Thursday’s “Late Night” found Seth Meyers talking about Joe Biden’s first official press conference since becoming the president, which had been a long time coming if you ask Fox News.
The conservative news network had been fixating on the fact that Biden hadn’t done a press conference, and Meyers rolled a montage of clips of talking heads counting the days that Biden’s supposedly been hiding in what Donald Trump’s former press secretary Kayleigh McEnany called the “figurative basement” of the Oval Office. This was a reference to Biden “hiding in his basement” during his presidential campaign, a line that got repeated in conservative media throughout the campaign.
“Once these people come up with a line they like they never let go of it, no matter how dumb it is,” Meyers said. “They’re more desperate to use the basement line than George Costanza was to use his ‘jerk store’ line.”
During the press conference, Biden formally announced his administration’s new COVID-19 vaccination goal of 200 million shots administered by his 100th day in office. This goal is likely to be achieved, as the country passed Biden’s initial target of 100 million shots on his 58th day in office.
“So he set a goal, met it, then said set a second, more ambitious goal which has credibility, because he met his first goal — that’s a novel strategy,” Meyers said. “It’s certainly different from the Trump strategy of overpromising and underdelivering.”
Meyers liked Biden’s upbeat demeanor during the announcement. “That kind of announcement is Biden at his best, when he’s got the vibe of an old-timer football coach giving his young squad an inspirational halftime speech,” Meyers said before slipping into a Biden impression: “‘We can do it, folks. We can score 42 points in the second half. And look, I know most of you have broken bones because I forgot to teach you how to tackle, but that’s how we learn.’”
Biden is not at his best, however, when he loses confidence in what he’s talking about in the middle of his answer, like he did at the end of the press conference while answering a question about immigration where he asked the reporter if he was giving too much detail and then bailed. “Yeah, we all know the press famously hates the details,” Meyers said. “That’s like a witness in a courtroom telling a judge, ‘I mean, I know where the bodies are buried, but you guys probably all have dinner plans.’”
Meyers also had mixed feelings about Biden’s response to the GOP’s attack on voting rights at the state level, appreciating that Biden called it out as “un-American” but not understanding Biden’s bizarre statement that these new voting restrictions “make Jim Crow look like Jim Eagle.”
“‘Jim Eagle’ sounds like a desperate guess on ‘Jeopardy!’ for the question, ‘He was the lead singer of the Eagles,’’ Meyers joked.
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