By Lisa Richwine
LOS ANGELES – Actor George Clooney, a major Hollywood fundraiser for Democrats, said on Wednesday that President Joe Biden is no longer the same person who won the White House in 2020 and said he should drop his bid for re-election.
Clooney co-hosted a star-studded fundraiser for Biden in Los Angeles in June, about two weeks before the 81-year-old president struggled through a debate with Republican former President Donald Trump, his rival in the Nov. 5 election.
“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 wrote in the New York Times. “He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the 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,” Clooney added.
A subsequent Biden interview with ABC journalist George Stephanopoulos “only reinforced what we saw the week before,” Clooney said.
Often described as an “ATM for Democrats,” Hollywood has traditionally been a significant source of donations for the party. Clooney’s event, hosted with actor Julia Roberts, raised more than $30 million in what the Biden campaign said was the largest Democratic fundraiser in history.
After Biden’s debate performance, several Hollywood donors called on the president to end his campaign.
Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings, Disney heir Abigail Disney and filmmaker Rob Reiner are among those who have said Biden should step aside. Screenwriter Damon Lindelof proposed that his Hollywood colleagues stop writing checks to Democrats until Biden withdraws. — Reuters
