Hollywood elites propped up Joe Biden. Now they could destroy him

If a week is a long time in politics, 24 days is an age. On June 16, George Clooney took to the stage at the Peacock Theatre in Los Angeles as part of a star-studded bill and urged Democratic Party donors to be generous in their support of Joe Biden as he prepares for his election rematch with Donald Trump.

Clooney, 63, teamed up with his frequent on-screen partner Julia Roberts to talk about the dangers of a Trump victory; Barbra Streisand sang the praises of First Lady Jill Biden; the President and Barack Obama were interviewed on stage by comedian Jimmy Kimmel. It was a record-breaking evening, with the Democrats raising $30 million (a little over £23 million) from the great and the good of Tinseltown.

Little more than three weeks later, following Biden’s disastrous performance in a televised debate with Trump, and Clooney has abandoned his man. The Ocean’s Eleven star joined a chorus of leading progressives urging Biden to make way for a better candidate. Having enabled Biden, and turned a blind eye to some of his most obvious flaws over the past four years, Hollywood is now turning against the 81-year-old President with November’s election rapidly approaching.

“The one battle he cannot win is the fight against time. None of us can,” Clooney wrote in The New York Times. “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. He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate… Our party leaders need to stop telling us that 51 million people didn’t see what we just saw. We’re all so terrified by the prospect of a second Trump term that we’ve opted to ignore every warning sign.” It is understood that Barack Obama was aware of Clooney’s intervention in advance and did not attempt to change his mind or stop him from publishing the piece.

Clooney is just the most high-profile member of the Hollywood elite to put their head above the parapet and call for Biden to quit lest Trump, who is both detested and feared in California, triumph in the election. Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings said that Biden must “step aside to allow a vigorous Democratic leader to beat Trump” while Abigail Disney, heiress of the film dynasty, has suspended her donations to the party until Biden steps aside. 

Michael Douglas, who in April hosted a Biden fundraiser at his home and was complemented by the President on the success of his fictional administration in his 1996 film The American President, said that Clooney had a “valid point” and he was “deeply, deeply concerned” about Biden’s prospects.

Fahrenheit 9/11 director Michael Moore said that the Democrats were committing “elder abuse” by having the President run again, while Rob Reiner claimed that “we lose our democracy” if Trump wins, and novelist Stephen King said that Biden ought not to seek re-election “in the interests of the America he so clearly loves”. 

Ari Emanuel, chief executive of talent agency Endeavor and brother of Biden’s ambassador to Japan, Rahm, put it most bluntly. “We are in f— city,” Emanuel told Tina Brown at the Aspen Ideas Festival last month and suggested that he would like to see an upper age limit imposed on the presidency. “I’m pissed off at the founding fathers. They had the start date of 35 years old… and well, everybody died [back then], so they didn’t have to give the end date.” Emanuel has also accused Biden of “self-aggrandising delusion on a Trumpian scale” by not withdrawing from the race.

Unlike in Britain, where celebrities getting involved in politics are dismissed as bleating luvvies, Hollywood’s heavyweights have played crucial roles in election fundraising and have genuine influence. Steven Spielberg has been roped into the campaign to help “tell the President’s story” at next month’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago. 

Nobody holds more sway than Jeffrey Katzenberg, co-founder (with Spielberg) of animation studio DreamWorks and the man behind films such as Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Lion King and Kung Fu Panda. Katzenberg, a 73-year-old billionaire, is co-chairman of the President’s campaign team and has the twin role of helping craft a compelling narrative and encouraging deep-pocketed donors to open their wallets.

Katzenberg has a formidable reputation and is well known in Hollywood, and, latterly, Washington DC, for his ferocious work ethic. A typical morning involves him rising at 5am, spending 90 minutes on an exercise bike while reading four newspapers before taking as many as three breakfast meetings. He has been involved in politics for decades, starting as a teenage volunteer for New York’s Republican mayor, John Lindsay, in the 1960s before becoming a Democrat power broker. He backed Obama over Hillary Clinton in 2008 and was one of the biggest fundraisers for both of his election wins.

But it is with Biden that Katzenberg has been most involved in a campaign and is frequently roaming the White House corridors. The Oscar-winning film mogul has sought to turn Biden’s biggest weakness — his mental acuity given his advancing years — into a strength. “Age is his superpower,” he has said about the President and drawn parallels with sprightly octogenarians such as Harrison Ford and Mick Jagger. Until that debate, the strategy worked: at the end of May Biden had raised almost $220 million, $20 million more than Trump’s campaign.

“I don’t think George Clooney alone is going to change President Biden’s mind [about whether to run],” says Kathryn Cramer Brownell, professor of history at Purdue University and author of books on Hollywood’s relationship with politics. “But celebrities like Clooney speaking out sustains attention on the issue and creates more opportunities for more people to jump in and create momentum.” Brownell also tells me that if donations to Biden’s campaign continue to dry up that would be “really significant” and would force the party to confront the Biden challenge head-on.

The importance of Katzenberg to the Biden project is hard to overstate. Steve Ross, a history professor at the University of Southern California and author of Hollywood Left and Right: How Movie Stars Shaped American Politics, told American news site The Wrap that if Katzenberg pulled his support, “then you’re going to have a very serious problem, because how is [Biden] going to fund his campaign in the last few months?”

While it is unlikely that many, if any, Americans will have their vote swayed by Clooney and his fellow stars, Hollywood has long played a big role in American politics. In the 1920s Louis B Mayer used his film studio, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, to help Republicans such as Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover. Charlie Chaplin’s films offered overt criticisms of worker exploitation at factories, while Frank Sinatra and Jack Warner (one of the Warner Brothers) created programmes to help Franklin D Roosevelt’s re-election campaign in 1944 and Joseph P Kennedy, father of future President John, founded the RKO studio. Before becoming a firebrand conservative polemicist, Ayn Rand was a Hollywood screenwriter and was one of the most fierce anti-Communists in Tinseltown.

The McCarthyist crackdown on Left-wingers, which included the blacklisting of anybody suspected to have Communist sympathies, broadly drove Hollywood away leaning conservative, though it is always worth remembering that Ronald Reagan was a noted actor before moving into politics and California native Richard Nixon was popular in his home state.

But it is Trump who inspires an acute feeling of dread among Hollywood’s liberal elites today and, despite raising millions for Biden’s campaign, studio bosses appear resigned to him returning to power in January. Some have speculated that the reason The Apprentice, in which Sebastian Stan plays a young Donald Trump in an unflattering biopic, has not yet got an American distributor is because Hollywood does not want to give him reason to seek revenge. Trump does have his own celebrity backers, though the likes of Caitlyn Jenner and Dennis Quaid are much less starry than Biden’s.

After support for Biden from the likes of Clooney has dribbled away, all eyes are now on Spielberg and Katzenberg, neither of whom have publicly commented on Biden’s campaign since that disastrous debate with Trump – though the latter led an unsuccessful effort to kill the actor’s New York Times piece. The pressure is building on Katzenberg, especially, who has been variously accused of “agewashing” the President and lying “about the whole Biden thing”. As one insider put it: “everyone in town is furious with him”. 

If either of them joins the chorus of criticism, it could mean that the Democrats need to make a very late decision on recasting their leading man.