• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, May 5, 2025

What does Joe Biden want? That’s the question that comes to mind as he prepares to appear on “The View” this week.

Scheduled for Thursday’s show (May 8), it will be the former president’s first TV interview since leaving office January 20.

He was last seen on “The View” last September, months after he ceded the presidential campaign to Vice President Harris.

In the photo above from the September show, he looks jovial and good-humored. And why not? For Biden, “The View” must be the safest, friendliest environment in all of television.

This week, the co-hosts will fawn all over him. They will ask him how he’s doing, what he’s been up to since leaving the White House, how he feels about his legacy, and what he thinks about the current political climate, which really means what does he think of Trump.

But for Joe Biden, appearing on television comes with risks. After all, two appearances early last summer -- his debate with Trump on June 27 and then, days later, his interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC July 5 -- doomed his campaign for a second term.

On Thursday’s “View,” he runs the risk of appearing like he did then -- an older man (he’s 82) who tires easily, demonstrates short-term memory loss and has moments of confusion.

On “The View,” however, he will hopefully not be called upon to answer the same kinds of complex questions he was asked in those two appearances. 

Nor should he have to. Joe Biden is a veteran politician who deserves to take a victory lap in the early days of his retirement as much as any other historical figure who came before him.

For example, my own opinion is that the former president should not be asked about how his cognitive abilities are doing today.

Nor should he be asked to defend himself or his handlers for the way they allegedly covered up his mental challenges while he was in office.

That stuff is coming out soon anyway with the May 20 release of Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson (Penguin Publishing Group, 352 pp.).

This is one of those books that is apparently so highly anticipated that Barnes and Noble is taking advance orders on its web site.

One could speculate that Biden, who will be accompanied by wife Jill on “The View,” wishes to get ahead of the book’s release by addressing the very subject of his fitness for office and a second term, which would have started last January 20.

I think this would be a mistake for the simple reason that in addressing this subject, he might demonstrate the very same characteristics that the book is about.

Ever since Trump’s inauguration in January, Trump has been attacking Biden, blaming him for the current economic turmoil, and the wars and bellicosity between nations that characterize the world today. 

But tradition has always called for new presidents to refrain from critiquing their predecessors, commenting negatively on their time in office or, in the case of Trump, repeatedly insulting them.

One assumes that this tradition is based, at least in part, on the old Golden Rule that advises treating people the way you would like to be treated.

With that in mind, the TV Blog hopes that if Biden is asked to respond to Trump’s insults, he takes the road not taken by Trump -- the high road -- and declines to respond in kind.

From such small gestures are great legacies made.