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President Joe Biden appears to have lost another major supporter: Actor George Clooney, a longtime Democrat and prominent fundraiser for the party, has joined the chorus of calls for Biden to withdraw from the race.
In an op-ed in The New York Times on Wednesday, Clooney echoed the remarks of the Democratic lawmakers who have urged Biden to step down from the ticket. Clooney praised the president and his character, but said that he was simply too old to run in an election with such high stakes.
“I love Joe Biden. As a senator. As a vice president and as president. I consider him a friend, and I believe in him. ... 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.”
Clooney wrote in dire terms about his belief in Biden's chances in the election:
We love to talk about how the Republican Party has ceded all power, and all of the traits that made it so formidable with Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, to a single person who seeks to hold on to the presidency, and yet most of our members of Congress are opting to wait and see if the dam breaks. But the dam has broken. We can put our heads in the sand and pray for a miracle in November, or we can speak the truth.
Clooney did not call for Vice President Kamala Harris to take over the top of the ticket as some lawmakers have. Instead, Democrats seen as potential successors — including Harris — should make the case for themselves, he suggested, “Then we could go into the Democratic convention next month and figure it out.”
The actor’s op-ed comes amid serious disarray among congressional Democrats about Biden’s insistence on running in the election and how that could affect down-ballot races. It also comes just weeks after Clooney hosted a star-studded fundraiser with Biden’s campaign in Los Angeles, raising almost $30 million for the president’s re-election bid. (Biden had flown from Europe to Los Angeles for the event, and he said his intense travel schedule in the weeks leading up to the debate contributed to his exhaustion and poor performance.)
Clooney is a Hollywood powerhouse in Democratic politics, raising significant amounts of money for liberal causes and Democratic candidates. He supported Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, and Hillary Clinton in 2016. He also supported Biden's 2020 campaign — and, until Wednesday, his 2024 campaign.
Clooney himself had previously ruled out a career in politics. In 2021, when asked by the BBC if he would ever consider running for office, he said, “No, because I would actually like to have a nice life.”