George Clooney endorsed Kamala Harris for president Tuesday, two weeks after becoming one of the most prominent figures to call for Joe Biden to drop out of the race.
“President Biden has shown what true leadership is,” Clooney said in a statement to CNN. “He’s saving democracy once again. We’re all so excited to do whatever we can to support Vice President Harris in her historic quest.”
The two-time Oscar winner’s announcement comes after his dramatic intervention in the Democratic race following Biden’s disastrous presidential debate against Donald Trump at the end of June.
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In an explosive New York Times op-ed published on July 10, Clooney wrote that, as much as he loves his friend Biden, the Democrats would not win in November if he was the party’s nominee. Clooney wrote that, while co-hosting a record-breaking Hollywood fundraiser for Biden in June, he’d personally noticed the president’s decline.
“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. He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020,” Clooney wrote. “He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate.”
He went on to write that “every senator and Congress member and governor” he’d spoken to in private agreed the Democrats wouldn’t win the House, Senate, or White House if Biden remained at the top of the ticket. “Top Democrats—Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, Nancy Pelosi—and senators, representatives and other candidates who face losing in November need to ask this president to voluntarily step aside,” Clooney added.
The damning article came at a time when Biden’s doomed re-election campaign was already under extreme pressure. Reports soon emerged that Schumer and Jeffries did, in fact, urge Biden to step aside, while Pelosi warned the president he wasn’t going to win.
After weeks of insisting he’d stay in the race, Biden announced Sunday he would no longer seek re-election and endorsed Harris to become the Democratic nominee.
Clooney had ended his piece by calling Biden “a hero” who “saved democracy in 2020.” “We need him to do it again in 2024,” Clooney wrote.
