As news of who will be replacing Hoda Kotb in the Today Show is still up in the air, Jenna Bush Hager got quite a treat this week when her longtime husband, Henry Hager, debuted as co-host.
On the show, Jenna calmed her clearly nervous husband, who works in private equity, by taking a walk down memory lane. At one point, she asked Henry to talk about a slip-up during their second date together back in 2004.
“So, I came to pick you up at your parents’ house,” Henry started. “Which is also the White House,” Jenna then quipped.
“We picked you up, and at the time, you had Secret Service detail,” he explained. “So I’m driving an old Bronco, and the gas meter didn’t work anymore, so I didn’t know how full the tank was.”
As it turns out, he started to feel that his car was running out of gas right when they reached an intersection. He then “peeled hard to the left” and “blocked three lanes of traffic coming in the opposite direction” in order to make it to the gas station on the other side.
Sadly, however, before he could park for gas, the car stopped and started rolling backward into the secret service car right behind him.
“I slammed on the emergency brake and just did a little bumper tap in the back,” he remembered. “No tax dollars were spent (to fix the car), but we were blocking a lot of traffic.”
“That was hectic,” he added. “I had never had that experience before, now I know what to do.”
Also in the episode, Jenna looked back at their first kiss together. “It was to Lil’ Troy, a song we can’t say on TV,” she joked. “Lil’ Troy was a rapper back in the day. We were dancing and all of a sudden, you shot your shot.”
“I mean, well, I don’t think you can say that on the 10 a.m. hour of television, but I went in for the kiss,” Henry said, blushing.
The couple got married a few years later, in 2008. They’ve since welcomed three kids: Mila, born in 2013, Poppy, born in 2015, and Hal, born in 2019. All in all, while they’re second date together might’ve been a little bumpy, everything surely worked out!
Before you go, click here to see presidential families over the years.
