Actor George Clooney revealed that former President Joe Biden lost his support during a Los Angeles fundraiser in June 2024, claiming the media failed to cover Biden's fitness and ability to serve, during an interview with the New York Times' Maureen Dowd published on Thursday (February 20).

Clooney, 63, who is set to make his Broadway debut in Good Night, and Good Luck as legendary CBS News anchor Edward R. Murrow, said watching former President Barack Obama leading Biden, 82, off the stage at the fundraiser changed his perception.

"I saw him for hours a year earlier at the Kennedy Center, and I saw someone much less sharp," Clooney told Dowd, who wrote that the actor was "gobsmacked" by the experience.

“I’ve always liked Joe Biden, and I like him still,” he added.

Clooney also revealed why he believes President Donald Trump won the election, pointing out the Biden administration's flaws.

“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.

Clooney, a longtime Democratic donor, publicly called for Biden to drop out of the presidential race on July 10, which was 11 days before the president ultimately announced his decision to end his re-election campaign.

“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**king 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 wrote in a guest essay for the New York Times, referencing the Los Angeles fundraiser at the time.

Lucy Chapman