How Joe Biden Handed the Presidency to Donald Trump

Fresh off a long flight from the G-7 leaders’ summit in Italy, the President appeared “severely diminished, as if he’d aged a decade since Clooney last saw him,” Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson write, in a stunning behind-the-scenes report of that night, drawn from their forthcoming book “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again.” “It was like watching someone who was not alive,” a Hollywood V.I.P. recalled. “It was startling. And we all looked at each other. It was so awful.” The New Yorker has the exclusive full excerpt.

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President Joe Biden got out of bed the day after the 2024 election convinced that he had been wronged. The élites, the Democratic officials, the media, Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama—they shouldn’t have pushed him out of the race. If he had stayed in, he would have beaten Donald Trump. That’s what the polls suggested, he would say again and again.

His pollsters told us that no such polls existed. There was no credible data, they said, to support the notion that he would have won. All unspun information suggested it would have been a loss, likely a spectacular one, far worse than that suffered by his replacement as the Democratic nominee, Vice-President Kamala Harris.

The disconnect between Biden’s optimism and the unhappy reality of poll results was a constant throughout his Administration. Many insiders sensed that his inner circle shielded him from bad news. It’s also true that, for Biden to absorb those poll results, he would have had to face the biggest issue driving them: the public had concluded—long before most Democratic officials, media, and other “élites” had—that he was far too old to do the job.

“We got so screwed by Biden, as a party,” David Plouffe, who helped run the Harris campaign, told us. Plouffe had served as Senator Barack Obama’s Presidential campaign manager in 2008 and as a senior adviser to President Obama before largely retiring from politics in 2013. After Biden dropped out of the race, on July 21, 2024, Plouffe was drafted to help Harris in what he saw as a “rescue mission.” Harris, he said, was a “great soldier,” but the compressed hundred-and-seven-day race was “a fucking nightmare.”

“And it’s all Biden,” Plouffe said. By deciding to run for reëlection and then waiting more than three weeks after the debate to bow out, Plouffe added, “He totally fucked us.”

The real issue wasn’t his age, per se. It was the clear limitations of his abilities, which got worse throughout his Presidency. What the public saw of his functioning was concerning. What was going on in private was worse. While Biden on a day-in, day-out basis could certainly make decisions and assert wisdom and act as President, there were several significant issues that complicated his Presidency: a limit to the hours in which he could reliably function and an increasing number of moments when he seemed to freeze up, lose his train of thought, forget the names of top aides, or momentarily not remember friends he’d known for decades. Not to mention impairments to his ability to communicate—ones unrelated to his lifelong stutter.

It wasn’t a straight line of decline; he had good days and bad. But, until the last day of his Presidency, Biden and those closest to him refused to admit the reality that his energy, cognitive skills, and communication capacity had faltered considerably. Even worse, through various means, they tried to hide it. And then came the June 27th debate against Trump, when Biden’s decline was laid bare before the world. As a result, Democrats stumbled into the fall of 2024 with an untested nominee and growing public mistrust of a White House that had been gaslighting the American people.

“It was an abomination,” one prominent Democratic strategist—who publicly defended Biden—told us. “He stole an election from the Democratic Party. He stole it from the American people.” Biden had framed his entire Presidency as a pitched battle to prevent Trump from returning to the Oval Office. By not relinquishing power and refusing to be honest with himself and the country about his decline, he guaranteed it.

George Clooney first met Joe Biden, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in New York City after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, but their first meaningful conversation came after the actor became a credible voice advocating against the genocide in Darfur.

Fresh off winning the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for “Syriana,” in 2006, Clooney began reading reports that government-aligned forces under Sudan’s President, Omar al-Bashir, were killing innocent civilians in the Darfur region of the country. It felt like a calling. He sought to travel there with a national TV network, but conditions grew so dangerous that the journalists dropped out. George and his father, Nick, a former TV anchorman who was then seventy-two, flew to southern Sudan in April, 2006, and sneaked into Darfur with a camera crew. After battling nine days of brutal heat, zero security, and rough nights in mud huts, the Clooneys returned to the U.S. in time for a rally organized by the Save Darfur Coalition on the National Mall, where other speakers included then Senator Barack Obama. A few months later, Clooney testified before the U.N. Security Council, and the next year the Clooneys released their documentary, “A Journey to Darfur.” He skipped the Oscars in 2009 to meet with President Obama and Vice-President Biden, delivering two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand signed Save Darfur postcards to them and pushing for a full-time envoy to the region.

