‘It Was Like Watching Someone Who Was Not Alive’

Meanwhile, White House aides and other Democrats denounced video evidence of decline as ‘cheap fakes’

Joe Biden didn’t recognize George Clooney at the infamous Hollywood fundraiser in June 2024, just days before the disastrous debate on CNN. “It was not O.K.,” one Hollywood VIP said after witnessing the president’s awkward backstage encounter with the legendary actor. “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.”

This behind-the-scene account of the fundraiser, which yielded a widely shared video of Biden appearing to freeze up before being guided off stage by former president Barack Obama, appears in a New Yorker excerpt of the forthcoming book Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson.

“It seemed clear that the President had not recognized Clooney,” the authors write. The actor, who had known Biden since 2001, was “shaken to his core,” as were the other Democratic donors who had gathered to take photos before the event. “It was like watching someone who was not alive,” the Hollywood VIP recalled. “It was startling. And we all looked at each other. It was so awful.” Biden appeared “almost catatonic,” the authors write. “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.”

Clooney didn’t share his concerns publicly at the time. He waited until July 10, nearly two weeks after the CNN debate, to publish a New York Times op-ed urging Biden to drop out of the race. “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,” Clooney wrote. “He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate.”

In the days after the fundraiser, White House aides and other Democrats aggressively defended Biden after a video clip surfaced of the president freezing up on stage before Obama grabbed his arm and gently escorted him off stage. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre denounced the footage as an example of a “cheap fake video” that was “done in bad faith.” The Associated Press published a fact check in response to the video clip, citing Biden aides and other fundraiser attendees who claimed Biden had simply “stopped to take in cheers and applause.” The AP took them at their word, concluding that Biden hadn’t frozen or otherwise behaved abnormally, he had just “paused amid cheers and applause as he exited the stage.”

Tapper and Thompson report that several Democrats in the audience were shocked by what they saw. “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,” the authors write. “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?” Other attendees were surprised by Biden’s “quiet and frail presentation” and “downright confusing” answers to friendly questions from Jimmy Kimmel, the so-called comedian and liberal activist.

Emily Favreau, wife of celebrity podcaster and former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau, was also alarmed by Biden’s demeanor on the stage. “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,'” she said. The Favreaus didn’t mention their concerns at the time. After Clooney published his op-ed in the Times, Jon Favreau finally acknowledged that Biden’s awful debate performance “was not surprising to any of us who were at the fundraiser.”

Another excerpt from Original Sin, published in Axios on Tuesday, revealed that Biden’s aides were worried he would need a wheelchair to get around if he was elected to a second term. These stunning new details, along with others to come, are presumably what CNN commentator Scott Jennings meant when he described the book, due out next week, as the “equivalent of a nuclear bomb dropped on the Democratic Party.”