George Clooney Calls on Biden to Withdraw: “The Dam Has Broken”

Academy Award–winning actor George Clooney on Wednesday joined the growing chorus of voices calling for Joe Biden to drop out of the presidential race. 

Since Biden’s disastrous appearance at CNN’s presidential debate last month, many have urged him to demonstrate that his halting, confused performance was not indicative of his mental acuity. 

But in an op-ed for The New York Times, Clooney confirmed that things are exactly as bad as everyone feared. 

“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,” wrote Clooney, referring to a fundraiser he co-hosted for Biden last month, which raised $28 million for the president’s campaign, per Variety. “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. We’re all so terrified by the prospect of a second Trump term that we’ve opted to ignore every warning sign,” he wrote. 

“We are not going to win in November with this president. On top of that, we won’t win the House, and we’re going to lose the Senate,” Clooney said. “This isn’t only my opinion; this is the opinion of every senator and congress member and governor that I’ve spoken with in private. Every single one, irrespective of what he or she is saying publicly.

“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,” he wrote. “We can put our heads in the sand and pray for a miracle in November, or we can speak the truth.”

Clooney concluded that “Joe Biden is a hero; he saved democracy in 2020. We need him to do it again in 2024.”

Although a staunch Democratic supporter and donor, this isn’t the first time Clooney has broken with Biden. In May, the actor and director called a top aide at the White House to voice his opposition to Biden’s denunciation of the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant for Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. One anonymous source told The Washington Post that Clooney was concerned that sanctions on the ICC would penalize his wife, Amal Clooney, who worked on the case. 

Biden has previously relied on celebrity spokespeople, such as Robert DeNiro, to help him set the stakes for his fight against Trump. Should Clooney’s dissent spark a wave of calls from high-profile public figures to drop out, public opinion of the president could nosedive even further.