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At a June 2024 fundraiser for the Biden presidential campaign, Joe Biden did not recognize longtime friend George Clooney.
In the new book “Original Sin,” excerpted in The New Yorker, CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’ Alex Thompson tell the story of the Biden White House’s ultimately failed attempt to control the story around his advanced age and his faculties. As the story indeed broke open following the disastrous June 27, 2024 debate between Biden and Donald Trump, Clooney’s July 10 New York Times op-ed calling for Biden to quit the race was a milestone in how bluntly it described the president’s decline.
Tapper and Thompson note that, before the fundraiser, Clooney and Biden had last met in 2022 at the Kennedy Center Honors, where the President called the actor “Amal Clooney’s husband” and thanked him for his activism. By contrast, in 2024, Biden was reportedly unaware of with whom he was speaking until prompted that it was George Clooney.
Tapper and Thompson write: “Clooney was shaken to his core. The president hadn’t recognized him, a man he had known for years. Clooney had expressed concern about Biden’s health before — a White House aide had told him a few months before that they were working on getting the president to take longer steps when he walked — but obviously the problem went far beyond his gait. This was much graver.”
Clooney, with Julia Roberts, was headlining the fundraiser, which ginned up at least $28 million but at which, the authors write, Biden was seen as “slow and almost catatonic” with “obvious brain freezes and clear signs of a mental slide.” After a group interview between Biden, Jimmy Kimmel and Barack Obama, Kimmel and Obama began to walk offstage, but Biden made headlines for wandering to the edge of the stage alone.
Tapper and Thompson also report that, ahead of Clooney’s op-ed, the actor received word from Senator Joe Manchin that Democratic senators, as a group, “were planning to confront Biden, to try to convince him to step aside.” Following a defiant July 8 letter in which Biden declared that attempts to push him aside were subverting democracy, Clooney, disgusted, reached out to Obama, who advised against, as “doing so would only make Biden dig in deeper.” After writing the op-ed, Clooney sent it to media mogul and Democratic megadonor Jeffrey Katzenberg, who had attended sessions of Biden’s debate prep. “Your process is not the correct one to get the end you desire, [Katzenberg] told Clooney. He really wanted Clooney to cut the line about the befogged Biden at the fundraiser being ‘the same man we all witnessed at the debate.'”
Clooney ignored him, and the Times published his op-ed on July 10, less than two weeks after the debate. Eleven days after that, Biden left the presidential race.
“Original Sin,” published by Penguin Press, will be available May 20.
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