Former Obama adviser Jon Favreau is confirming Hollywood star George Clooney’s assessment of President Joe Biden’s mental decline.
In an op-ed published by The New York Times on Wednesday, Clooney said Biden’s decline has been “devastating” and that when he attended a fundraiser with the president, “The Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fundraiser 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.”
During an appearance on CNN after the op-ed sent ripples through the political world, Favreau said, “It was not surprising to any of us who were at the fundraiser. I was there.”
“Clooney was exactly right, and every single person I talked to at the fundraiser thought the same thing, except for the people working for Joe Biden, or at least they didn’t say that,” he continued.
Favreau added:
“I remember my wife, Emily, turned to me after the fundraiser and said, ‘What are we going to do?’ And I said, ‘Well, there is a debate in a week. Either he’ll do well in the debate, and we’ll think he was just tired because he flew all the way back from Europe, and that’ll be that, or he’ll be like this at the debate and then the whole country will be talking about it.’ So, here we are.”
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Clooney also wrote about Biden’s mental state, “Was he tired? Yes. A cold? Maybe. But our party leaders need to stop telling us that 51 million people didn’t see what we just saw.”
Former Obama adviser David Axelrod, who appeared on CNN at the same time as Favreau, said Clooney’s assessment was “devastating.”
