Late night host Seth Meyers ridicules media focus on Biden health cover-up

NBC “Late Night” host Seth Meyers mocked the idea of former President Joe Biden’s declining health being a major political scandal, claiming it “was the worst cover-up in American history.”

Questions about Biden’s health have resurfaced after the release of “Original Sin,” a new book by CNN anchor Jake Tapper and Axios journalist Alex Thompson, which alleges that Biden’s inner circle concealed the president’s flailing health and cognitive decline for years, despite telling the public that he was mentally sharp and fit for office. 

Meyers ripped the media for paying attention to the Biden “cover-up” when, according to him, “The Trump Administration and Republicans in Congress are rapidly dismantling American civil society and turning the country into a reclusive oligarchy.”

“But I don’t want to talk about any of that and neither does the media. We both want to talk about something way more important. Joe Biden is, and has been, for a while, very old,” he said sarcastically.

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After playing a montage of figures calling the cover-up a media scandal, Meyers joked, “They’re right. This is the biggest scandal in history, bigger than Watergate, bigger than Iran-Contra, bigger than the Teapot Dome Scandal.”

The late-night host argued that the president’s advanced age wasn’t a secret and the majority of Americans were against him running for re-election in the 2024 campaign, believing him to be too old to serve again.

“Now, you might be thinking to yourself, ‘Wait, didn’t everybody already know that Joe Biden was old?'” Meyers asked. “‘Didn’t poll after poll show that the vast majority of Americans, including a clear majority of Democrats, thought he was too old to run for reelection, and wanted someone else? Didn’t he biff it so bad in the debate that his own party undertook an unprecedented effort to successfully force him out of the race?'” 

“‘Weren’t Democrats ultimately punished for Biden’s disastrous choice to run again when they got their asses kicked in the November election?'” he continued. “‘Didn’t Seth play that clip of Biden falling up the stairs, like, 1,000 times?'”

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“This was on TV, everyone saw it,” he said of Biden stumbling while walking up the stairs of Air Force One in 2021.

“If this was a cover-up, if this was the worst [bleep] cover-up in American history. It was the worst-kept secret since Mika and Joe,” he joked, referring to the relationship of “Morning Joe” co-hosts Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough who wed in 2018 after years of co-hosting the morning MSNBC show.

“This was only like Watergate if the break-in had been live-streamed on Twitch,” Meyers added.

After poking fun at reports that Biden got lost in his closet in the White House, Meyers turned serious.

“It was just a disastrous political choice. And the people who deserve criticism for that are Biden, the aides who convinced him and themselves that he should ignore reality and run again,” he concluded.

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Meyer’s Monday night show appears to be the first time he referenced the Biden cover-up revelations from Tapper’s book, according to Grabien transcripts.

Meyer and fellow liberal late-night hosts Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel have all welcomed Biden for friendly interviews. Most recently, Biden was on “Late Night with Seth Meyers” in February 2024, just days after the release of Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report.

Hur was heavily attacked by the media at the time for calling Biden a “sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory” in his report.

During his February 2024 interview of Biden, Meyers gently broached the subject of Biden’s age before quickly moving on to other topics. 

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After Hur’s report was released a few days later, Meyers called the special counsel’s comments a “gratuitous hypothetical” and stressed that Hur was a “Republican attorney” who “was originally appointed by Trump.”

“If that kind of language was appropriate in a legal finding, then prosecutors could have done the same thing to Trump,” Meyers said before repeatedly drawing attention to President Donald Trump‘s mental acuity.

Fox News’ Joseph A. Wulfsohn contributed to this report.