Democratic elites are being accused of “steamrolling democracy” by forcing President Biden to end his campaign at the eleventh hour as part of a sinister plot to replace the octogenarian commander-in-chief at the top of the ticket for Veep Kamala Harris without voter approval.
After Dems mounted a sudden pressure campaign to topple Biden, 81, following his disastrous debate performance against former President Donald Trump, House Republican leadership excoriated influential leftists for sabotaging the democratic process to get his decades-younger running mate elected instead.
“Over 48 hours ago – just over 100 days before an election – Democrat Party bosses forced Joe Biden off the ballot,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) told reporters Tuesday during a press conference.
“They invalidated the votes of more than 14 million Americans who went through the small ‘d’ democratic process and chose their nominee for president,” he went on, adding that “they just steamrolled democracy.”
Trump, 78, also rebuked Democrats for the gambit on Truth Social on Tuesday, accusing them of pulling a fast one on the public.
“The Democrats lied and misled the public about Crooked Joe Biden, and now we find he is a complete and total Cognitive and Physical ‘MESS,’” Trump wrote. “They also mislead [sic] the Republican Party, causing it to waste a great deal of time and money. To be resumed!”
What they knew
While the general public was awakened to Biden’s disturbing decline during the June 27 debate, Democratic insiders have said they spotted the signs a full 12 days before – during Clooney’s glitzy June 15 fundraiser.
After the event that pulled in a record-setting $30 million, Democratic elites knew more than they have let on, critics say.
Jon Favreau, an Obama White House speechwriter who attended the event, indicated that insiders saw the writing on the wall at the Hollywood event.
What to know about President Biden’s decision to drop out of the 2024 presidential race:
“I said to my wife, either he’ll do great at the debate, and we’ll realize he was just tired tonight, or he’ll perform like this and then the whole country will be talking about it,” he told The Washington Post after the fundraiser.
Another unnamed donor told the outlet that Biden’s “volume and speed [were] turned way down — to an alarming level,” noting that she and her husband “struggled” to tell friends their honest opinion of what they saw at the fundraiser.
“We were worried that if we told the truth — that President Biden was stiff, slow and dare we say it, fragile — that we risked losing their support for the president,” said the donor. “It was painful to be deceptive. Now, we realize we were not alone in withholding what we experienced.”
Ultimately, Dems let Biden march himself to his political death less than two weeks later at the debate, which “was a set-up to convince Democrats that he couldn’t run for president,” a source told The Post on Monday.
Sealing Biden’s fate
Biden’s unsettling performance at the fundraiser inspired Clooney’s blistering editorial that published four weeks later — setting aflame the left’s calls for the president to reconsider his reelection bid.
Clooney wrote in a New York Times op-ed that he was stunned by his interactions with Biden at the fundraiser in Los Angeles – but waited until after the debate made the president’s decline clear for the world to see.
“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,” Clooney wrote.
Billionaire businessman Barry Diller credits Clooney’s editorial in particular with sealing Biden’s fate, at least publicly, after hosting the event for him nearly two weeks before the president took to the debate stage.
The media mogul told The Post on Tuesday that the Hollywood A-lister’s publication of his concerns about the 81-year-old president’s mental acuity meant “it was inevitable” that Biden would end his candidacy.
But Clooney wasn’t alone in offing Biden. Former President Barack Obama made clear — largely through his silence — that he thought Biden should step aside after being forced to help him off stage at the Clooney-hosted fundraiser.
“Obama wrote Joe Biden’s epitaph at the exact same time he assumed the body of George Clooney to facilitate the op-ed that started the drip-drip-drip,” a Democratic source quipped to The Post on Tuesday
The latest on President Biden’s decision to drop out of the 2024 presidential race:
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre insisted that footage of Obama doing so was a “cheap fake” clip that gave a misleading impression of the incumbent’s frailty, criticizing The Post’s reporting of Biden’s apparent mental decline despite Clooney’s later assessment.
GOP nominee Donald Trump on Tuesday said “there’s no question” his rival was pushed out of his re-election campaign by top Democrats, including co-host Obama.
“Obama can’t stand him, and he can’t stand Obama. Obama had a part because he said he wasn’t going to support him,” the 78-year-old former president told reporters on a phone call in response to a Post question.
“Nancy Pelosi dumped him,” the GOP presidential nominee added of Biden. “They all dumped him, and they said, ‘Either you get out nice or we’re going to go after you.’ And that’s what happened. And he had no choice. There’s no question about it.”
Still, a source close to Biden said they don’t believe that Clooney and Obama necessarily sealed his fate directly — with Biden notably unplugged from pop culture and prickly about cues from Obama — but that the momentum that they contributed to tanked internal polling ahead of the final decision.
“Joe Biden doesn’t care about celebrities and he loves nothing more than to prove people wrong,” the source said. “But he is not dumb and knows the threat Trump poses.”
Follow the money
By finally releasing the troubling details of the event he’d witnessed a month earlier, Clooney became one of the first prominent Democrats to call on Biden to step aside after just five mostly back-bench Democrats in Congress had done so following the president’s dismal June 27 debate.
And when Clooney balked at Biden, a shortage of fresh funds quickly followed.
Biden campaign co-chair Jeffrey Katzenberg, the co-founder of film studio DreamWorks and a major shepherd of Hollywood funds, had reportedly warned the president last Wednesday that donations were drying up, as public and internal polling showed him trailing former President Trump.
With Biden gone, Diller said he’s pledging to donate the “maximum” amount to Vice President Kamala Harris’ newly reframed campaign.
His donation will join the deluge of funds that have flooded the former Biden-Harris ticket, which pulled in more than $231 million in campaign and super PAC funds within the first 24 hours of the president’s earth-shattering announcement.
“For those who doubt the political skill of Kamala Harris, I refer them to her handling of every detail since Biden’s exit — it’s a master class in political expertise — within 48 hours she cleared the field. Quite impressive,” the chairman of IAC and Expedia gushed.
“I will give her the maximum,” added Diller, who had done the same for the campaigns of Biden and failed GOP presidential candidate Chris Christie last August, while funneling tens of thousands of dollars more to their associated super PACs.
Reporters Steven Nelson and Diana Glebova contributed to this report.
