Biden Sets Second Post-Debate Interview, This Time With NBC’s Lester Holt
President Biden has committed to his second major network interview since the debate debacle that has fueled questions about his continued candidacy.
The president will tape an interview with the NBC News anchor Lester Holt on Monday in Austin, Texas, the network said on Wednesday. NBC plans to air the interview “in its entirety” that evening at 9 p.m. Eastern, a similar prime-time placement as ABC’s interview with Mr. Biden that aired last Friday.
Mr. Holt, who last interviewed the president in February 2022, will speak with Mr. Biden for at least 15 minutes at the LBJ Presidential Library, NBC said. Excerpts from their conversation are expected to on that evening’s “NBC Nightly News,” with the unedited interview to follow in prime-time.
Mr. Biden has been under pressure from allies to appear in more unscripted settings with journalists, to show that his poor performance at last month’s debate — where he at times struggled to deliver cogent statements — was, as he has argued, merely one “bad night.”
About 8.5 million people watched his interview on Friday with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos.
The president arguably faces a more intense test on Thursday, when he is scheduled to conduct his first live news conference since the debate. That appearance, at the NATO summit in Washington, is expected to involve an open question-and-answer session with the White House press corps, although the exact format and length of the news conference has yet to be revealed. The news conference is scheduled for 5:30 p.m. Eastern.
In setting the appearance with Mr. Holt, the White House has created an additional opportunity for Mr. Biden to make his case to a wide audience — and provide counterprogramming to the first day of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.
NBC’s prime-time broadcast of the Biden interview will be followed immediately by the network’s coverage of the convention.
In its announcement on Wednesday, NBC took pains to say that it would also release “the full interview and unedited transcript” of Mr. Biden’s appearance with Mr. Holt. The transcript of Mr. Stephanopoulos’s interview became the subject of a kerfuffle over the weekend, after the White House urged the network to change the word “goodest” to “good as” in its initial transcript of Mr. Biden’s remarks; after its own editorial review, ABC agreed.
