Obama Didn’t Even Try to Stop That Brutal Clooney Op-Ed on Biden

Before actor George Clooney published an op-ed in The New York Times Wednesday calling for President Joe Biden to withdraw from the 2024 race, he reportedly reached out to former President Barack Obama, who didn’t try to dissuade him. 

Obama didn’t encourage or advise Clooney on what to say, but he also didn’t try to stop him, according to Politico, which is telling, considering what Clooney ended up writing. The actor didn’t hold back, saying, “We are not going to win in November with this president. On top of that, we won’t win the House, and we’re going to lose the Senate.”

Clooney and Obama are on friendly terms. The actor hosted a major fundraiser for Biden last month that the former president also attended, raising $28 million for Biden. Obama initially publicly defended Biden after his disastrous debate performance two weeks ago, saying that “this election is still a choice between someone who has fought for ordinary folks his entire life and someone who only cares about himself.”

But he didn’t try to dissuade a high-profile celebrity from calling for Biden’s ouster, and that could be an omen for Biden. Obama isn’t just a former president, but one of the most senior Democratic figures in the country aside from Biden. This may signal an opening for Biden to be replaced without objections from Obama, if not his outright approval.

Obama’s non-objection to a major call for Biden to step down echoes similar actions from other leading Democrats, including Senator Tim Kaine and Representative Nancy Pelosi. Rank-and-file Democratic politicians can take all of this as a sign that their objections to Biden staying on aren’t hurting their standing with the party, and could ultimately strengthen the momentum behind the efforts to replace Biden with a new candidate.

Democrats tying Project 2025 to Donald Trump continues to get under his skin: Trump took to Truth Social late Wednesday night to try to distance himself from the radical agenda, posting after midnight, “I know nothing about Project 2025. I have not seen it, have no idea who is in charge of it, and unlike our very well received Republican Platform, had nothing to do with it.”

“The Radical Left Democrats are having a field day, however, trying to hook me into whatever policies are stated or said. It is pure disinformation on their part. By now, after all of these years, everyone knows where I stand on EVERYTHING! DJT,” he added.

This, it should come as no surprise, is probably not true. As The New Republic previously reported, Trump’s campaign, in coordination with the Republican National Committee, installed former Trump appointee Russ Vought as the RNC platform committee’s policy chair and Trump stooge Ed Martin as RNC deputy policy director. Both sit on the advisory board of Project 2025—and Vought even authored an entire chapter of the plan. A CNN analysis released Thursday found at least 140 people who worked in Trump’s administration involved in Project 2025—spanning across every level of his administration. According to CNN, six of Trump’s former cabinet secretaries collaborated on the 900-page master plan, with roughly 20 pages credited to Trump’s first deputy chief of staff.

Project 2025 is a pathway for executing Trump’s extreme policies The conservative think tank behind the project claims it’s crafted for any Republican president, but it’s not a matter of divine coincidence that Trump is the presumptive Republican nominee who, if he wins in November, will be inaugurated in 2025, the year for which the initiative is named. The thorn of Project 2025 dogging Trump seems to be its extreme position on executing a federal ban on abortion and IVF. It’s a position the extreme right holds, but which is at odds with a majority of the electorate.

Trump’s stated stance on contraceptives routinely shifts, but according to his recently adopted RNC platform, he wants to maintain access to contraception and IVF, while remaining murky on emergency contraceptives (Plan B) and the abortion pill, and opposing late-term abortions. Project 2025, meanwhile, seeks to dismantle access to IVF, emergency contraceptives, and the abortion pill nationwide.

During his presidency, Trump appointed several anti-abortion hardliners to his administration and the Supreme Court, which soon overturned Roe v. Wade. He allowed employers to opt-out of providing birth control coverage in their health insurance plans, expanded the “global gag rule,” and also sought to gut Planned Parenthood by banning the nonprofit from receiving federal funding.

Biden’s campaign has leaned into pairing Trump with Project 2025 as he attempts to distance himself from it. The DNC placed Project 2025 billboards around his rally in Doral, Florida, on Tuesday, and Biden has released multiple posts encouraging people to learn about the threat it poses, first directing people to Google the plan and then unveiling a website tying it to Trump. “Project 2025 will destroy America,” Biden warned in a video released by his campaign on Wednesday. “Look it up.”