By the time the 2024 Presidential race had begun, the actor had known Biden for decades and had known him well for fifteen years. He had last seen Biden on December 4, 2022, when Clooney was in D.C. with his wife, Amal, to be celebrated at the Kennedy Center Honors. Biden looked older, sure, but in the East Room of the White House, at the reception for the honorees, the President was playful and seemed cogent enough.

“We see Amal Clooney’s husband,” the President said, to laughter.

Yes, he was reading from prepared remarks, but far be it from an actor to take issue with someone reciting lines.

“Mentors—he mentors these—those historic kids from Parkland on their march and their lives—against gun violence,” Biden said, stumbling a bit. “I met with every one of those kids, and they really appreciate what you did, George. Not a joke.”

In February, 2024, Clooney had thought the special counsel Robert Hur’s report, which called Biden an “elderly man with a poor memory,” mean-spirited. And, when Biden gave a rousing State of the Union address in March, Clooney thought, Way to go, Mr. President. He had helped him get elected in 2020 and was happy to do so again.

For the rematch in 2024, everyone involved with the campaign knew that beating Trump would be difficult—and would require a record-breaking amount of money. The Hollywood mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg led the charge on that front. He had been helping the Democratic Party with resources—money and connections—since the early eighties, when he was an executive at Paramount Pictures and a student of the leadership of the legendary businessman Lew Wasserman. He’d backed some members of Congress, but Katzenberg’s first real foray into the world of big-donor politics came when he and David Geffen flew to Arkansas, in 1990, to meet a young governor named Bill Clinton. Since then, Katzenberg had become a top fund-raiser for Democratic Presidential candidates.

Katzenberg had known Biden since the late nineteen-eighties and was on board with his Presidential run as early as October, 2018, when he hosted a meet and greet for the former Vice-President at his Wilshire office, after which the two men dined at Madeo, in West Hollywood. Katzenberg told him that he would support Biden’s campaign, that he thought him best positioned to beat Trump. I don’t want anything from you, he told Biden. I might be the only one who doesn’t. I just want you to win.

Biden did, in 2020, and in the process Katzenberg became more than a donor. As 2024 approached, he saw Biden’s communication struggles and thought he could help fix them. He worked on providing better lighting for Biden and trying to find a microphone that would amplify Biden when he would break into a whisper for emphasis. Katzenberg also recruited his friend Steven Spielberg, who helped coach Biden for the State of the Union and his debates, even assisting with routine campaign videos. There was, however, only so much that Hollywood magic could do.

When it came time for the reëlection campaign, Katzenberg worked on a spectacularly successful March fund-raiser, held at Radio City Music Hall, featuring Obama, Biden, and Bill Clinton. It raised twenty-six million dollars—according to the campaign, the most ever raised at a single event for a Democratic Presidential candidate. In the spring, he and top campaign aides discussed when they could bring Biden out to California. Katzenberg told the campaign that he wanted to try to hit another record number.

Katzenberg and Clooney were pals, and they had a long, successful track record of doing these events: they had broken records for Obama with a nearly fifteen-million-dollar event at Clooney’s Studio City home, in May, 2012; organized two events for Hillary Clinton, in 2016; and raked in more than seven million dollars with a July, 2020, Zoom fund-raiser in which Obama stumped for Biden.

On a rainy Easter at his home in the South of France, on the last day of March in 2024, Clooney heard from Katzenberg, who made his ask—a fund-raiser in June. Katzenberg had learned over the years that there was a cadence in terms of how many times a campaign could ask people for money. He thought that the Biden team could get another bite at the apple in the summer and then one last one on the other side of Labor Day. But Clooney was going to be in London and Tuscany in June, working with the filmmaker Noah Baumbach on “Jay Kelly,” a coming-of-age film that Baumbach had co-written with Emily Mortimer. It was a big project for Netflix, involving Clooney, Adam Sandler, and Laura Dern.

Clooney looked at his calendar. There was one possible window: Saturday, June 15th. It would be brutal, though. He’d need to fly into Los Angeles from Tuscany, do the event, and leave that same night for Rome, before the fund-raiser was even over.

