Democratic Party elites are accused of “stifling democracy” by forcing President Biden to end his campaign at the last minute as part of a sinister plot to replace the octogenarian commander in chief with Vice President Kamala Harris, who tops the list of candidates without voter approval.
After Democrats launched a surprise pressure campaign to oust the 81-year-old Biden, who suffered a disastrous debate defeat against former President Donald Trump, House Republican leaders blasted influential leftists for subverting the democratic process to elect a running mate decades younger than Biden.
“More than 48 hours ago, a little over 100 days before the election, Democratic Party leaders removed Joe Biden from the ballot,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) told reporters at a press conference on Tuesday.
“They invalidated the votes of more than 14 million Americans who chose their presidential candidate through a lowercase ‘d’ democratic process,” he continued, adding, “They literally trampled on democracy.”
The 78-year-old Trump also slammed Democrats for their tactics on “Truth Social” on Tuesday, accusing them of deceiving the public.
“The Democrats lied and misled the public about the unscrupulous Joe Biden, and now we know he is completely cognitively and physically ‘messed up.'” Trump wrote:“they again, [sic] This has cost Republicans a lot of time and money. Restart it!”
What they knew
While the public first noticed Biden’s disturbing decline during the June 27 debate, Democratic Party insiders say they noticed the signs 12 days earlier, at Clooney’s glitzy fundraiser on June 15.
After the event, which raised a record $30 million, critics say Democratic elites knew much more than they’ve revealed so far.
Jon Favreau, President Obama’s White House speechwriter, who attended the event, suggested that officials at the Hollywood event could sense the escalation.
What you need to know about President Biden’s decision to withdraw from the 2024 presidential race:
“I said to my wife, ‘Either he’ll have a great debate performance and realize he was just tired tonight, or he’ll have a performance like this and the whole country will be talking about it.'” He told The Washington Post: After the fundraiser.
Another anonymous donor cited Biden’s “volume and speed” [were] “We saw a huge drop in donations, it was shocking,” she said, noting that she and her husband had “struggled” to give honest feedback to friends about what they had seen at the fundraiser.
“We were worried that telling the truth — that President Biden is stiff, dull and dare we say it, weak — would cost us support for the president,” the donor said. “Lying was painful. Now we realize we weren’t the only ones hiding what we were going through.”
After all, Democrats allowed Biden to die in a debate less than two weeks ago, which was “a ploy to convince Democrats that he can’t run for president,” a source told The Washington Post on Monday.
Seals Biden’s fate
Biden’s unsettling performance at the fundraiser inspired Clooney’s scathing op-ed published four weeks later and ignited calls on the left for the president to reconsider seeking reelection.
Clooney wrote in a New York Times op-ed that he was surprised by his exchange with Biden at a fundraiser in Los Angeles, but waited until the debate when the president’s decline became clear to the world.
“It shocks me to say this, but the Joe Biden I sat with at a fundraiser three weeks ago was not the ‘big’ Joe Biden of 2010. He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debates,” Clooney wrote.
Billionaire businessman Barry Diller, who hosted an event for Clooney about two weeks before the president took the debate stage, credited Clooney’s op-ed in particular with sealing Biden’s fate, at least publicly.
The media mogul told The Post on Tuesday that Hollywood’s top stars publicly raising concerns about the 81-year-old president’s mental capacity meant it was “inevitable” that Biden would withdraw from the running.
But Clooney is not the only one to attack Biden: Former President Barack Obama made it clear, primarily through his silence, that he thought Biden should step aside after he was forced to escort Biden off stage at a fundraiser hosted by Clooney.
“Obama wrote Joe Biden’s epitaph at the same time he inherited George Clooney’s body, to boost the op-ed that started the drip-drip-drip,” a Democratic source sarcastically told The Post on Tuesday.
An update on President Biden’s decision to withdraw from the 2024 presidential race:
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre argued that Obama’s footage was a “cheap fake” clip that gave the wrong impression of the sitting president’s frailty, and criticized The Washington Post for reporting on Biden’s apparent mental breakdown despite Clooney’s subsequent assessment.
Republican candidate Donald Trump said Tuesday there was “no question” that his rival had been barred from his reelection campaign by Democratic leaders, including co-sponsor Obama.
“Mr. Obama can’t stand him and he can’t stand Mr. Obama. Mr. Obama said he doesn’t support him, so that’s what’s causing it,” the 78-year-old former president told reporters in a phone interview with The Washington Post.
“Nancy Pelosi dumped Biden,” the Republican presidential candidate added, referring to Biden. “They all dumped him and said, ‘You either get away with it or we’re coming after you,’ and that’s what happened. Biden had no choice. There’s no question about it.”
Still, sources close to Biden said they don’t believe Clooney and Obama necessarily decided his fate directly — Biden is known for being out of touch with pop culture and more susceptible to taking direction from Obama — but the momentum they contributed to sending his internal polling plummeting ahead of the final decision.
“Joe Biden doesn’t care about celebrities and loves nothing more than proving people wrong,” the source said, “but he’s not stupid and recognizes the threat that Trump poses.”
Follow the money
Clooney finally went public with the troubling details of the incident he witnessed a month ago, becoming one of the first leading Democrats to call on Biden to step down after just five Democrats in Congress, mostly House members, called on Biden to step down following the disastrous June 27 presidential debate.
And with Clooney’s reluctance to Biden, new funding quickly became scarce.
Biden campaign co-chair Jeffrey Katzenberg, co-founder of the film studio DreamWorks and a key manager of Hollywood funds, reportedly warned the president last Wednesday that donations were drying up as polls and internal research showed Biden trailing former President Trump.
With Biden gone, Diller said he was committed to donating “maximum” to Vice President Kamala Harris’ newly restructured campaign.
His donation joins a flood of money that has poured into the Biden-Harris campaign, which raised more than $231 million in campaign and super PAC funds within 24 hours of the president’s shock announcement.
“Anyone who doubts Kamala Harris’ political acumen should take a look at how she’s handled every detail since Biden’s withdrawal. It’s a master class in political expertise. She blew away the other candidates in less than 48 hours. It’s truly impressive,” enthused the chairman of IAC and Expedia.
“We’re going to give her the maximum amount of funding,” added Diller, who made similar contributions to the campaigns of Biden and failed Republican presidential candidate Chris Christie last August, and also pumped tens of thousands of dollars into their affiliated super PACs.
Reporters Steven Nelson and Diana Glebova contributed to this report.