There are legitimate questions to be had about President Joe Biden’s physical and mental ability to serve another four years in the White House, but at least one conservative lawmaker is pushing an unhinged conspiracy to explain the chief executive’s disastrous debate performance last month.

Early Thursday, Colorado Representative Lauren Boebert rhetorically asked online, “I wonder what could have caused Joe Biden’s rapid physical and cognitive decline?” But her choice to include four additional photos of Biden getting vaccinations revealed the shallowness of her concern.

Boebert has aggressively pushed the idea that Covid-19 vaccines are unsafe and dangerous, accusing door-to-door vaccinators at the height of the pandemic of being “needle Nazis” and claiming that instituting a mandatory vaccine network would be akin to “communist China.” In April, the Colorado congresswoman became a target for the conspiracy she helped inflame, battling conspiracy theorists after she suffered a medical emergency.

It’s not the first conspiracy that’s been crafted out of Biden’s poor matchup against Donald Trump in June.

Earlier this week, the White House had to shut down a bubbling conspiracy that Biden has Parkinson’s disease, an idea built almost entirely around one Republican lawmaker’s opinion on Biden’s footwear.

In a news release Monday night, White House medical experts explained that Dr. Kevin Cannard, a neurologist who has reportedly visited the White House eight times since last summer, has been a member of the White House medical unit since 2012, and is the “longest serving Neurologist at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center and in the Military Healthcare System.” Cannard’s routine visits in the last year were a part of neurology clinics for active-duty members working in the White House, wrote Dr. Kevin O’Connor, physician to the president.

Representative Pramila Jayapal had the perfect response to a Fox Business reporter who asked her whether she had any doubts about President Joe Biden’s mental fitness.

Hillary Vaughn asked the Washington state Democrat about Biden’s mental acuity as the two walked down the hallway on Capitol Hill Wednesday night.

“Do you think it’s OK to have a president, though, where there’s this open question about whether or not he’s in cognitive decline?” Vaughn asked.

“Do you think it was OK to have President Trump in cognitive decline for his entire four years?” Jayapal shot back.

Jayapal’s right: Donald Trump has repeatedly shown that his memory is slipping. The presumptive Republican nominee is prone to incoherent rambling, slurring his words, and forgetting the names of lawmakers, his doctor, and even his own son. And while all of these examples are from the campaign trail, it’s worth noting that Trump has been making similar gaffes for years, including during his time in the White House.

In 2019, 733 health professionals signed a petition to Congress claiming that Trump’s psychological state was quickly deteriorating. “Donald Trump has the real potential to become ever more dangerous, a threat to the safety of our nation,” they wrote. The same is still true.

Jayapal released a statement Monday emphasizing the stakes of another Trump term, but stopped short of supporting Biden’s candidacy or hinting that the president should drop out. She did have a message for the media, though.

“Any reporter or pundit who is asking about or talking about the aftermath of President Biden’s debate performance and health should also be spending at least the same amount of time and energy talking to Republicans about why they are still supporting a convicted felon who incited an insurrection and wants to be Dictator on Day 1,” Jayapal wrote.

Again, Jayapal hits the nail on the head. Fitness is not just physical or mental; it’s also based on ability and will. And as many of Trump’s former staffers, allies, and friends can attest, his crimes have disqualified him from ever being fit to hold office again.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has followed through on her threat to introduce impeachment articles for two Supreme Court justices with an affinity for accepting lavish gifts from Republican billionaires. In a fiery speech on the House floor introducing the articles, Ocasio-Cortez charged Congress with a “constitutional and moral obligation” to hold the nation’s highest court accountable for its careless corruption.

Ocasio-Cortez introduced three articles against Justice Clarence Thomas, which included one count of failing to disclose financial income and gifts and two counts of refusing to recuse himself from matters that concerned his wife’s “legal and financial interest.” A second resolution included counts against Justice Samuel Alito for refusing to recuse himself in cases where he had a personal bias against a party before the court, and one count for refusing to disclose gifts.