“I can do one night,” Clooney told Katzenberg.

“Great,” Katzenberg said.

“Let’s call Julia and see if she’ll do it with me,” Clooney said, referring to Julia Roberts.

He texted her immediately. Katzenberg had headed Disney when Roberts was cast in the role that made her a superstar, in “Pretty Woman.” He reached out to her, too.

Coördinating it all was wildly complicated. Roberts was starting production on a film—“After the Hunt,” with Ayo Edebiri, Andrew Garfield, and Chloë Sevigny—and also needed to get on a plane before the fund-raiser ended.

Not to mention the President’s schedule. From June 13th to 14th, Biden was going to be in Italy for the G-7, right after honoring Allied veterans in France for the eightieth anniversary of D Day, in between which he’d be at his home in Wilmington, Delaware, while his son Hunter faced prosecution for a gun charge. They looked at six different ways to move things around, but everyone ultimately agreed on June 15th. Jimmy Kimmel would interview Biden and Barack Obama onstage. All Clooney and Roberts needed to do was pose for photos with the big donors before the event, then open the show. Afterward, they could fly to their sets, and, God willing, another fund-raising record would be set.

On Thursday, June 13th, Clooney landed at a private airfield in the Los Angeles area. On Saturday, he rolled to the Peacock Theatre, capacity seven thousand one hundred, roughly four hours before the event was set to begin; he and Roberts had hundreds of photographs to take with thousands of attendees, whose perks depended upon their contributions, from two hundred and fifty dollars to five hundred thousand dollars. The event would once again set a record as the biggest fund-raiser for a Democrat in American political history, raising more than thirty million dollars.

Before Kimmel, Obama, and Biden hit the stage to toss bons mots back and forth in a cozy Q. & A., there was a series of private receptions, called clutches, plus photo lines and free-flowing booze and hors d’œuvres. Clooney and Roberts were doing the work of charming the attendees and posing for pictures when they heard the crowd starting to murmur. Clooney looked to the side and saw Obama walking in, grayer but still spry and electric. A few minutes later, Secret Service agents entered the room and announced that President Biden had arrived.

Biden hobbled out from around the corner. Clooney knew that the President had just arrived from the G-7 leaders’ summit in Apulia, Italy, that morning and might be tired, but, holy shit, he wasn’t expecting this.

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 an aide seemed to be guiding him by the arm.

“It was like watching someone who was not alive,” a Hollywood V.I.P. recalled. “It was startling. And we all looked at each other. It was so awful.”

“Thank you for being here,” the President said to guests as he shuffled past them. “Thank you for being here.” Clooney felt a knot form in his stomach as the President approached him. Biden looked at him. “Thank you for being here,” he said. “Thank you for being here.”

“You know George,” the assisting aide told the President, gently reminding him who was in front of him. “Yeah, yeah,” the President said to one of the most recognizable men in the world, the host of this lucrative fund-raiser. “Thank you for being here.”

“Hi, Mr. President,” Clooney said.

“How are ya?” the President replied.

“How was your trip?” Clooney asked.

“It was fine,” the President said.

It seemed clear that the President had not recognized Clooney.

“It was not O.K.,” recalled the Hollywood V.I.P. who had witnessed this moment. “That thing, the moment where you recognize someone you know—especially a famous person who’s doing a fucking fund-raiser for you—it was delayed. It was uncomfortable.”

“George Clooney,” the aide clarified for the President.

“Oh, yeah!” Biden said. “Hi, George!”

Clooney was shaken to his core. The President hadn’t recognized him, a man he had known for years. Clooney had expressed concern about Biden’s health before—a White House aide had told him a few months before that they were working on getting the President to take longer steps when he walked—but obviously the problem went far beyond his gait. This was much graver.

This was the President of the United States?

Clooney was certainly not the only one concerned. Other high-dollar attendees who posed for photographs with Obama and Biden described Biden as slow and almost catatonic. Though they saw pockets of clarity while watching him on television, and onstage later that night, there were obvious brain freezes and clear signs of a mental slide. It was, to some of them, terrifying.

Obama 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. 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. The man was eighty-one, and he had gone from France, to Delaware, then Italy, and then to California in just ten days. The time zones were difficult enough, but this was a rough itinerary. Obama put it down to a bad scheduling decision by Biden and his staff.

