George Clooney’s op-ed in the New York Times calling on Joe Biden to go was “ruthless,” according to Piers Morgan.
Weeks after he attended a star-studded fundraiser for President Biden at which $28 million was raised for his campaign, Clooney became one of the first people to call on the 81-year-old president to end his reelection campaign, after his disastrous debate performance in which he appeared to slur his words and lose his train of thought.
“It’s devastating to say it, but the Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fundraiser was not the Joe ‘big F—ing deal’ Biden of 2010,” Clooney wrote in a New York Times op-ed in July titled I Love Joe Biden. But We Need a New Nominee.
“He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate.”
President Joe Biden shakes hands with Hollywood star George Clooney during the Kennedy Center honorees reception at the White House in Washington, Dec. 4, 2022. Clooney publicly called for Biden to end his reelection campaign.
President Joe Biden shakes hands with Hollywood star George Clooney during the Kennedy Center honorees reception at the White House in Washington, Dec. 4, 2022. Clooney publicly called for Biden to end his reelection campaign.
Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP
Just 11 days later, Biden stepped down as the Democratic candidate for president, making his vice president Kamala Harris the nominee.
Since then, the Democrats have seen a substantial rise in the polls, with Harris now leading her opponent nationally by 3 points, and leading him in 6 of the 7 swing states—a far cry from Biden’s weak position in the polls.
However, for British TV host and former journalist Piers Morgan, Clooney’s words about his friend and ally were “brutal.”
“For Clooney, a lifelong Democrat and major party donor, to turn on his friend in such a brutal manner was extraordinary and must have been so personally hurtful to Biden given their decadeslong relationship,” Morgan wrote in an op-ed in the New York Post.
“What he did to Biden was a political hit job of the most ruthless kind.
“After all, what kind of friend takes you down in such spectacular fashion just weeks after lavishing praise on you at a Hollywood fundraiser he’s hosting for you?”
Morgan added that he does not doubt that Clooney “believed he was acting in a principled manner, putting the party before personal relationships. Nor do I doubt he was right in his assessment.
“However, where I do have a problem with Clooney is in his shockingly cynical new effort to pretend that he wasn’t a coldblooded contract killer of the kind he played in his hit movie “The American””, Morgan added.
“He took a cold, calculating sniper aim at his friend and metaphorically sprayed him with a hail of bullets designed to leave his career as dead as a dodo.
“And he did it because he knew aged, decrepit Biden was now a washed-up electoral loser on course for a crushing defeat in the election, and he wanted the whole world to know that too.”
Newsweek has contacted Joe Biden and representatives of George Clooney for comment via email.
Following Biden’s decision to step down, Clooney praised the president.
“The person who should be applauded is the President who did the most selfless thing that anybody has done since George Washington,” he told a news conference in Italy.
“All of the machinations that got us there, none of that’s going to be remembered, and it shouldn’t be,” he continued. “What should be remembered is the selfless act of someone who did the hardest thing to do. It’s very hard to let go of power—we know that; we’ve seen it all around the world—and for someone to say, I think there’s a better way forward, all the credit goes to him, and that’s really the truth.”
The news conference was held for Clooney’s new film Wolfs, where he stars as a fixer tasked with covering up a high-profile crime—prompting Morgan to draw a parallel.
“Ironically, in George Clooney’s new movie, Wolfs, he plays a shady underworld fixer who specializes in making problems disappear, including an apparently dead body,” he wrote.
“Even more ironically, he made the Biden problem disappear by throwing him to the wolves.”
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Publish date : 2024-09-03 05:02:00
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