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Former President Joe Biden didn’t recognize one of the most famous men in America and perhaps the entire world — actor George Clooney, whom he’s known for nearly two decades — at a glitzy Hollywood fundraiser where his former running mate had to step in, a new book reports.
Biden was in a state of serious mental decline throughout the 2024 election to a point that seriously alarmed those outside of his inner circle long before his disastrous June debate with Donald Trump signaled the end of his campaign, according to first-hand accounts reported in Originan Sin by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios correspondent Alex Thompson.
His decline was evident months earlier, but family and close aides supported his run for president to the bitter end — an end Democratic A-listers like Sen. Amy Klobuchar and many others now openly say was a mistake that robbed their party of a proper primary contest last year. The former president’s stubbornness, on the side of his diminished capabilities, was present throughout, the book claims.
According to an unnamed “Hollywood VIP” who witnessed the interaction, Biden seemed a shell of his former self at the fundraiser, which took place in June of 2024. Two weeks before the debate that would herald the beginning of the end of his career, the president shuffled around a room with film industry A-listers organized by Clooney and producer Jeffrey Katzenberg, appearing “almost catatonic” and showing “clear signs of mental decline”, according to the authors’ description of attendees’ accounts.
The interactions took place on the sidelines of the Democratic Party’s biggest fundraising night of the year up until that point: a panel discussion with Biden and former President Barack Obama hosted by talk show host Jimmy Kimmel.
“It was like watching someone who was not alive,” the VIP who saw the pre-show interaction with Clooney recalled. “It was startling. And we all looked at each other. It was so awful.”
During that interaction the 46th president, who was being led around by an aide, had to be prompted to remember who Clooney was, according to the VIP’s firsthand account.
“It was not O.K.,” they recalled to the authors. “That thing, the moment where you recognize someone you know — especially a famous person who’s doing a f*****g fund-raiser for you — it was delayed. It was uncomfortable.”
“You know George,” the aide said, repeating the actor’s full name, with stress on the surname: “George Clooney.”
“Oh, yeah!” Biden reportedly responded. “Hi, George!”
The awkward moment was one of several that night which, according to the authors, spurred Clooney to pen his now-famous op-end urging Biden to drop out of the race and for the Democrats to run with a new nominee in the November election, which at the time was a little more than 100 days away.
Onstage, Biden would go on to give “downright confusing” answers, according to the authors, and once again sounded quiet and whispery — neither of which was reflected in immediate coverage of the event, which focused on the record-smashing total of $30m raised by the campaign over that Saturday and the following Sunday. His onetime running mate would often complete sentences for him or push him back on track, according to the book.
Emily Favreau, a Democratic campaign consultant and wife to Pod Save America host and Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau, told Tapper and Thompson bluntly: “I wanted to make everyone stay in this theatre and say, ‘No one is going anywhere until we have a plan, because this can’t be it.’”
An unnamed spokesperson for the former president told the authors: “No one has been able to point out where Joe Biden had to make a presidential decision or make a presidential address where he was unable to do his job because of mental decline. In fact, the evidence points to the opposite—he was a very effective president. Evidence of aging is not evidence of mental incapacity.”
Clooney was criticized sharply for speaking out, but other members of Biden’s party in elected office moved to work both behind the scenes and publicly to pressure the president to step down. He did one month later. In the end, even former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was hinting publicly that it was time for the president to step aside.
Harris would go on to lose the presidential election to Donald Trump, ushering in the second Trump presidency with a drubbing in which the vice president’s party lost every major battleground state to the Trump campaign.
David Plouffe, a longtime Democratic campaign veteran called in to rescue Harris in the wake of her running mate’s withdrawal, laid the blame entirely on the former president: “He totally f***ed us.”
English (US) ·