How Biden handled his time was a consistent theme in Obama’s conversations with him; he was a bit protective of his former running mate. “Why are you doing ten hours of a photo line at the holiday party?” Obama would ask him.

But Obama would come to realize that scheduling was not the fundamental problem.

As Obama’s former chief speechwriter Jon Favreau and his wife, Emily, pulled up to the event, Favreau didn’t know which Joe Biden was going to show up that night. Favreau had reason to wonder. He’d had two personal meetings with Biden in the previous two years, and two wildly divergent experiences.

The first was on November 30, 2022, when he, Emily, their son Charlie, and Emily’s parents, Marnie and Tim Black, visited the White House. Favreau, now one of the hosts of the political podcast “Pod Save America,” first had to record an interview with Biden’s chief of staff, Ron Klain, and when he joined his family in his old office, he was delighted to find Biden there charming them all. Stunningly, Biden had recognized Marnie from an event in California several years before and said so as he regaled them with stories infused by his garrulous Irish pol demeanor. The President invited everyone up to the Oval Office, where he was as sharp as ever. To Emily’s dad, a federal judge, he offered a detailed recounting of the failed confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork. Favreau was a bit disturbed by Biden’s staff’s willingness to indulge his windbaggy nature in the middle of a Wednesday afternoon. They seemed a little too eager to let him waste time in the midst of a crisis: a major railway strike.

The second encounter came a year and a half later, on Friday night, April 26, 2024, the evening before the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. Favreau was among the “influencers” invited to visit with the President at the White House, as were two of his co-hosts, Dan Pfeiffer and Jon Lovett.

That night, to Favreau, Biden seemed to have aged fifty years in sixteen months. He was incoherent. His stories were meandering and confusing. Something about Iraq? What, exactly, was the point of this? He told one story twice. After the President left the group, Favreau asked a staffer about his demeanor. Oh, no big deal, the staffer said. The President must have just been tired. It was nighttime at the end of a long week.

Biden seemed O.K. the next night at the dinner, capably reading from a teleprompter and projecting as aged but present. But Lovett, Pfeiffer, Favreau, and Emily left the White House that weekend deeply disturbed. And now here they were at the biggest fund-raiser in the history of the Democratic Party. Yes, Biden would be helped by the presence of the younger, more charismatic Obama and Kimmel onstage with him. But they could only hide so much.

The Favreaus weren’t ponying up five hundred thousand dollars for the meet and greet at the Peacock Theatre; they would just sit in the audience and watch the show. And hope. And pray.

And then came the event: Jimmy Kimmel, fifty-six; Barack Obama, sixty-two; and Joe Biden, eighty-one, came onstage, all in dark suits, white shirts, no ties. Kimmel sat on the left, Biden in the middle, Obama on the right. The late-night comedian rattled off Biden’s accomplishments and quipped, “Not bad for ‘Sleepy Joe,’ ” reclaiming Trump’s nickname for the President.

Some attendees later expressed concern about how Biden seemed onstage. The event was just half an hour or so, and the questions were friendly. Many in the audience were surprised by the President’s apparent diminishment, his quiet and frail presentation, his inability to develop a strong, convincing sales pitch. Some of his answers were downright confusing.

When the event ended, the three men stood. Obama began to walk offstage, but Biden walked to the edge and, after waving and giving a thumbs up, stopped and stared blankly into the crowd. Obama turned back and grabbed Biden’s arm, then guided him backstage. He later explained that he just wanted to get the hell out of there, but he didn’t want to leave Biden alone up on the stage. Biden folks insisted that the President was just basking in the glow of a supportive audience, and they called clips of the moment “cheap fakes,” a term for video content that has been deceptively edited or taken out of context. But even some supporters present in the arena wondered what was going on.

He doesn’t look like he knows where he’s supposed to go, thought the New Hampshire Democratic congresswoman Annie Kuster, sitting in the audience with the California congresswoman Julia Brownley. They’d seen him in the photo line, and Kuster could tell it was a struggle for the President to engage. It reminded her of being with an aging grandparent, worryingly thinking, Oh, my gosh, what’s going to happen next?

