Joe Biden & Jay Leno Put Pedal To The L.A. Metal, Talk Trump On ‘Garage’s POTUS Corvette Episode

EXCLUSIVE: Even with Dr Jill Biden’s recent best-selling memoir and Hunter Biden becoming the unvarnished sage of social media, it’s not quite a Bidenaissance until the former President of the United States himself gets out on the highway. That is in fact exactly what Joe Biden and his 1967 Corvette Stingray are doing on a “very special edition of Jay Leno‘s Garage,” according to the former Tonight Show host himself.

Set to drop today on Leno’s YouTube channel at 9 am PT, the half-hour episode of Garage finds the 46th POTUS and the former Late-Nighter cruising around the roads of Burbank and the mountains of L.A. County in Biden’s lean green Corvette.

“Jay’s been asking for years to drive my Corvette so I said ‘why the hell not?” President Biden told Deadline of the offer from Leno to come out West. The episode was shot in April, “Jay and his team are the best, and we had a great time catching up while driving through the Angeles National Forest. And the Vette drove like a charm.”

Of course, Joe Biden being Joe Biden and Leno being a professionally polite interviewer, the duo did talk about Donald Trump. Leaving the current occupant of the White House unnamed, Biden reflected on his own tenure and took a few swipes at the ex-Apprentice host’s record since returning to the White House from his successor and predecessor. “He’s cutting back on all the programs that have apprenticeships and create jobs,” Biden says of Trump as Leno reflects on the value of old New Deal plans like the WPA.

Still, as you would expect on Leno’s long-running celebs in cars show, Biden and his host mainly just hang out. They certainly talk way more about cars than politics.

Followed by a bevy of Secret Service SUVs and police, Biden and Leno also riff on the value of NATO, natural parks, Beau Biden’s life and death, being designated drivers, horse power, Ronald Reagan’s motorcycle and ice cream. As more than a few IG posts and local papers reported at the time, the frosty treat topic found the CAA-repped Biden and Leno stopping by a Handel’s in La Cañada Flintridge to surprise some local awestruck kids and snag a chocolate chip and a chocolate and vanilla respectively.

“All right, so we went for ice cream, you know.” Leno says of the Handel’s layover. “We get there and they’re a bunch of little kids waiting for ice cream, you know. And I said, anybody ever met a president of the United States? No, well this guy’s president. I mean, it’s just very funny. Yeah, eight, nine year old kids, you know. So it was very funny watching him interact with the kids, they loved him.”

It should be noted, as well as Leno having an In-N-Out Cookout truck on site at his Burbank garage to serve Biden lunch during his visit, the former President did pay for a number of the kids’ ice creams as well as his own and Leno’s at Handel’s.

“He was the old Joe, you know, every handshake is worth 250 votes, that kind of thing,” Leno notes “Shook hands with everybody, just congenial, just a nice guy.”

Addressing the elephant in the room when it comes to the now 83-year old ex-commander-in-chief, Leno adds: “It’s interesting because he was, he was very sharp. I thought maybe I would have to talk in a slower voice, you know what I mean? But, no, we just talked, and he was funny, and just making jokes and things like that.”

“I think a year of relaxation and taking it easy and just being a normal guy was great for him. Really, it was the old Joe again. It was great to see him.”

As that famous 2014 White House Correspondents Dinner video with Veep’s Julia Louis-Dreyfus made very apparent, Biden is no stranger to showing up on camera behind the wheel.

He has actually done it a couple of times before with Leno, at least once before with 1967 Corvette. In the Garage episode coming out Monday, the two reminisce about the time they drove together (with a cameo by a certain ex-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) almost a decade ago. That was a long time before Leno made the move to YouTube after Emmy winner Garage was canceled by CNBC back in 2023.

A late-nighter regular of sorts over his decades in the Senate and as VP, Biden also showed up on Garage when he was President for Leno’s October 22, 2022 show.