The New York Times op-ed dropped just minutes before President Biden headed for his motorcade, and as he was driving across town to meet with union workers, all of Washington devoured the words of George Clooney, the movie star publicly calling on the president to step aside.
“It’s devastating to say it, but the Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fundraiser was not the Joe ‘big F-ing deal’ Biden of 2010. He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020,” Clooney wrote, setting up a betrayal worthy of the big screen. “He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate.”
It was a worst fear come to life for this White House, more evidence that concerns about the age and mental acuity of the president cannot easily be set aside. Clooney headlined a record-breaking, star-studded fundraiser for Biden in Hollywood just last month. Now the star has jumped ship, signaling to the country, as much as to other deep-pocketed Democrats, that it is okay to look past Biden.
The White House likely didn’t expect Clooney, an Obama family friend who vacations with the former president, to join the growing number of A-listers abandoning the top of the Democratic ticket. All the same, Biden had opened a preemptive broadside against the elites.
“I’m getting so frustrated by the elites,” Biden said Tuesday on Morning Joe, pausing only to tell MSNBC hosts Joe Scarborough, a former congressman, and Mika Brzezinski, sister to the U.S. Ambassador to Poland, that “I’m not talking about you guys.” Instead, the president directed his ire toward “the elites in the party who know so much more. If any of these guys don’t think I should run, run against me. Go ahead, announce for president. Challenge me at the convention.”
No challenger has stepped forward yet, but at a Wisconsin rally last week, Biden made reference to an effort behind the scenes “trying to push me out of the race.” To do that just before he accepts the Democratic nomination, the president said, would disenfranchise voters. In this way, desperately clinging to the Oval Office, Biden fell back on his reputation as “Scranton Joe,” man of the people.
It has not worked.
The co-founder of Netflix, Reed Hastings, has called on Biden to leave the ticket. The heiress to the Disney family fortune, Abigail Disney, has said she will not donate to Democrats until they dump Biden. George Stephanopoulos, a senior advisor to President Clinton before a career as a newsman with ABC, was caught on camera Wednesday telling a pedestrian in New York that he did not think Biden could serve “four more years.”
Stephanopoulos later apologized for the unauthorized commentary, but the damage was done. The journalist who landed the first interview with Biden post-debate, a test of his ability to convince the country he was still all there, just said the president flunked. Biden insists his debate performance was just “a bad night,” an unfortunate combination of a cold and jetlag. His White House has offered similar excuses for the president’s puzzling behavior.
When Biden appeared to freeze on stage at the Los Angeles fundraiser that Clooney headlined before being led off stage with President Obama, the White House said he was just “taking in an applauding crowd for a few seconds.” And edited videos of the president appearing frail or confused, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters days after the fundraiser, were “cheap-fakes.”
But what was once dismissed as a right-wing conspiracy is now being espoused by some of the Democratic elite, most notably Clooney, who said there was no difference in what he saw from Biden at the L.A. fundraiser or the presidential debate.
“Was he tired? Yes. A cold? Maybe. But our party leaders need to stop telling us that 51 million people didn’t see what we just saw. We’re all so terrified by the prospect of a second Trump term that we’ve opted to ignore every warning sign,” Clooney wrote of the presidential debate, saying he and his fellow Democrats “collectively hold our breath” anytime the president faces the press.
It was a remarkably similar sentiment to the one shared by Ben Rhodes, a former senior advisor to Obama, who tweeted after the debate that “telling people they didn’t see what they saw is not the way to respond to this.”
Biden has responded by telling the donors, pundits, and Democratic leaders now doubting him how wrong they were before to doubt him.
“Look, I remember them telling me the same thing in 2020: I can’t win. The polls show I can’t win,” the president recalled in his sit-down with ABC News. “Remember 2024 – 2020, the red wave was coming. Before the vote, I said that’s not going to happen. We’re going to win. We did better in an off year than almost any incumbent president ever has done.”
For now, the president has made clear, despite the elite lining up against him, that he will not go quietly into that good night, giving anyone a tidy Hollywood ending, no matter how nicely they ask.
