Joe Biden Jokes About Approval Rating to Jimmy Fallon—Laments Trumpism, QAnon

President Joe Biden joked about his low approval rating with NBC's Jimmy Fallon on Friday night and also criticized the QAnon conspiracy and former President Donald Trump's "Big Lie," saying they have made political discourse "awful hard."

The president made his first appearance on late night TV since coming to office in January with a virtual interview where he touched on a range of subjects, including inflation and his own approval rating.

Fallon asked the president about his approval in recent polling. Biden's approval has been underwater since August 30—the day before the final withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan—and stood at just 43 percent on December 10, according to analysis from poll tracker 538.

"How much do you pay attention to your approval rating?" Fallon asked.

"Well, not anymore," Biden said. "I'm not joking. I would pay attention when they're in the mid-60s, but now they're in the 40s, I don't pay attention anymore."

Fallon replied: "I appreciate the honesty, yeah."

Earlier in the interview, Biden explained that he had been slightly late for the taping of the show because he had been giving the eulogy for the late former Senator Bob Dole, a Republican who died on December 5 at the age of 98.

"He asked me on his deathbed whether I would do his eulogy," Biden said.

"We're friends. We disagree, but we're friends," the president said.

"We used to have an awful lot of that relationship and it still exists except that the QAnon and the extreme elements of the Republican Party and what Donald Trump keeps sort of—seems to me—feeding, you know, with the Big Lie. It makes it awful hard," Biden went on.

Biden was referring to Trump's repeated claims of unsubstantiated voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election and the QAnon conspiracy which posits, among other claims, that Trump was fighting an international cabal of Satanic pedophiles.

"And I think most Republicans ... there's an awful lot of Republicans in Congress I think would agree," Biden said.

The president also acknowledged that many Americans are concerned about the economy, which has been reflected in a number of recent polls, with inflation a particular concern.

"Look, people are afraid. People are worried," Biden said. "And people are getting so much inaccurate information to them. I don't mean about me, but I mean about the situation."

"They're being told that, you know, Armageddon's on the way," the president said. "The truth is the economy is growing more than it has any time in close to 60 years. The unemployment rate ' down to 4.2 percent and it's gonna go lower, in my view."

"We do have inflation, in fact, on things that matter to people's lives," Biden said, arguing that gas was one product where prices can be expected to come down.

"There's a lot of anxiety and my job is to be straightforward, shoot from the shoulder, let people know exactly what the truth is, and lay out how I'm going to try to make life better for them," he said.