Hollywood and Media Personalities United in Calls for Biden to Drop Out

While Democrats on Capitol Hill deliberate over whether or not to back Joe Biden for president following his catastrophic debate performance, celebrities, newscasters, and long-time Democrat donors appear united in their calls for the 81-year-old incumbent to drop out of the race for the White House.

Less than a month ago, movie star George Clooney hosted a swanky Hollywood fundraiser for Biden but is now calling on him to stop campaigning. In a New York Times op-ed on Wednesday, Clooney boasted of hosting “the single largest fund-raiser supporting any Democratic candidate ever for President Biden’s re-election.” The “Ocean’s 11” star praised Biden’s political career, claiming, “In the last four years, he’s won many of the battles he’s faced.” Clooney continued, “But the one battle he cannot win is the fight against time. None of us can.”

“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,” Clooney wrote. “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.”

To his credit, Clooney’s chief argument was against hypocrisy. While he claimed that the Republican Party “has ceded all power” to former President Donald Trump, a man whom Clooney said “seeks to hold on to the presidency,” he noted that Democrats are in danger of doing the same by backing Biden. “It is disingenuous, at best, to argue that Democrats have already spoken with their vote and therefore the nomination is settled and done, when we just received new and upsetting information,” the movie star wrote. “We all think Republicans should abandon their nominee now that he’s been convicted of 34 felonies. That’s new and upsetting information as well.”

“This is about age. Nothing more. But also nothing that can be reversed. 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 argued. He reported that every elected Democrat he’s spoken to, “irrespective of what he or she is saying publicly,” has told him that Biden cannot run the country for another four years. Clooney called on Biden to retire his campaign and suggested that Democratic Party leadership need to unite in a bid to pressure the president to retire. He concluded, “Joe Biden is a hero; he saved democracy in 2020. We need him to do it again in 2024.”

Fellow actor Michael Douglas, who once played a fictionally idealized Democratic president in “The American President,” also recommended that Biden step aside and allow some other Democrat to run against Trump. Appearing on “The View” on Wednesday, Douglas was asked, as a “long-time Biden supporter,” whether the president should drop out of the race. “This is such a tough one,” the “Wall Street” actor lamented. He continued, “I adore the guy. Fifty years of public service, such a wonderful guy, and this just happens to be one of these elections that is just so crucial and it’s really hard. I don’t worry necessarily today or tomorrow, but a year down the line I worry. I am concerned.” Douglas noted that the Democratic Party has “a big bench” and “a lot of heavy hitters” who could replace Biden at the top of the Party’s ticket.

Filmmaker Rob Reiner, who directed Douglas in “The American President,” sided with the two actors. “My friend George Clooney has clearly expressed what many of us have been saying,” Reiner wrote on social media. Sharing a link to Clooney’s op-ed, he continued, “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.”

Author Stephen King, a long-time enemy of Trump, also called on Biden to step aside. “Joe Biden has been a fine president, but it’s time for him — in the interests of the America he so clearly loves — to announce he will not run for re-election,” he wrote on social media.

Hollywood isn’t the only heavily-left-wing field worried about Biden’s cognitive decline. On Tuesday, NBC News’s former White House correspondent and current chief political analyst Chuck Todd claimed that the president’s deteriorating mental state has been an “open secret” for years. On his podcast, Todd reported that one of Biden’s cabinet secretaries told him in 2022 that the president cannot run for reelection. “I’m not gonna out the cabinet secretary, right? But I had a cabinet secretary two years ago … all out of the blue ask me, ‘Do you really think he’s gonna? He can’t run again like this,’” Todd recounted. “This is a pretty senior cabinet secretary. And this was two years ago.”

“This is one of those, you know, it’s the classic open secret, a non-versation, right? It’s the story everybody knows and … everybody was afraid to talk about,” Todd continued. “It looks like they’re putting, essentially, party over country — and for what? They cannot, I mean, there is no evidence — this is irresponsible. There is no evidence he can serve four years.”

Todd also pointed to recent reports that a Parkinson’s specialist, neurologist James Cannard, has visited the White House at least eight times in the past year. While White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre initially suggested that Cannard was visiting military personnel who work at the White House, she admitted just hours later that Biden has been assessed by Cannard on at least three occasions, the latest as recently as January. “This White House had to — they had to drag it out of him that they’ve had this neurological test,” Todd commented. “If he had it, he should have been at the Stephanopoulos interview: ‘Here you go, George, here it is, here it is. I know people have been asking for it. Look, I did it in February. It’s clear, you know, it’s all fine. Here it is.’”

Former White House physician and current Congressman Ronny Jackson (R-Texas) has also suggested that Biden is suffering from either Perkinson’s or dementia. “Everyone has had a relative that’s gone through this, and everyone you talk to is like, ‘I know exactly what that is. I had an aunt and uncle [and] a grandparent that went through this process. You know, that’s Alzheimer’s. That’s dementia of some sort. That’s Parkinson’s. That’s multi-infarct dementia,” Jackson said. “He’s not fit to be president. He’s not fit to be commander-in-chief and head of state, and everybody can see it. You don’t have to be a doctor to see it, but, yeah, slurring his speech, you know, shuffling when he walks.”

On Monday, neurologist Tom Pitts told NBC News Now that Biden “definitely” has Parkinson’s. Pitts, who has never assessed Biden personally but based his assessment on videos of the president, said that Biden “has the classic features of neurodegeneration, word-finding difficulties. And that’s not, ‘Oh, I couldn’t find the word,’ that’s from degeneration of the word retrieval area.” Pointing to Biden’s “low voice” in last month’s debate, Pitts said, “He said it was a cold. Hypophonia, a small monotone voice over time is a hallmark of Parkinson’s. I could have diagnosed him from across the mall.” Following the airing of that segment and the White House’s admission that Biden has been assessed by a Parkinson’s specialist, NBC News announced that the president has agreed to an interview on Monday with anchor Lester Holt.

Other concerns have been raised by Biden biographer Chris Whipple, author of “The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House.” Whipple reported on Wednesday, “I can tell you, having written a book about it, that this White House is the most battened-down, buttoned-up, scripted White House in modern history.” Although ostensibly serving as Biden’s biographer, Whipple revealed that the White House would not allow him to interview the president directly. “While I was able to interview in real time almost all of Joe Biden’s inner circle, when it came to Biden himself, the deal was written answers to written questions. I’d never heard of that before,” the author stated. He observed, “You can look at it two ways: this is obviously a White House with — either with something to hide or just obsessed with controlling the narrative.”

“I will tell you that one of the president’s closest friends thinks that Joe Biden should go up to Walter Reed, have a complete neurological exam, release the results, and let the chips fall,” Whipple continued, without revealing that close friend’s identity. “Now, I don’t think that friend has said this out loud to Joe Biden because that’s a hard thing, even for a close friend, to tell him. But I don’t think [Biden is] going there without a major push.”

While Hollywood celebrities and news media pundits have made it clear that they want Biden to retire his White House campaign, elected Democrats are less certain. While some have called for the president not to run for reelection, a number of prominent Democrats — including Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and Squad members Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.) and Rep. Ilhan Omar (Minn.) — have publicly and even repeatedly endorsed the 81-year-old incumbent.