Biden says he’ll debate Trump in surprise Howard Stern interview

Joe Biden sprang a surprise on the Washington press corps on Friday when he gave an interview to the radio host and shock jock Howard Stern.

Discussing the deaths in a car crash in 1972 of his first wife, Neilia Hunter Biden, and young daughter, Naomi, the president told Stern he then contemplated suicide.

“You don’t need to be crazy to commit suicide,” Biden said. “Maybe I just go to the Delaware Memorial Bridge and jump.”

He also encouraged listeners experiencing mental health issues to seek therapy.

The conversation was announced minutes before the interview began on air.

Reporting the unscheduled stop in New York, the White House pool report said: “At 10.05am, the motorcade made an unscheduled stop at Sirius XM studio in midtown Manhattan.”

Jennifer Witz, chief executive of Sirius XM, said: “We are thrilled that President Biden chose Howard Stern. It’s just another reminder that Howard is in a league of his own, regularly lauded as the world’s best interviewer.”

That would be up for debate but Stern does have a habit of making news – often, in the case of Biden’s White House predecessor Donald Trump, retrospectively.

Trump’s interviews with Stern before entering politics have regularly resurfaced, particularly over Trump’s usually controversial, often lewd and sometimes disturbing remarks.

Wirtz said Sirius XM was “proud to offer distinct and varied insights and commentary spanning the political spectrum”.

Biden was in New York after attending a campaign fundraiser hosted by the actor Michael Douglas on Thursday.

Stern had never interviewed a sitting president before. In 2019, he interviewed Hillary Clinton, the losing Democratic candidate in the 2016 election.

A day after the rightwing-dominated supreme court showed signs of delaying Trump’s federal election subversion trial by indulging his claims about presidential immunity, Stern asked Biden why he had to be careful talking about a court the host called “a joke”.

“It’s a really extremely conservative court, maybe the most conservative in modern history,” Biden said.

He also excused himself for a “Freudian slip” after saying “Trump” while meaning to refer to Richard Nixon.

Asked if he would debate Trump before the election in November, as Trump (who skipped all debates in the Republican primary) has demanded, Biden said: “I am, somewhere, I don’t know when, but I am happy to debate him.”

Biden, 81, has attracted controversy through his relative reluctance to sit for interviews with the mainstream press.

On Thursday, a day before Biden chose to speak to Stern, Politico published an extensive report about what it called a “petty feud” between the Biden White House and the New York Times.

“Although the president’s communications teams bristle at coverage from dozens of outlets,” Politico said, “the frustration, and obsession, with the Times is unique, reflecting the resentment of a president with a working-class sense of himself and his team toward a news organisation catering to an elite audience – and a deep desire for its affirmation of their work.

“On the other side, the newspaper carries its own singular obsession with the president, aggrieved over his refusal to give the paper a sit-down interview that publisher AG Sulzberger and other top editors believe to be its birthright.”

Reporting Biden’s interview with Stern, the Times noted that the president “once again told a story about being arrested at a Delaware desegregation protest as a teenager”, but observed: “There has never been any evidence that he ever was arrested at a civil rights protest.”