Actor George Clooney said that his decision calling for then-President Joe Biden to drop out of the 2024 presidential campaign was based on his sense of “civic duty.”
“I don’t know if it was brave,” Clooney told CNN’s Jake Tapper in a preview of his The Lead interview airing Wednesday. “It was a civic duty. Because I found that people on my side of the street — and I’m a Democrat from Kentucky so I get it — when I saw people on my side of the street not telling the truth, I thought it was time.”
“Are people still mad at you for that?” Tapper asked the Hollywood star.
“Some people, sure,” Clooney replied.
Following Biden’s poor debate performance on June 27, many Democrats urged their party members not to overreact. There were others, however, who pleaded with the incumbent president to step aside and let a new, younger face carry the party forward. Clooney was one of them, writing a July 10 op-ed in the New York Times titled “I Love Joe Biden. But We Need a New Nominee.”
“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,” Clooney wrote at the time. “We’re all so terrified by the prospect of a second Trump term that we’ve opted to ignore every warning sign.”
Clooney is one of Hollywood’s most famous Democratic supporters and even hosted a fundraiser for Biden weeks before the debate.
HARRIS FACES POLITICAL WILDERNESS AFTER HISTORIC LOSS LEAVES HER PARTY ‘IN TATTERS’
Fewer than two weeks after Clooney’s op-ed was published, Biden dropped out of the presidential race on July 21, endorsing his then-vice president, Kamala Harris, to take his place. She would go on to win the Democratic nomination but lose the general election to President Donald Trump.
Other Democrats, many of whom had much more sway in Washington, D.C., than Clooney, such as former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), were seen as having privately pushed Biden to drop out of the race.