President Joe Biden got out of bed the day after the 2024 election convinced that he had been wronged. The élites, the Democratic officials, the media, Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama—they shouldn’t have pushed him out of the race. If he had stayed in, he would have beaten Donald Trump. That’s what the polls suggested, he would say again and again.
His pollsters told us that no such polls existed. There was no credible data, they said, to support the notion that he would have won. All unspun information suggested it would have been a loss, likely a spectacular one, far worse than that suffered by his replacement as the Democratic nominee, Vice-President Kamala Harris.
The disconnect between Biden’s optimism and the unhappy reality of poll results was a constant throughout his Administration. Many insiders sensed that his inner circle shielded him from bad news. It’s also true that, for Biden to absorb those poll results, he would have had to face the biggest issue driving them: the public had concluded—long before most Democratic officials, media, and other “élites” had—that he was far too old to do the job.
“We got so screwed by Biden, as a party,” David Plouffe, who helped run the Harris campaign, told us. Plouffe had served as Senator Barack Obama’s Presidential campaign manager in 2008 and as a senior adviser to President Obama before largely retiring from politics in 2013. After Biden dropped out of the race, on July 21, 2024, Plouffe was drafted to help Harris in what he saw as a “rescue mission.” Harris, he said, was a “great soldier,” but the compressed hundred-and-seven-day race was “a fucking nightmare.”
“And it’s all Biden,” Plouffe said. By deciding to run for reëlection and then waiting more than three weeks after the debate to bow out, Plouffe added, “He totally fucked us.”
The real issue wasn’t his age, per se. It was the clear limitations of his abilities, which got worse throughout his Presidency. What the public saw of his functioning was concerning. What was going on in private was worse. While Biden on a day-in, day-out basis could certainly make decisions and assert wisdom and act as President, there were several significant issues that complicated his Presidency: a limit to the hours in which he could reliably function and an increasing number of moments when he seemed to freeze up, lose his train of thought, forget the names of top aides, or momentarily not remember friends he’d known for decades. Not to mention impairments to his ability to communicate—ones unrelated to his lifelong stutter.
It wasn’t a straight line of decline; he had good days and bad. But, until the last day of his Presidency, Biden and those closest to him refused to admit the reality that his energy, cognitive skills, and communication capacity had faltered considerably. Even worse, through various means, they tried to hide it. And then came the June 27th debate against Trump, when Biden’s decline was laid bare before the world. As a result, Democrats stumbled into the fall of 2024 with an untested nominee and growing public mistrust of a White House that had been gaslighting the American people.
“It was an abomination,” one prominent Democratic strategist—who publicly defended Biden—told us. “He stole an election from the Democratic Party. He stole it from the American people.” Biden had framed his entire Presidency as a pitched battle to prevent Trump from returning to the Oval Office. By not relinquishing power and refusing to be honest with himself and the country about his decline, he guaranteed it.
George Clooney first met Joe Biden, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in New York City after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, but their first meaningful conversation came after the actor became a credible voice advocating against the genocide in Darfur.
Fresh off winning the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for “Syriana,” in 2006, Clooney began reading reports that government-aligned forces under Sudan’s President, Omar al-Bashir, were killing innocent civilians in the Darfur region of the country. It felt like a calling. He sought to travel there with a national TV network, but conditions grew so dangerous that the journalists dropped out. George and his father, Nick, a former TV anchorman who was then seventy-two, flew to southern Sudan in April, 2006, and sneaked into Darfur with a camera crew. After battling nine days of brutal heat, zero security, and rough nights in mud huts, the Clooneys returned to the U.S. in time for a rally organized by the Save Darfur Coalition on the National Mall, where other speakers included then Senator Barack Obama. A few months later, Clooney testified before the U.N. Security Council, and the next year the Clooneys released their documentary, “A Journey to Darfur.” He skipped the Oscars in 2009 to meet with President Obama and Vice-President Biden, delivering two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand signed Save Darfur postcards to them and pushing for a full-time envoy to the region.
