George Clooney says Democrats need a new nominee just weeks after he headlined a major fundraiser for Biden
Washington
CNN
—
The actor George Clooney, who had been among President Joe Biden’s biggest supporters and donors in Hollywood, called on Biden to bow out of the presidential race on Wednesday, just weeks after he headlined a major fundraiser for his reelection campaign.
“I love Joe Biden,” Clooney wrote in a New York Times opinion piece. “As a senator. As a vice president and as president. I consider him a friend, and I believe in him.”
But, Clooney added, the Biden he saw during the June 15 fundraiser, which also included former President Barack Obama, “was not the Joe “big F-ing deal” Biden of 2010. He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020.”
“He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate,” Clooney added, referencing Biden’s faltering and disastrous performance at the June 27 presidential debate on CNN.
That statement was a stunning assessment of Biden’s current state from someone who has interacted with the president privately — that the way the president presented himself during that debate, which the White House and Biden campaign have alternatively blamed on a cold and a tiring travel schedule, was not an aberration.
Clooney is not just a movie star and a prominent donor: He’s someone who has spent time with Biden over the years and has always been a big fan. This goes all the way back to Biden’s early days as vice president, when Clooney came by the White House and dropped in to Biden’s then-office down the hall in the West Wing from the Oval Office and ended up having an extended visit talking about helping Darfur.
Clooney is friendly with Obama too, but he and Biden have stayed in touch over the years, and the strength of that relationship held even when Biden criticized the International Criminal Court’s May decision to issue an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a result of his actions in Gaza – which Clooney’s wife, international human rights lawyer Amal Clooney, had been a key part of crafting. Clooney called a top White House adviser to complain, but he did not pull back on his support then, or on his participation in the June fundraiser. Biden forcefully criticized the ICC’s efforts because of the implication of an equivalence between Israel and Hamas.
Clooney is also seen by many Democratic backers in Hollywood as a sort of compass given his engagement and activism. His standing with Biden until now helped rally wider donor and celebrity support, even among some who had never been big Biden fans and were not enthused about backing him long before the debate.
Asked for comment Wednesday, Biden’s campaign pointed toward the letter the president wrote to members of Congress on Monday indicating he would remain in the race.
Clooney’s opinion piece represents the biggest defection against Biden in Hollywood, which the party has long relied on for big-named support and money. It comes as a handful of Democrats in Congress have also publicly demanded Biden step aside due to persistent concerns about his age and mental acuity.
The fundraiser that Clooney headlined raised $28 million for Biden’s reelection campaign, the most for the Democratic Party from a single event in history. A source familiar with the event says that part of the reason that the Los Angeles fundraiser took place on June 15 – immediately after Biden’s travel to the G7 summit in Italy – was because that was the one date Clooney said would work for him. Biden has cited his intense travel ahead of last month’s debate as one reason for his poor performance.
In the opinion piece, Clooney called on key Democrats — naming Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — to ask Biden to “voluntarily step aside.”
“We are not going to win in November with this president,” Clooney warned, adding that the lawmakers he has spoken with privately shared this view.