A Time magazine journalist, who interviewed President Biden last week, attested that in person he is every bit as old as he appears on-screen.
"I mean, he appears very much as he appears on TV," Time's Washington bureau chief Massimo Calabresi told CNN host Jake Tapper when asked how Biden seemed. "He is older than when he started in office. It‘s visible if you just look side-by-side on the tape. The transcript is a good place for people to go to assess that. He was — we describe it in the piece as well, there’s some sort of colored description of how he appeared in there."
Biden sat down with Time magazine at the White House on May 28 for a lengthy interview published on Tuesday. At one point, Biden was asked if he could still do the job "as an 85-year old man" who will be considered "too old to lead" by many Americans if he wins a second term.
"I can do it better than anybody you know. You’re looking at me, I can take you, too," Biden told the Time reporters interviewing him, including Calabresi and editor-in-chief Sam Jacobs.
QUESTIONS OF BIDEN'S AGE AMONG DEMS, MEDIA, COMEDIANS KEEP PILING UP FOLLOWING HUR REPORT
After joking about that comment earlier in the interview, Tapper asked Calabresi, "When it came up, did you get the sense that he takes the concerns about his age from, according to polls, a majority of the American people, including Democrats, seriously?"
"Yeah, he didn‘t pause when we asked him about it," the Time magazine correspondent replied. "He came back pretty fast. I think, to some degree, that may be a stock answer. I didn‘t get the sense that he was troubled by it."
The transcript of the interview released by Time includes multiple instances where Biden’s responses were recorded as "unintelligible."
He also appeared to confuse Chinese President Xi Jinping with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
CLICK HERE FOR MORE COVERAGE OF MEDIA AND CULTURE
"Mr. President, won’t your newly announced tariffs raise the prices on American consumers?" the interviewer asked Biden at the time.
"No, because here's the deal. There's a difference," Biden replied. "I made it clear to Putin from the very beginning that—I'm not, we're not engaging in…For example, Trump wants a 10% tariff on everything. That will raise the price of everything in America."
An "Editor’s note" said, "Biden appeared to mean Xi here, not Putin."
Biden also said in the interview that several world leaders have told him he cannot let presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump win in 2024.
"There's not a major international meeting I attend that, before it’s over, and I've attended many, more than most presidents have in three and a half years, that a world leader doesn’t pull me aside as I’m leaving and say, ‘He can’t win. You can’t let him win,'" Biden said.
