It was June 2024 when then-President Joe Biden saw George Clooney at a Hollywood fundraiser co-hosted by the Academy Award winner and longtime acquaintance. But Biden didn’t recognize him, even when they were talking face to face, according to a new book.
The “Good Night and Good Luck” star was taken aback at how “diminished” the president seemed at the event, CNN anchor Jake Tapper and Axios reporter Alex Thompson write in “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again.” NBC News on Tuesday obtained a copy of the book, which goes on sale next week.
“Biden hobbled out from around the corner. Clooney knew the president had just arrived from the G7 Leaders’ Summit in Apulia, Italy, that morning and might be tired, but hooooooooooly s—, he wasn’t expecting this,” the book says.
“The president appeared severely diminished, as if he’d aged a decade since Clooney last saw him in December 2022. He was taking tiny steps and had an aide guiding him by his arm,” the book says.
Clooney attempted to make small talk with the president, who did not appear to recognize him and gave him curt answers. The aide then told Biden, “George Clooney.”
“Oh, yeah!” Biden said, according to book. “Hi, George!”
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Former President Barack Obama was at the fundraiser too, and “didn’t know what to make of how his former running mate was acting. At one point, in a small group of a few dozen top donors, Biden began speaking — barely audibly — and trailed off incoherently. Obama had to jump in and preside,” the book says. “At other moments during photos, Obama would hop in and finish sentences for him. The former president decided that the fault lay with Biden’s busy schedule.”
Clooney, a major Democratic fundraiser, called for the 81-year-old candidate to step aside after his disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump in late June, after the fundraiser. “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,” Clooney wrote in an op-ed for The New York Times. “He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate.”
The book said Clooney reached out to Obama to tell him that he was planning to write the op-ed, and that Obama told him it would only make Biden dig in his heels deeper.
A spokesperson for Biden said, “We have not reviewed the book, and the authors did not fact-check the book with us, despite it being a common practice to do so. So we are not going to respond to every bit of this book they choose to release via select leaks in the reporters’ efforts to make a profit.”
“We continue to await anything that shows where Joe Biden had to make a presidential decision or where national security was threatened or where he was unable to do his job. In fact, the evidence points to the opposite — he was a very effective president,” the spokesperson added.
A separate Biden-Harris campaign official wouldn’t comment on the specifics outlined in the book excerpts, but said: “We were always going to lose no matter what because of anti-incumbent headwinds.”
The book also said that despite their public pronouncements that Biden was fine mentally and physically, his team was concerned about his health — and discussed having him use a wheelchair if he were elected to a second term.
It also says that White House physician Kevin O’Connor often argued with Biden’s aides to reduce his schedule.
“He wasn’t naive to the stresses of the presidency, and he privately expressed worry about the toll it was taking. He fought other Biden officials on scheduling to try to get Biden more rest,” the authors wrote. “O’Connor quipped that Biden’s staff were trying to kill him, while O’Connor was trying to keep him alive.”
