The outgoing president’s final interview is set.
Photo: Chris Kleponis/CNP/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Lawrence O’Donnell has landed a very big scoop: The anchor of MSNBC’s The Last Word is getting the last word with President Joe Biden, Vulture has learned. O’Donnell will travel to Washington to interview Biden in the Oval Office on Thursday for a conversation which will air later that same evening during O’Donnell’s 10 p.m. ET show. MSNBC is expected to tout the Biden-O’Donnell meeting as Biden’s “final interview as President” before he leaves office next week.
While Biden hasn’t completely shunned the mainstream (as his critics charge), he also hasn’t exactly rushed to talk to TV news during his four years in the White House, either — particularly of late. His last flurry of sit-down interviews with video platforms came last summer: He spoke to several networks in July following his shaky debate performance and then sat down with CBS News’s Sunday Morning in August after he dropped out of the 2024 campaign. Last week, Biden also did a print interview with USA Today, and he is scheduled to deliver a farewell address to the nation on Wednesday. There’s been no word on a final Biden press conference.
By contrast, the last Democratic president — Barack Obama — embarked on a major media tour during his final weeks in office with Crooked Media’s Pod Save America scoring the last White House conversation with Obama. During his last weeks in office back in 2021, Trump, despite his reputation for being chatty with reporters, avoided non-conservative media platforms after he lost the 2020 election — and especially after he incited the failed insurrection on January 6, 2021.
Biden’s decision to book his final TV interview with O’Donnell has some poetry about it: He gave one of his first interviews as president to the MSNBC anchor on May 12, 2021, to mark the end of his administration’s first 100 days two weeks earlier. And while O’Donnell never worked on Biden’s staff — as the Pod Save America guys did with Obama — in a previous career, O’Donnell was staff director for the Senate Finance Committee under the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan and thus worked in close proximity with both Biden and his Senate office. O’Donnell’s The Last Word — MSNBC’s most-watched nightly prime-time telecast — has also previously hosted many top officials from the Biden White House over the last four years, including Vice-President Kamala Harris and former chief of staff Ron Klain.
