George Clooney 'Shaken to His Core' When Joe Biden Didn't Recognize Him

Joe Biden did not recognize one of his longtime friends, according to a new book.

In Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, a book by news personality Jake Tapper and reporter Alex Thompson, they detailed a fundraiser in 2024 where they alleged Biden did not know who he was speaking to when conversing with George Clooney.

“Clooney was shaken to his core,” Tapper and Thompson wrote. “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 interaction was in stark contrast to the last time Biden and Clooney had been together at the 2022 Kennedy Center Honors where Biden referred to him as “Amal Clooney’s husband.”

At the fundraiser, Jake and Alex noted Joe was “slow and almost catatonic” with “obvious brain freezes and clear signs of a mental slide.”

On July 10, 2024, George infamously released an op-ed in The New York Times, calling for Joe to step aside and forgo running for a second presidential term. Prior to this, Jake and Alex claim George was told by Senator Joe Manchin that Democratic senators “were planning to confront [Joe], to try to convince him to step aside.”

Jeffrey Katzenberg, a Democratic megadonor, was reportedly shown George's op-ed after he wrote it. The authors of the book note he told the famous actor this would not “get the end” he desired, and he pushed him to “cut the line about the befogged [Joe] at the fundraiser being ‘the same man we all witnessed at the debate.’”

Days after George's op-ed went public, Joe ended up dropping out of the presidential race, making way for Kamala Harris to lead the ticket.