George Clooney has joined a growing number of stars who have started to tell President Joe Biden it’s time to drop out of the race following the president’s disastrous debate.
In a lengthy editorial in The New York Times, the 63-year-old actor lists the reasons Biden needs to drop out of the 2024 election and allow someone else to run for the Democratic Party after Biden struggled, rambled, and froze numerous times during the CNN Presidential Debate against former President Donald Trump.
“I love Joe Biden,” Clooney, who hosted a star-studded fundraiser in Hollywood for Biden in June, wrote. “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.”
“But the one battle he cannot win is the fight against time. None of us can,” he added.“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. He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate.”
George Clooney urges Joe Biden to step down as the 2024 Democratic nominee for president in a new op-ed:
“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. This isn’t only my opinion; this is the… pic.twitter.com/EArMreTtMk
— Variety (@Variety) July 10, 2024
“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,” Clooney continued. “We’re all so terrified by the prospect of a second Trump term that we’ve opted to ignore every warning sign,”
The Hollywood star said it is fair to point this out and said it’s “about age. Nothing more. But also nothing that can be reversed.”
“We are not going to win in November with this president,” the actor wrote. “On top of that, we won’t win the House, and we’re going to lose the Senate…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 added.“We can put our heads in the sand and pray for a miracle in November, or we can speak the truth.”
At one point, Clooney also called on top Democrats to “ask this president to voluntarily step aside.”
“Would it be messy? Yes. Democracy is messy,” Clooney wrote. “But would it enliven our party and wake up voters who, long before the June debate, had already checked out? It sure would…Biden, is a hero; he saved democracy in 2020. We need him to do it again in 2024.”
Rob Reiner, who has called for Biden to step down, posted the Times piece and wrote on X, “My friend George Clooney has clearly expressed what many of us have been saying. We love and respect Joe Biden. We acknowledge all he has done for our country. But Democracy is facing an existential threat. We need someone younger to fight back. Joe Biden must step aside. “