(AFP) – In interviews published one year after Joe Biden abandoned his re-election bid, his son Hunter lashed out at actor George Clooney for leading the public charge on calling for the elderly president to bow out. “Fuck him. And everybody around him,” Biden’s younger son said in a profanity-laced interview with independent journalist Andrew Callaghan, who has 3 million followers on YouTube.
“Really, do you think in middle America, that voter in Green Bay, Wisconsin, gives a shit what George Clooney thinks about who she should vote for?” Biden also said in a podcast with Jaime Harrison, former chair of the Democratic National Committee. Clooney was one of the first high-profile Democrats to publicly call on Joe Biden to withdraw from the presidential race, just three months before the election.
Biden, then 81 years old, was at the time facing growing doubts in his own camp about his health and mental acuity, after a disastrous debate with Donald Trump at the end of the June. “I Love Joe Biden. But We Need a New Nominee,” read the headline for Clooney’s essay, published in the New York Times on July 10, 2024. The Oscar-winning actor and producer recounted having seen the president at a Hollywood fundraiser the month prior, describing him as no longer the politician he was in 2010 or 2020.
“I consider him a friend, and I believe in him…In the last four years, he’s won many of the battles he’s faced,” Clooney wrote. “But the one battle he cannot win is the fight against time.” Less than two weeks later, on July 21, the president announced he was quitting the race.
In the interviews released on Monday, Hunter Biden angrily remembered the events leading to the end of his father’s decades-long political career. “Why do I have to fucking listen to you? What right do you have to step on a man who’s given 52 years of his fucking life to the service of this country and decide that you, George Clooney, are going to take out basically a full page ad in the fucking New York Times?” he said in the Callaghan interview.
Plagued for years with legal troubles and drug addiction, Hunter Biden became a favorite target of Republicans, who viewed him as the president’s Achilles Heel. Hunter received an unconditional pardon from his father in December 2024, after Trump defeated the Democratic replacement candidate, vice president Kamala Harris.
© 2024 AFP
