Shocking new book reveals Biden’s decline: He failed to recognize George Clooney

Actor George Clooney surprised leaders of the Democratic Party last summer when he published an op-ed in the New York Times calling on President Joe Biden to step aside and allow another candidate to represent the party on the November ticket.

Clooney’s piece came out on July 10, just over two weeks after Biden’s catastrophic debate performance with President Donald Trump. Throughout the Biden presidency, accusations that the president was unfit to serve were cast aside as ageist, but the debate made it impossible for the campaign to ignore the legitimacy of these growing concerns.

Now, almost a year later, CNN’s Jake Tapper has co-authored a book with Axios’ Alex Thompson on failures of the Biden campaign in 2024, which includes background on Clooney’s decision to write the op-ed just weeks after having hosted a major fundraiser for the party. The book is titled “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again,” and will be released on May 20, 2025.

For decades, Clooney has used his platform as an A-list celebrity to support progressive policies and Democratic leaders. Two weeks before the debate, Clooney ran into Joe Biden, whom he says did not recognize him. Clooney and others present for the incident who spoke with Tapper and Thompson say that an aide had to tell Biden it was George Clooney in front of him. After the debate performance and the response from Biden’s inner circle that it was a fluke, Clooney felt he had to come forward with his concerns, because his own interactions with the president contradicted the narrative that Biden had one bad night.

Why did George Clooney publish the op-ed?

Was it worse to threaten the party’s chances by speaking out, or was it a greater risk to say nothing? In the end, Clooney published his op-ed, telling Tapper, “it was a civic duty” because he was so alarmed that people who share many of his political beliefs “were not telling the truth.”

In the piece, Clooney underscored the severity of the situation, stating that with Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket, the party was “not going to win in November,” and that the party wouldn’t stand a chance of garnering a majority in either chamber of Congress. In the end, Democrats lost on all three counts, but in retrospect, few blame Clooney for those losses.

Tapper reports that other Democratic leaders, including former President Barack Obama and other donors, were alarmed by what they saw at the June fundraiser. These concerns were mentioned by the actor, who said that “every senator and Congress member and governor who [he’d] spoken with in private,” had expressed concerns over the fitness of Joe Biden, even if they made public-facing comments in support of the president.

As the retrospectives on the 2024 campaign begin to emerge, it is clear that a new narrative is forming. The Democratic Party attempted to walk a fine line after Vice President Kamala Harris was passed the mantle, not admitting that it was a mistake for President Biden to seek another term, while accepting that it was the right decision for him to step aside. There is a growing consensus within the party that Biden shouldn’t have run again, allowing the primary process to select a candidate who would have had more time to build a national profile that wasn’t so strongly tied to the Biden administration.

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