The New Yorker Has Excerpts Brutally Recounting the Biden LA Fundraiser That Left Dems Aghast

Yet, the first shoe to drop was that infamous Los Angeles fundraiser featuring Hollywood’s elite, including former President Barack Obama, who was caught leading Joe offstage in a scene that likely infuriated the White House staff.
George Clooney was a big fan and ally of Joe Biden and, at first, was looking forward to securing another term for the Delaware liberal.

---

Can we stop with this ‘I didn’t know Joe Biden was cooked’ lie? We knew it was garbage, but so many in the legacy press are trying to gaslight us into thinking this epic collapse in Joe Biden’s mental faculties was a surprise—it wasn’t. You people covered it until the man imploded in that June debate on CNN last year. It would be an election-killing event for Biden, who got booted off the ticket in July.

Yet, the first shoe to drop was that infamous Los Angeles fundraiser featuring Hollywood’s elite, including former President Barack Obama, who was caught leading Joe offstage in a scene that likely infuriated the White House staff. They’ve been trying to combat the frail and infirmed narratives; this only rehashed them. Yet, that fight was lost, as New York Magazine brutally recounted. That fundraiser is where Geroge Clooney was hit by the reality that Biden couldn’t hack it anymore.
The piece is an excerpt from Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s new book, “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again.”
George Clooney was a big fan and ally of Joe Biden and, at first, was looking forward to securing another term for the Delaware liberal. Then, he met him before that infamous fundraiser, where the Hollywood actor and face of Tinseltown’s activist wing was left aghast. Biden looked tired, aged, and didn’t recognize the actor (via NY Mag):
Biden hobbled out from around the corner. Clooney knew that the President had just arrived from the G-7 leaders’ summit in Apulia, Italy, that morning and might be tired, but, holy shit, he wasn’t expecting this.
The President appeared severely diminished, as if he’d aged a decade since Clooney last saw him, in December, 2022. He was taking tiny steps, and an aide seemed to be guiding him by the arm.
“It was like watching someone who was not alive,” a Hollywood V.I.P. recalled. “It was startling. And we all looked at each other. It was so awful.”
“Thank you for being here,” the President said to guests as he shuffled past them.
“Thank you for being here.”
Clooney felt a knot form in his stomach as the President approached him. Biden looked at him. “Thank you for being here,” he said. “Thank you for being here.”
“You know George,” the assisting aide told the President, gently reminding him who was in front of him. “Yeah, yeah,” the President said to one of the most recognizable men in the world, the host of this lucrative fund-raiser. “Thank you for being here.”
“Hi, Mr. President,” Clooney said.
“How are ya?” the President replied.
“How was your trip?” Clooney asked.
“It was fine,” the President said.
It seemed clear that the President had not recognized Clooney.
“It was not O.K.,” recalled the Hollywood V.I.P. who had witnessed this moment. “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.”
“George Clooney,” the aide clarified for the President.
“Oh, yeah!” Biden said. “Hi, George!”
Clooney was shaken to his core. The President hadn’t recognized him, a man he had known for years. Clooney had expressed concern about Biden’s health before—a White House aide had told him a few months before that they were working on getting the President to take longer steps when he walked—but obviously the problem went far beyond his gait. This was much graver.
This was the President of the United States?
Clooney was certainly not the only one concerned. Other high-dollar attendees who posed for photographs with Obama and Biden described Biden as slow and almost catatonic. Though they saw pockets of clarity while watching him on television, and onstage later that night, there were obvious brain freezes and clear signs of a mental slide. It was, to some of them, terrifying.
Obama didn’t know what to make of how his former running mate was acting. 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.
"It was like watching someone who was not alive," added another Hollywood VIP who was not named when watching the then-former president.
Clooney and Julia Roberts had to leave as they were both filming projects; Clooney had to fly into LA from Tuscany, do this event, and then leave before the fundraiser was over to head back to Italy. It’s part of the timeline that was hurled back at his face when he penned that damning New York Times op-ed calling for Joe to step aside after the CNN debate. Biden’s inner circle was furious, whereas Jeffrey Katzenberg, Biden’s Hollywood money guy, plainly said, “You left early. You never saw him onstage.” Clooney responded that he saw Biden in the clutch [the debate], and he’d seen enough.
Even Obama’s former top aides, like Jon Favreau, were left “disturbed” after an evening with Joe Biden, who they all felt had lost more than a step. The point is that everyone and their mother knew Biden was cooked before this clown show did:
The second encounter came a year and a half later, on Friday night, April 26, 2024, the evening before the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. Favreau was among the “influencers” invited to visit with the President at the White House, as were two of his co-hosts, Dan Pfeiffer and Jon Lovett.
That night, to Favreau, Biden seemed to have aged fifty years in sixteen months. He was incoherent. His stories were meandering and confusing. Something about Iraq? What, exactly, was the point of this? He told one story twice. After the President left the group, Favreau asked a staffer about his demeanor. Oh, no big deal, the staffer said. The President must have just been tired. It was nighttime at the end of a long week.
Biden seemed O.K. the next night at the dinner, capably reading from a teleprompter and projecting as aged but present. But Lovett, Pfeiffer, Favreau, and Emily left the White House that weekend deeply disturbed. And now here they were at the biggest fund-raiser in the history of the Democratic Party.

And then this excerpt from the photo line after the LA fundraiser, where Biden was not capable of engaging with anyone:
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. 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?
In the audience, Emily Favreau couldn’t believe how awful Biden seemed. “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,’ ” Emily, a longtime communications consultant, said. To her, it had been a complete disaster. And she hadn’t even seen what happened backstage.
Kuster had already reached the conclusion that there was no scenario in which Biden would be reelected. She turned to Brownley. “We can’t go out there and campaign for ‘four more years,’ ” she said. “That’s just not tenable.”
Clooney’s op-ed was published on July 10, 2024. It was an atomic bomb, a massive body blow to the Biden White House. It angered Joe’s closest supporters, but Clooney didn’t care. Among many things, the Hollywood actor realized that one of the reasons why Trump won was that the Democrats and the media had so long covered up Joe’s inability to do the job.
A broken clock is right twice a day. However, it still doesn’t absolve the media or the Democrats of covering Biden’s loss of cognitive abilities that speak to one’s fitness to carry out the duties of the office. Executive function had ceased in Joe Biden, so who was running the country? We know that aides picked up and covered up the president’s senior moments, like the media, so what laws, actions, and, dare I say, military deployments were actually made with a cognizant Joe?

Who was running the damn country for the past four years?