George Clooney blames media for hiding Biden's mental decline

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George Clooney is opening up on the moment he concluded Joe Biden was no longer the Democrats’ best pick for president.

In a lengthy interview with the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd, Clooney accused the media of “hiding (Biden’s) incapacities” and said “the media, in many ways, dropped the ball” in reporting on his re-election campaign.

It was during a glitzy fundraiser in Los Angeles last June when Clooney said he realized Biden was no longer fit to serve another four years as America’s leader.

“I saw him for hours a year earlier at the Kennedy Center, and I saw someone much less sharp” during that event, Clooney said. “I’ve always liked Joe Biden, and I like him still.”

After Biden’s disastrous debate against President Donald Trump, Clooney wrote a New York Times opinion piece urging the then-leader to drop his re-election bid.

“We are not going to win in November with this president,” he said, bluntly.

“I love Joe Biden. 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,” Clooney wrote.

“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 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.”

Clooney told Dowd he wrote the op-ed “despite being urged not to.”

After Biden stepped down and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to take his place at the top of the Democratic ticket, Clooney backed the party’s new candidate. But in his conversation with Dowd, Clooney said that Trump won over voters because of Biden’s poor messaging.

“The Biden administration was terrible at explaining that we’re a world economy, where we were actually doing better than all the other G7 countries. They were bad at telling the story because their messenger was not working at his best, to say the least,” he said.

The Ocean’s 11 star has been a vociferous critic of Trump. Back in 2017, when he spoke to Postmedia, Clooney dismissed Trump as a Hollywood wannabe.

“Donald Trump pays $100,000-a-year to the Screen Actors Guild and has a star on Hollywood Boulevard. I don’t have a star on Hollywood Boulevard, but Donald Trump does,” he said.

Clooney also bashed Trump’s onetime chief strategist Steve Bannon, calling him “a failed f***ing screenwriter.”

“If you’ve ever read that bulls*** screenplay (referring to The Thing I Am, Bannon’s infamous rap musical), it’s unbelievable,” Clooney said at the time. “Now, had he in some miraculous way got that thing produced, he’d still be in Hollywood making movies and licking my ass to come do one of his stupid-ass screenplays… That’s who Steve Bannon is.”

Last September, in the midst of a bruising campaign, Trump took time out to bash Clooney on Truth Social, telling the Oscar winner to “get out of politics and go back to television. Movies never really worked for him!!!”

But in his recent sit-down with Dowd, Clooney lobbed several jabs back at Trump. “No rules count anymore,” Clooney said of Trump’s first days back in office. “It’s like letting an infant walk across the 405 freeway in the middle of the afternoon.”

Still, after privately acquiescing to perhaps keeping quiet about politics going forward, Clooney, who is set to debut his Broadway show Good Night, and Good Luck in New York next month, shared his optimism for a second Trump presidency.

“We’ve got to hope that he can have that Scrooge night where he wakes up and there are some ghosts of Christmas there that say, ‘There’s some good things you can do for people,’” he said.

mdaniell@postmedia.com