call, Vice President Kamala Harris also appeared to rally the troops.
“We will not give up. We will follow the example of our president. We will fight and we will win.”
The call concluded with Biden saying: “There is no one I would rather be in this fight with than all of you. So let’s join arms. Let’s do this. You, me, the vice president. Together.”
In his private conversations, Biden focused on efforts to correct the course of his messy debate and the threat he sees former President Donald Trump as posing to the country, as he sought comment on what went wrong last Thursday in Atlanta and took responsibility for his performance.
“We had a direct, open and lucid conversation about the debate, his thoughts on what happened and why it wasn’t his best night or his best debate,” Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., who spoke with Biden on Tuesday, said in an interview with the Associated Press.
Vice President Kamala Harris told members of her campaign team on Wednesday that she supports Biden.
“He wanted advice. He was very vocal in asking for feedback and input on what he should do to regain trust and support, and what the best path forward is.”
Coons, the president’s closest ally on Capitol Hill, said Biden clearly understood the urgency, difficulty and importance of the election, while the senator advised the president to hold more open, unscripted events to restore confidence in his candidacy.
Biden met for more than an hour at the White House on Wednesday night, in person and virtually, with more than 20 Democratic governors who later described the conversation as “candid” but said they supported Biden despite being concerned about a Trump victory in November.
“The president is our nominee. The president is the leader of our party,” Maryland Gov. Wes Moore said. He added that at the meeting, Biden “was very clear that he’s here to win.”
Despite those reassuring sentiments, one major Democratic donor, Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings, also called on the president to drop out of the race, saying, “Biden must step aside to allow a vigorous Democratic leader to defeat Trump and keep us safe and prosperous.”
The statement was first reported by The New York Times.