By the time the 2024 Presidential race had begun, the actor had known Biden for decades and had known him well for fifteen years. He had last seen Biden on December 4, 2022, when Clooney was in D.C. with his wife, Amal, to be celebrated at the Kennedy Center Honors. Biden looked older, sure, but in the East Room of the White House, at the reception for the honorees, the President was playful and seemed cogent enough.
“We see Amal Clooney’s husband,” the President said, to laughter.
Yes, he was reading from prepared remarks, but far be it from an actor to take issue with someone reciting lines.
“Mentors—he mentors these—those historic kids from Parkland on their march and their lives—against gun violence,” Biden said, stumbling a bit. “I met with every one of those kids, and they really appreciate what you did, George. Not a joke.”
In February, 2024, Clooney had thought the special counsel Robert Hur’s report, which called Biden an “elderly man with a poor memory,” mean-spirited. And, when Biden gave a rousing State of the Union address in March, Clooney thought, Way to go, Mr. President. He had helped him get elected in 2020 and was happy to do so again.
For the rematch in 2024, everyone involved with the campaign knew that beating Trump would be difficult—and would require a record-breaking amount of money. The Hollywood mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg led the charge on that front. He had been helping the Democratic Party with resources—money and connections—since the early eighties, when he was an executive at Paramount Pictures and a student of the leadership of the legendary businessman Lew Wasserman. He’d backed some members of Congress, but Katzenberg’s first real foray into the world of big-donor politics came when he and David Geffen flew to Arkansas, in 1990, to meet a young governor named Bill Clinton. Since then, Katzenberg had become a top fund-raiser for Democratic Presidential candidates.
Katzenberg had known Biden since the late nineteen-eighties and was on board with his Presidential run as early as October, 2018, when he hosted a meet and greet for the former Vice-President at his Wilshire office, after which the two men dined at Madeo, in West Hollywood. Katzenberg told him that he would support Biden’s campaign, that he thought him best positioned to beat Trump. I don’t want anything from you, he told Biden. I might be the only one who doesn’t. I just want you to win.
Biden did, in 2020, and in the process Katzenberg became more than a donor. As 2024 approached, he saw Biden’s communication struggles and thought he could help fix them. He worked on providing better lighting for Biden and trying to find a microphone that would amplify Biden when he would break into a whisper for emphasis. Katzenberg also recruited his friend Steven Spielberg, who helped coach Biden for the State of the Union and his debates, even assisting with routine campaign videos. There was, however, only so much that Hollywood magic could do.
When it came time for the reëlection campaign, Katzenberg worked on a spectacularly successful March fund-raiser, held at Radio City Music Hall, featuring Obama, Biden, and Bill Clinton. It raised twenty-six million dollars—according to the campaign, the most ever raised at a single event for a Democratic Presidential candidate. In the spring, he and top campaign aides discussed when they could bring Biden out to California. Katzenberg told the campaign that he wanted to try to hit another record number.
Katzenberg and Clooney were pals, and they had a long, successful track record of doing these events: they had broken records for Obama with a nearly fifteen-million-dollar event at Clooney’s Studio City home, in May, 2012; organized two events for Hillary Clinton, in 2016; and raked in more than seven million dollars with a July, 2020, Zoom fund-raiser in which Obama stumped for Biden.
On a rainy Easter at his home in the South of France, on the last day of March in 2024, Clooney heard from Katzenberg, who made his ask—a fund-raiser in June. Katzenberg had learned over the years that there was a cadence in terms of how many times a campaign could ask people for money. He thought that the Biden team could get another bite at the apple in the summer and then one last one on the other side of Labor Day. But Clooney was going to be in London and Tuscany in June, working with the filmmaker Noah Baumbach on “Jay Kelly,” a coming-of-age film that Baumbach had co-written with Emily Mortimer. It was a big project for Netflix, involving Clooney, Adam Sandler, and Laura Dern.
