How Joe Biden Handed the Presidency to Donald Trump | The New Yorker

“We got so screwed by Biden, as a party,” David Plouffe, who helped run the Harris campaign, told us. Plouffe had served as Senator Barack Obama’s Presidential campaign manager in 2008 and as a senior adviser to President Obama before largely retiring from politics in 2013. After Biden dropped out of the race, on July 21, 2024, Plouffe was drafted to help Harris in what he saw as a “rescue mission.” Harris, he said, was a “great soldier,” but the compressed hundred-and-seven-day race was “a fucking nightmare.”

The role of Hollywood elites in the Biden campaign —

Biden did, in 2020, and in the process Katzenberg became more than a donor. As 2024 approached, he saw Biden’s communication struggles and thought he could help fix them. He worked on providing better lighting for Biden and trying to find a microphone that would amplify Biden when he would break into a whisper for emphasis. Katzenberg also recruited his friend Steven Spielberg, who helped coach Biden for the State of the Union and his debates, even assisting with routine campaign videos. There was, however, only so much that Hollywood magic could do.

It was Clooney who started the process to get Biden out —

This was too much for Clooney. He reached out to Obama to tell him that he was considering writing an op-ed to call for Biden to drop out. Obama advised that doing so would only make Biden dig in deeper.

In his home office in the South of France, Clooney sat down at his laptop. “I love Joe Biden,” Clooney wrote. “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.”

Clooney sums it up —

Also, he acknowledged, lies serve as an important reminder for anyone in the audience upset about the current state of affairs. Democrats deceived the country about Biden’s abilities and, Clooney said, “that’s how Trump won.”