Actor and director George Clooney, who has been a prolific fundraiser for the Democratic Party over the past two decades, urged President Joe Biden to leave the presidential ticket and called on party leaders to formally ask Biden to step aside in a New York Times op-ed Wednesday.
“We are not going to win in November with this president,” Clooney wrote. “On top of that, we won’t win the House, and we’re going to lose the Senate. This isn’t only my opinion; this is the opinion of every senator and congress member and governor that I’ve spoken with in private. Every single one, irrespective of what he or she is saying publicly.”
Clooney wrote that Biden’s decline was evident even before the debate, noting that the president appeared to be in poor condition at a June fundraiser Clooney co-hosted alongside a slew of Hollywood stars.
“It’s devastating to say it, but the Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fund-raiser was not the Joe ‘big F-ing deal’ Biden of 2010,” Clooney contended. “He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate.”
It was at that fundraiser where Biden, as captured on video, had to be led off stage by former president Barack Obama after appearing to freeze following a joint interview with late-night host Jimmy Kimmel.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre dismissed concerns over the episode at a press briefing after the event, saying Obama taking Biden’s hand and leading him to the exit was a demonstration of the close relationship the two share and nothing more.
Clooney, on the other hand, wrote that Democratic leaders “need to stop telling us that 51 million people didn’t see what we just saw” — a president whose advanced age causes Democrats to “collectively hold our breath or turn down the volume whenever we see the president, who we respect, walk off Air Force One or walk back to a mic to answer an unscripted question.”
With all eyes on Capitol Hill and the Democratic lawmakers who have called on the president to forego a 2024 re-election campaign, many celebrities in the party have done the same.
Director Rob Reiner, who has long been involved in progressive politics as a donor and lobbyist, echoed Clooney’s sentiments in a post on X.
“My friend George Clooney has clearly expressed what many of us have been saying,” Reiner wrote. “We love and respect Joe Biden. We acknowledge all he has done for our country. But Democracy is facing an existential threat. We need someone younger to fight back. Joe Biden must step aside.”
Multiple entertainment-world bigwigs have said they would like to see Biden withdraw from the race. Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings told the Times recently that the president “needs to step aside,” while Abigail Disney said she will not donate to the Democratic Party until it replaces Biden at the top of the ticket.
Ari Emanuel, chief executive officer of the Endeavor media conglomerate, told Aspen Ideas Festival attendees that Biden’s advanced age reminds him of a situation he was once in with his father.
“I had a father who died at 92, but at 81 I took away his car, and it was a very simple test for me,” Emanuel said. “If you were driving from downtown Beverly Hills to Malibu, would you want Biden to do it at night? Would you want Trump to do it at night? If the answer is neither, you cannot have them running a $27 trillion company called the United States.”