Hollywood actor and longtime Democratic fundraiser George Clooney is speaking out about his public call for President Joe Biden to step down from the 2024 presidential race, describing the move as “a civic duty” driven by principle, not politics.
In a new interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, Clooney reflected on the moment he broke with the party’s aging head. “When I saw people on my side of the street not telling the truth, I thought that was time,” Clooney said. “It was a civic duty.”
Clooney’s remarks come months after his bombshell New York Times op-ed, in which he urged Biden to withdraw from the race following his widely criticized debate performance against Donald Trump. That essay sparked national headlines — and serious ripples throughout the Democratic Party.
Though Clooney had raised more than $30 million for Biden’s re-election campaign at a glitzy California fundraiser just weeks earlier, he wrote in the Times that the Biden he saw that night was not the dynamic, sharp-witted statesman he once knew.
“The Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fundraiser was not the Joe ‘big F-ing deal’ Biden of 2010. He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020,” Clooney wrote. “He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate.”
Clooney emphasized that his critique wasn’t about abandoning the president’s record, which he praised in both the op-ed and on-air. “In the last four years, he’s won many of the battles he’s faced,” he wrote. “But the one battle he cannot win is the fight against time.”
Biden eventually announced his withdrawal from the 2024 race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, who went on to secure the Democratic nomination.
In his CNN interview, Clooney acknowledged the backlash he’s faced — including from fellow Democrats and longtime allies — but defended his right to speak out.
“You can’t demand freedom of speech and then say, ‘But don’t say bad things about me,’” Clooney said. “Take a stance, stand for it, and then deal with the consequences. That’s the rules.”
The backlash Clooney has faced also seems to stem from a belief that the president could have defeated Trump had he stayed in the race, arguing that Biden had already beaten Trump once. However, internal Democratic polling told a different story, showing Biden trailing Trump by even larger margins than Harris did, handing Trump a 400 electoral vote victory.
The episode has reignited broader conversations within the Democratic Party about age, leadership, and transparency — conversations that Clooney, by his own admission, hopes continue. “If we want to restore trust, we have to be honest, even when it’s uncomfortable,” he said.
Some critics have called out Clooney’s tone of “civic duty” as self-righteous and revisionist, arguing that Biden’s cognitive decline had been evident for years, but came to a head during the debate. For these observers, the debate was not a sudden revelation, but the inescapable crescendo of a long, uncomfortable pattern that party insiders like Clooney had long ignored or downplayed until it was no longer politically viable.
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