Chris Crucial: The *real* reason George Clooney matters

PLUS: Joe Biden's terrible day

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1. What Clooney revealed

You might, at first glance, be tempted to dismiss George Clooney’s op-ed in the New York Times today calling on President Joe Biden to step aside as the Democratic nominee for president.

After all, Clooney isn’t a Democratic elected official. Or a delegate to next month’s Democratic National Convention. He’s, well, just an actor.

Which, if you just heard about Clooney’s op-ed, I get. But if you read Clooney’s piece, you’d immediately see why it’s much more damaging than simply a liberal celebrity calling for Biden to step down.

Here’s the key bit (bolding is mine):

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.

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 fund-raiser 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.

That is a massive problem for Biden. MASSIVE.

Here’s why: Biden and his campaign have repeatedly cast his debate performance as “one bad night.” The idea being that because Biden was sick (or because of his makeup or because he was jet-lagged or because Donald Trump kept interrupting him or….) he was bad in the debate. But that it was a total one-off. And it won’t happen again.

What Clooney is saying in his op-ed is directly counter to that message. Clooney is saying that he was with Biden less than a month before the debate — and he saw the same bad Biden that 51 million people saw during the debate on June 27. And, presumably, Biden wasn’t sick at that fundraiser. Or distracted by Donald Trump yelling at him. Or his bad makeup job.

Now, if you have been reading the media coverage in the 13 days since the debate (and even before that), you likely already know this. The Wall Street Journal, New York Times and Washington Post (among many others) have all reported that signs of Biden’s mental slippage have been apparent behind closed doors for a while now — and that it has gotten worse in recent months.

But I think Clooney admitting it — in such a public forum — is actually different, and more powerful. Because even if you have convinced yourself that the media is out to get Biden (we are not), it’s impossible to claim that Clooney is some kind of MAGA plant aimed at bringing Biden down.

As the actor writes in the Times piece: “I love Joe Biden. As a senator. As a vice president and as president. I consider him a friend, and I believe in him.”

No one can look at Clooney’s work — particularly on the fundraising front — for Biden and other national Democrats and think that this guy is anything but a loyal party person.

Which makes it WAY harder to dismiss his assessment of Biden at that recent fundraiser.

And, Clooney is far from the only person saying that the president was in rough shape at the event.

Elex Michaelson, a local reporter in Los Angeles, tweeted this out Wednesday afternoon:

And Jon Favreau, a former speechwriter for Barack Obama and now a member of the liberal Crooked Media empire, told CNN’s Dana Bash “every single person I talked to at the fundraiser thought the same thing.”

It’s going to be very hard for Biden and his team to spin this one. Do they say Clooney, Favreau and the other guests are lying? (If so, what would the reason be?) Or that they simply misunderstood how, er, with it Biden was (and is)? Or do they try to say something like “Biden has a lot more good days than bad days”???

2. But, wait it gets worse….

The Clooney op-ed alone would have made Wednesday a bad day in Biden’s efforts to stay on as the nominee. (I think Monday and Tuesday were good days on that front, by the way.)

But it got worse. Way worse.

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who remains a major power player in Democratic politics, was decidedly noncommittal about Biden’s future in an interview on “Morning Joe.”

“It’s up to the president to decide if he is going to run,” Pelosi said. “We’re all encouraging him to make that decision, because time is running short.”

Which is a weird thing to say given that Biden has been unequivocal about his plans to run. In an open letter to Congressional Democrats on Monday, which was, um, two days ago, Biden was clear — writing that he is “firmly committed to staying in this race, to running this race to the end, and to beating Donald Trump.”

Parsing Pelosi’s comments I think what you get is this: She is urging Biden to reconsider that previous assertion that he is going to fight it out.

That Pelosi said what she said in a morning show interview — she doesn’t do many of those — makes it all the more likely she was intentionally trying to send a message to Biden.

And then it got even worse for the president. NBC News reported this on Wednesday afternoon:

President Joe Biden’s campaign has already suffered a major slowdown in donations and officials are bracing for a seismic fundraising hit, with the fallout from a debate nearly two weeks ago taking a sizable toll on operations, according to four sources close to the re-election effort. 

“It’s already disastrous,” one of the sources close to Biden’s re-election said of fundraising.  

"The money has absolutely shut off" to the Biden campaign, another source close to Biden's re-election said.

Brutal. Brutal. Brutal.

And one more blow fell just before I published this newsletter: Axios reported that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is “open” to replacing Biden at the top of the ticket.

For his part, Biden appears to be simply trying to buy more time. The White House has pointed to tomorrow’s NATO press conference as another chance for him to prove to Democratic doubters that he’s up to the job. And the White House announced that Biden will sit for an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt that is set to air in primetime on Monday.

I’ve made clear that I simply do not believe that any one press conference or speech or interview — or even lots of them — will solve this problem for Biden. People thought he was too old long before the debate. The debate and all the reporting that has come after it has only affirmed that belief. I don’t see it changing now.

3. The Trump operation, examined

I have argued in this space — repeatedly — that Donald Trump is running a MUCH better campaign than he did in 2016 and 2020. You can hate him and all he stands for but that is a fact.

The Atlantic’s Tim Alberta, one of the best political writers in the business, went deep inside the Trump campaign in a new piece for the magazine.

At the heart of the campaign — and Alberta’s article — are two longtime GOP operatives who are relative newcomers to Trumpworld: Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles.

Writes Alberta of the duo:

Wiles and Lacivita are two of America’s most feared political operatives. She is the person most responsible for Florida—not long ago the nation’s premier electoral prize—falling off the battleground map, having spearheaded campaigns that so dramatically improved the Republican Party’s performance among nonwhite voters that Democrats are now surrendering the state. He is the strategist and ad maker best known for destroying John Kerry’s presidential hopes in 2004, masterminding the “Swift Boat” attacks that sank the Democratic nominee. Together, as the architects of Trump’s campaign, they represent a threat unlike anything Democrats encountered during the 2016 or 2020 elections…

…Wiles, who runs the day-to-day operation, is small and self-possessed, a gray-haired grandmother known never to utter a profane word; LaCivita, a Marine combat veteran who charts the macro strategy, is a big and brash presence, famous for profane outbursts that leave Wiles rolling her eyes. They disagree often—staffers joke about feeling like the children of quarreling parents—but Wiles, who hired LaCivita, pulls rank. What unites them, with each other and Trump, is an obsession with winning. To that end, Wiles and LaCivita have never been focused on beating Biden at the margins; rather, their plan has been to bully him, to humiliate him, optimizing Trump’s campaign to unleash such a debilitating assault on the president’s age and faculties that he would be ruined before a single vote is cast this fall.

If you want to understand why Trump is where he is — the favorite to be the next president of the United States — you need to read the whole piece.

NOTABLE QUOTABLE

“I don't even order bacon anymore. You know, bacon's gone up like five. I said so expensive.” — Donald Trump

ONE GOOD CHART

It’s just math.

SONG OF THE DAY

On this day in 1968, Cream, the supergroup led by Eric Clapton, announced it was breaking up. Here’s the band doing “Sunshine of Your Love” from its seminal album “Disraeli Gears.”

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