Oscar winner opens up on decision to turn on former president
George Clooney is opening up on the moment he concluded Joe Biden was no longer the Democrats’ best pick for president.
“I saw him for hours a year earlier at the Kennedy Center, and I saw someone much less sharp” during that event, Clooney said. “I’ve always liked Joe Biden, and I like him still.”
After Biden’s disastrous debate against President Donald Trump, Clooney wrote a New York Times opinion piece urging the then-leader to drop his re-election bid.
“We are not going to win in November with this president,” he said, bluntly.
“I love Joe Biden. As a senator. As a vice president and as president. I consider him a friend, and I believe in him. Believe in his character. Believe in his morals. In the last four years, he’s won many of the battles he’s faced,” Clooney wrote.
“But the one battle he cannot win is the fight against time. None of us can. 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. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate.”
Clooney told Dowd he wrote the op-ed “despite being urged not to.”
After Biden stepped down and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to take his place at the top of the Democratic ticket, Clooney backed the party’s new candidate. But in his conversation with Dowd, Clooney said that Trump won over voters because of Biden’s poor messaging.
“The Biden administration was terrible at explaining that we’re a world economy, where we were actually doing better than all the other G7 countries. They were bad at telling the story because their messenger was not working at his best, to say the least,” he said.
“Donald Trump pays $100,000-a-year to the Screen Actors Guild and has a star on Hollywood Boulevard. I don’t have a star on Hollywood Boulevard, but Donald Trump does,” he said.
Clooney also bashed Trump’s onetime chief strategist Steve Bannon, calling him “a failed f***ing screenwriter.”
But in his recent sit-down with Dowd, Clooney lobbed several jabs back at Trump. “No rules count anymore,” Clooney said of Trump’s first days back in office. “It’s like letting an infant walk across the 405 freeway in the middle of the afternoon.”
“We’ve got to hope that he can have that Scrooge night where he wakes up and there are some ghosts of Christmas there that say, ‘There’s some good things you can do for people,’” he said.