In the audience, Emily Favreau couldn’t believe how awful Biden seemed. “I wanted to make everyone stay in this theatre and say, ‘No one is going anywhere until we have a plan, because this can’t be it,’ ” Emily, a longtime communications consultant, said. To her, it had been a complete disaster. And she hadn’t even seen what happened backstage.

Kuster had already reached the conclusion that there was no scenario in which Biden would be reëlected. She turned to Brownley. “We can’t go out there and campaign for ‘four more years,’ ” she said. “That’s just not tenable.”

That same night, in New York City, the Senate Majority Leader, Chuck Schumer, was at a wedding. He had jitters about the upcoming debate.

Sometimes the President would call him and, after some chit chat, admit that he’d forgotten why he’d called. Sometimes he rambled. Sometimes he forgot names. Schumer wasn’t concerned about Biden’s acuity, but he was worried about the optics. Biden talked sluggishly—his voice was not just slower but oddly quieter, reminding Schumer of his mother, who had Parkinson’s. His gait was slower. Schumer was concerned about the President’s electability. He talked about it with his staff, but he felt that he had to keep a close circle. If he talked about his worries with Obama or Hakeem Jeffries or Nancy Pelosi and it got out that they were discussing whether Biden was too old to run, that would make it even harder for him to win.

At the wedding, Schumer was discussing his concerns and the fact that the debate was so early—just twelve days away. “If things go south at the debate, it might change things,” Schumer later recalled having said. The early date gave Democrats some time.

Another wedding guest, who sat at Schumer’s table, recalled him saying, “If things go south at the debate, me, Barack, Nancy, and Hakeem have a Plan B,” though Schumer would later deny it.

George Clooney had flown back to Italy and compartmentalized his encounter with the President at the L.A. fund-raiser, chalking it up to the President’s eighty-one spins around the sun and Biden’s own long trip from Italy, even if the President had flown in on Air Force One.

But then the debate confirmed all the fears that he’d shoved aside. Biden struggled to find the words he needed to communicate. He made guttural sounds. His slack-jawed expressions suggested that he wasn’t even aware that he was on camera for the entire ninety minutes. “Look,” he said at one point, and then trailed off, before concluding, “We finally beat Medicare.”

So many governors, senators, members of Congress, fund-raisers, and activists were now reaching out to Clooney—it was all anyone could talk about. What a disaster! Biden needed to take himself off the ticket.

Senator Joe Manchin reached Clooney through a mutual acquaintance. He felt that Biden, his friend of decades, had lost the will to fight. He told Clooney that a number of Democratic senators he’d spoken to were planning to confront Biden, to try to convince him to step aside. Manchin personally hoped that they wouldn’t until after the NATO summit that month—“No need to show our ass to the world,” he said. For whatever reason, no such meeting happened. Clooney held out hope that Democratic governors would address the matter with Biden instead. But the readout he got on a White House meeting with the governors suggested that no one had stepped up and told the President the truth. Then, on July 8th, Biden released a letter as a last-ditch effort to end the crusade to push him out.

The letter shocked Clooney. Despite the herculean efforts that the Democratic machine had made to shut down any sort of real contest, Biden cast his position as that of a true exercise in democracy, having “received over 14 million votes, 87% of the votes cast across the entire nominating process.”

“This was a process open to anyone who wanted to run,” he wrote, which was not really true. “Only three people chose to challenge me.” Of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Biden wrote that he “fared so badly that he left the primaries to run as an independent.” Of Dean Phillips, a Democratic congressman from Minnesota, the President said that he “attacked me for being too old and was soundly defeated. The voters of the Democratic Party have voted. They have chosen me to be the nominee of the party.”

This was too much for Clooney. He reached out to Obama to tell him that he was considering writing an op-ed to call for Biden to drop out. Obama advised that doing so would only make Biden dig in deeper.

In his home office in the South of France, Clooney sat down at his laptop. “I love Joe Biden,” Clooney wrote. “As a senator. As a vice president and as president. I consider him a friend, and I believe in him. Believe in his character. Believe in his morals. In the last four years, he’s won many of the battles he’s faced.”

But, Clooney added, “the one battle he cannot win is the fight against time. None of us can. 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.”

Clooney got down to the point: “We are not going to win in November with this president. . . . This is the opinion of every senator and Congress member and governor who I’ve spoken with in private. Every single one, irrespective of what he or she is saying publicly.”

