Joe Biden didn’t recognise George Clooney at a massive fundraiser the actor hosted for him, a new book has claimed.
Despite knowing Mr Clooney for 20 years and attempts by aides to jog his memory, the then-US president reportedly failed to realise who he was talking to and greeted him by saying “thank you for coming” as he did to all of the other guests.
An observer said it was “like watching someone who was not alive”, according to Original Sin, a new book about Mr Biden’s mental decline and the attempts of his team to conceal it ahead of the 2024 presidential election.
The June fundraiser raised $30 million for Mr Biden’s re-election campaign.
“Thank you for being here,” he said repeatedly to the actor, after slowly making his way into the room while being guided by an aide.
When Mr Clooney greeted Mr Biden, he replied “How are ya?” and when he asked him about his recent trip to a G7 meeting in Italy, he responded: “It was fine.”
“You know George,” the aide is said to have prompted Mr Biden, who said again: “Thank you for being here.”
“George Clooney,” the aide then clarified, and Mr Biden responded: “Oh yeah. Hi George.”
“It was not OK,” one event attendee told the book’s authors.
“That thing, the moment where you recognise someone you know – especially a famous person who’s doing a f—ing fundraiser for you… it was uncomfortable.”
Mr Clooney is said to have first met Mr Biden in 2006 when speaking out against atrocities being committed in Sudan by its president Omar al-Bashir, while the Democrat was the ranking member on the Senate foreign relations committee.
Mr Clooney is said to have been “shaken to his core” by the encounter, while other attendees thought Mr Biden was “almost catatonic”.
A Hollywood figure told the book’s authors: “It was like watching someone who was not alive. It was startling. We all looked at each other. It was so awful.”
Mr Obama, who was present at the fundraiser to support Mr Biden, is said to have tried to cover up for his old running mate by completing his sentences, and blamed the then-president’s team for setting a gruelling schedule which took him to Normandy, Delaware, Italy and California in just 10 days.
Weeks later, Mr Clooney publicly called for Mr Biden to drop out of the presidential race following a disastrous debate against Donald Trump in which the Democrat frequently lost his train of thought and at times was barely audible.
“I love Joe Biden. As a senator. As a vice president and as president. I consider him a friend, and I believe in him,” he wrote in a New York Times op-ed last July.
“But 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 [June] fundraiser 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.”
Mr Biden suspended his campaign in July following the intervention from Mr Clooney and powerful party figures including Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker of the House of Representatives, and Chuck Schumer, the Democrat leader in the Senate.
He was replaced by Kamala Harris, his vice president, who went on to lose the election to Mr Trump.
In a post on his Truth Social platform earlier this year, Mr Trump labelled Mr Clooney a “second-rate movie star” and claimed he had “dumped” Mr Biden “like a dog”.
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