Actor George Clooney, who hosted a high-profile fundraiser for President Joe Biden’s campaign last month, on Wednesday said the Biden he saw at the fundraiser was the same frail man the nation witnessed during the June 27 debate with presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump.
"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—king 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 wrote Wednesday in a New York Times op-ed.
"We are not going to win in November with this president," Clooney continued. "We can put our heads in the sand and pray for a miracle in November, or we can speak the truth."
Concerns about Biden’s mental capabilities surfaced after Clooney’s star-studded fundraiser for Biden’s campaign on June 15, as videos spread across the internet showing former president Barack Obama leading Biden off stage after the octogenarian appeared to freeze.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre dismissed the videos as "cheap fakes" and "manipulated."
The 81-year-old president fared poorly in his debate against Trump two weeks later but blamed his shaky performance on exhaustion that stemmed from "a really bad cold."
"Was he tired? Yes. A cold? Maybe," Clooney said. "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."
Since the debate, nearly a dozen House Democrats have demanded Biden exit the presidential race, yet Biden has remained defiant, urging congressional Democrats in a letter on Monday to rally behind him and "move forward as a unified party."
Clooney offered no disclosure of Biden’s weakened condition after the event, and now proposes a rapid-fire primary to replace Biden, but urges that it be free from "opposition research" or any other negative information that would reveal the actual qualifications of the Democratic Party’s hypothetical alternate candidate.