George Clooney Calls Harris Candidacy a ‘Mistake’ After He Helped Push Out Biden
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George Clooney said that Kamala Harris’ candidacy for the 2024 election was “a mistake,” telling CBS’s Seth Doane on Sunday that the former vice president should have joined an open primary.
Clooney sat down with Doane to discuss, among other topics, his involvement in the 2024 election cycle.
The star’s bombshell New York Times op-ed, titled “I Love Joe Biden. But We Need a New Nominee,” became a critical part of the left-wing pressure on former President Joe Biden, urging him to drop out of the presidential race.
In the piece, Clooney described seeing Biden’s mental decline up close, writing that “the one battle he [Biden] cannot win is the fight against time.”
The former president dropped out of the race less than two weeks after the op-ed was published.
Clooney told Doane that if he had the choice, he would still write the piece again.
“We had a chance,” he said. “I wanted there to be, as I wrote in the op-ed, a primary. Let’s battle-test this quickly and get it up and going.”
Despite his and other prominent Democrats’ calls for a wider field of candidates, no primary was held – something that Clooney says hurt the vice president in her run against President Donald Trump.
“I think the mistake with it being Kamala is she had to run against her own record. It’s very hard to do if the point of running is to say, ‘I’m not that person,'” said Clooney. “It’s hard to do and so she was given a very tough task. I think it was a mistake, quite honestly.”
Clooney’s involvement in the scandal over former President Biden’s mental decline continued after Trump’s victory, with the release of Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s bombshell book Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again.
In it, the writers describe how Biden failed to recognize Clooney at Los Angeles fundraiser, one of the key events that pushed Clooney to publish his op-ed.
The actor defended his controversial piece later in the CBS interview, telling Doane that “to not do it would be to say I’m not going to tell the truth.”
