President Joe Biden—who is notoriously unavailable to the press, as even his allies in the mainstream media cannot help but point out—chose the oddest place of all to actually sit down for a long-form interview. On Friday, 26 April, he appeared on The Howard Stern Show on the satellite radio station SiriusXM.
President Biden’s choice is perplexing for multiple reasons. First, it is a premium subscription-based radio service, which has a very narrow reach. Howard Stern, who once dominated terrestrial radio in the 1990s and early 2000s with around 20 million live listeners, can now only ‘boast’ a few tens of thousands on the platform.
Secondly, the reason Stern left terrestrial radio back in 2005 was to escape the regulatory scope of the FCC.
The type of radio show Howard Stern was running at the peak of his popularity would be hard to imagine ever airing nowadays.
He regularly had porn actresses on, performing sex acts live on air, or just stripping; he had a group of people with deformities and other birth defects known as ‘the Wack Pack,’ much akin to an 1800s Victorian freak show; and he would dress up in ‘blackface’ for comedy skits and would use the ‘N-word’ with ‘a hard R’. Racial comedy with that particular word was not uncommon on his old show, more often by his cast members and some guests.
Stern has cleaned up his act completely in the past decade or so, to the point that his show is unrecognizable now—which evidently was a major factor in his drastic loss of listenership. Still, it has been a habit of progressive activists to dig up insensitive jokes or statements made by celebrities in their past to hurt their reputation or to ‘cancel’ them. Yet the sitting POTUS from the liberal Democratic Party is willing to sit down with a radio host who built his entire career on incendiary content.
Howard Stern was also a close associate of Donald Trump, who appeared on his show many times in the past. However, Stern has since become a hard-line Democrat and severed his relationship with Trump.
As for President Biden’s appearance, there is not much to really talk about. He brought his usual remarkably uncharismatic way of speaking, which was oftentimes hard to comprehend even. He did open up about the personal tragedies of his life to Stern, talked about losing his first wife and daughter in a car accident in 1972, and admitted that he even considered suicide in the wake of the tragedy. These moments did paint President Biden in a sympathetic light.
In the spirit of the old Howard Stern Show, President Biden also revealed that after he became widowed as a Senator, ‘lovely women’ sent him ‘very salacious pictures’ to try to court him. However, he would just give these pictures to the Secret Service and would never respond.
Is President Biden Playing Catch-Up with President Trump?
Another reason why President Biden’s choice to visit Howard Stern is interesting is the location—which is Manhattan, New York City, New York, where Donald Trump is currently being tried for 36 felony counts of falsifying business records in the first degree.
President Trump is now bound to NYC, being court-mandated to show up every workday for his months-long trial for some reason, keeping him away from the campaign trail (probably, that is the reason…). He used this opportunity to connect with the working-class men and women of New York City, many of whom are sick and tired of increased violent crime tacitly supported by liberal prosecutors. He visited a bodega worker who had been attacked by criminals, and also met with construction workers in Manhattan—both times, he was met with an enthusiastic welcome in one of the most liberal places in the US.
President Biden too visited a bodega a few days after Trump, in an obvious attempt to appear as likable and approachable to the ‘common folk’ of America as his rival is.
Perhaps President Biden decided to drop by Howard Stern to try to ‘score some points’ with working-class New Yorkers as well, many of whom grew up listening to and idolizing their local shock jock hero in the 1990s and 2000s.
There is a lot of catching up to do for President Biden—at least according to a recent poll published by CNN, which shows Trump leading by six points nationally head-to-head, and a whopping nine points with all five major candidates included in the poll.
It needs to be added that this is an outlier poll, and there is no chance Donald Trump will actually win the popular vote by such a wide margin in November.
However, it does show that he is on track to win both the popular vote and the election, if things remain as they are now. Trump has been leading the RealClearPolitics aggregate of polls for over seven months now, more time than there is left until the election. Meanwhile, President Biden’s approval rating has started to dip again after a very brief period of recovery. In the most recent Gallup poll, considered as the gold standard of polling by the news and polling industry, it is at an abysmal 38 per cent.
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