He wanted some sort of process for a new nominee. “Let’s hear from Wes Moore and Kamala Harris and Gretchen Whitmer and Gavin Newsom and Andy Beshear and J.B. Pritzker and others. Let’s agree that the candidates not attack one another but, in the short time we have, focus on what will make this country soar. Then we could go into the Democratic convention next month and figure it out.” He attempted to end the op-ed with a note that was both empathetic and firm: “Joe Biden is a hero; he saved democracy in 2020. We need him to do it again in 2024.”

Clooney sent a copy to Jeffrey Katzenberg and told him to show one of Biden’s closest advisers, Steve Ricchetti.

Ricchetti read it and was furious. Internally, he threatened to shut Clooney down—some of his colleagues thought he sounded like a Mob boss.

Word came back that Ricchetti suggested it would be better if Clooney held it a week.

Katzenberg did not agree with Clooney’s assessment. Biden had been jet-lagged, and Katzenberg had been told that the President didn’t sleep well on flights, even in the bedroom aboard Air Force One. So the President had got only four or five hours of sleep. Biden was one of those people who needed the full eight hours every night. Even just seven hours wouldn’t cut it.

Yes, Biden had gone into that disconcerting whisper mode among that one clutch. Katzenberg still didn’t understand why he had done that. But what he had said was perfectly fine. Yes, it paled in comparison with Obama’s eloquence and elegance—but that had always been the case.

Katzenberg told Clooney that he was skeptical the op-ed would achieve its desired effect. He also thought it was kicking a good man when he was clearly down. He felt the op-ed was harsh and premature.

“I was there for the fund-raiser,” Katzenberg told his friend. “You left early. You never saw him onstage.”

“Yeah, but I saw him in the clutch,” Clooney said, “and I was stunned by what I saw.”

Katzenberg knew how difficult it is for a person of some achievement—Rupert Murdoch, Michael Eisner—to step down. He’d seen it close up. Hell, it had happened to him with the sale of DreamWorks Animation, in 2016.

Your process is not the correct one to get the end that you desire, he told Clooney. He really wanted Clooney to cut the line about the befogged Biden at the fund-raiser being “the same man we all witnessed at the debate.”

It’s not fair, what you’re saying, Katzenberg said.

You’re right, it’s not fair, Clooney agreed. Aging is awful. It really isn’t fair.

But, Clooney said, what he had written was accurate.

Clooney’s op-ed—“I Love Joe Biden. But We Need a New Nominee”—was published by the New York Times on July 10th. The line Katzenberg had objected to stayed in. It sent shock waves throughout the political world.

Clooney is currently starring, on Broadway, in “Good Night, and Good Luck,” a celebration of the CBS correspondent Edward R. Murrow in particular and journalism in general, based in part on the 2005 film of the same name. Both the film and the play were written by Clooney and his longtime collaborator Grant Heslov.

The play focusses on Murrow’s reporting on the campaign by the Republican senator Joseph McCarthy, of Wisconsin, to smear various Americans with charges of Communism and disloyalty. Despite the obvious resonance with current headlines, the drama remains firmly planted in the nineteen-fifties, except for one moment at the very end. Clooney delivers some of Murrow’s famed 1958 speech “Wires and Lights in a Box,” warning that television “can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and even it can inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends.”

What follows is a montage of television clips suggesting the medium’s evolution—or devolution—since Murrow gave that speech, from the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, to the carnival of humanity of “The Jerry Springer Show,” to recent ignominious moments from cable TV, including conservatives spreading conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and Democrats vouching for President Biden’s acuity.

Asked about the fund-raiser and what followed, a Biden spokesperson said, “No one has been able to point out where Joe Biden had to make a presidential decision or make a presidential address where he was unable to do his job because of mental decline. In fact, the evidence points to the opposite—he was a very effective president. Evidence of aging is not evidence of mental incapacity.” But at the Winter Garden Theatre one breezy April afternoon, Clooney said it was important to him and his team to include what he saw as misleading testimonials about Biden. “We had to do it,” he said, to underline the importance of speaking truth to power no matter which party currently rules.

Also, he acknowledged, lies serve as an important reminder for anyone in the audience upset about the current state of affairs. Democrats deceived the country about Biden’s abilities and, Clooney said, “that’s how Trump won.” ♦

This is drawn from “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again.”