When Joe Biden arrived at a heavily promoted, record-breaking fundraiser in Los Angeles last year, he didn’t appear to recognize one of the star co-hosts of the event: George Clooney.
The moment was detailed in Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s new book, Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, to be published next week.
In an excerpt in The New Yorker, Tapper and Thompson detail the scene at a pre-fundraiser clutch, as Clooney and Julia Roberts, another co-host, entertained high-dollar donors while waiting for Biden to arrive.
They write that the President said “thank you for being here” to guests as he shuffled past them. “Clooney felt a knot form in his stomach as the President approached him. Biden looked at him. ‘Thank you for being here,’ he said. ‘Thank you for being here.’”
“‘You know George,’ the assisting aide told the President, gently reminding him who was in front of him. ‘Yeah, yeah,’ the President said to one of the most recognizable men in the world, the host of this lucrative fund-raiser. ‘Thank you for being here.’”
An aide, they wrote, clarified to the president that it was Clooney, who he had known for decades.
They wrote that Biden said, “Oh, yeah! Hi, George!”
They added, “Clooney was shaken to his core. The President hadn’t recognized him, a man he had known for years. Clooney had expressed concern about Biden’s health before—a White House aide had told him a few months before that they were working on getting the President to take longer steps when he walked—but obviously the problem went far beyond his gait. This was much graver.”
The event was a success, raising more than $30 million for Democrats, a record sum.
But in the following days, the White House pushed back against reports of Biden’s cognitive state, even though he had been on a heavy schedule of international travel. The featured attraction at the event was a conversation between Biden, Barack Obama and Jimmy Kimmel. But after that ended and the audience cheered, Biden stood on the stage and peered at the audience. Obama took Biden’s arm and directed him off the stage. The White House pushed back against some reporting by outlets on the right as spreading “cheap fake” videos, but Biden’s disastrous debate performance later in the month convinced Clooney and other Democrats that his campaign was not sustainable.
The next month, Clooney published his op ed urging Biden to withdraw from the race. Jeffrey Katzenberg, who was serving as co-chair of Biden’s campaign, took issue with Clooney’s assessment and doubted that the op ed would have the desired effect, Tapper and Thompson wrote.
A couple of weeks later, Biden dropped out of the race.
Biden and his wife, Jill Biden, appeared on ABC’s The View last week in advance of the book’s publication.
“They are wrong. There is nothing to sustain that,” the former president said when asked about claims that his cognitive ability was in decline in his final year.
Jill Biden said, “The people who wrote those books were not in the White House with us, and they didn’t see how hard Joe worked every single day…If you look at things today, give me Joe Biden anytime.”