“The abuses of power committed by Justice Thomas and Justice Alito are precisely the types of corruption that the Framers [of the Constitution] understood was an existential threat to our democracy,” Ocasio Cortez said, arguing that impeachment is the tool available to bring the court back into balance with the other arms of government. “Corruption without consequence infects all it touches.”

Thomas has effectively admitted to pocketing favors from billionaire real estate developer and Nazi memorabilia collector Harlan Crow by retroactively amending previous financial disclosures that suspiciously omitted the massive gifts. They included private school tuition for his nephew; the renovation of the home where Thomas’s mother still lives; and undisclosed trips on the billionaire’s yacht, private jet, and at his private resort. Alito, meanwhile, has been accused of taking a luxury fishing trip with hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer, among other improprieties.

“Lastly, we cannot ignore the most important material consequences of this court’s unchecked corruption and its resulting influence: the suffering of the American people,” Ocasio-Cortez continued. “We cannot ignore and pretend that this corruption is wholly unrelated to the millions of pregnant Americans now suffering and bleeding out in emergency rooms under the court’s unleashing of extreme abortion bans across the United States, which was a key political priority of these undisclosed benefactors and shadow organizations surrounding Alito and Thomas’s misconduct.

“Nor can we ignore the millions of Americans now suffering hours-long wait times in the hot sun, often without water, just to cast a ballot—also a direct result of this corrupt court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act, allowing the closing of polling sites around the country,” she said.

Earlier this week, Democratic senators also requested the Department of Justice investigate Thomas for alleged criminal wrongdoing, pointing to the justice’s apparent ethics violations and tax omissions.

Donald Trump lashed out at George Clooney, after the Academy award–winning actor publicly urged Joe Biden to drop out of the presidential race.

“So now fake movie actor George Clooney, who never came close to making a great movie, is getting into the act. He’s turned on Crooked Joe like the rats they both are. What does Clooney know about anything?” Trump railed Wednesday in a post on Truth Social, in response to an editorial the Academy Award winner had written in The New York Times earlier that day.

Trump attempted to bash Clooney for writing that Biden had “saved our Democracy” in 2020 and could do it again by choosing not to run in 2024, by suggesting that Clooney was only reciting Democratic “talking points.” But then the former president proceeded to predictably rattle through his own set of talking points, each more baseless than the last.

“Crooked Joe Biden didn’t save our Democracy, he brought our Democracy to its knees. Clooney should get out of politics and go back to television,” Trump wrote. “Movies never really worked for him!!!”

Trump’s patently immature rant demonstrates more than a little reluctance to see his 81-year-old opponent exit the race and be replaced by another, younger candidate. Maybe Trump understands that in politics, like in Hollywood, youth is currency, and the 78-year-old is scared that he just can’t compete.

Buried deep in a letter Democratic senators sent to Attorney General Merrick Garland requesting a special prosecutor to investigate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s potential federal ethics and tax violations is something shocking: Democrats claim that the Supreme Court justice accepted a 2003 yacht trip to Russia and a helicopter flight to Yusupov Palace in St. Petersburg, Putin’s hometown—both paid for by Republican billionaire donor Harlan Crow.

Senators Sheldon Whitehouse, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Federal Courts, and Ron Wyden, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, issued a letter to Garland just before Congress took a break for the Fourth of July wherein they detailed several “likely undisclosed gifts” alleged to have been given to Thomas over the years from Crow and “affiliated companies.” Among those gifts are a 2003 yacht trip to “Russia and the Baltics” and a “helicopter ride to Yusupov Palace, St. Petersburg.”

The site of Rasputin’s assassination by monarchists in 1916, Yusupov Palace is in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s hometown of St. Petersburg. Putin has held and attended events at Yusupov Palace over the years, meeting with Chinese President Jiang Zemin in 2002 and attending the birthday party of Germany’s former Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder in 2014.

The trip and flight were first reported by ProPublica in May 2023 and buried among a slew of other undisclosed gifts. While it’s unclear whether Thomas met with Putin during his 2003 visit to Yusupov Palace, Whitehouse and Wyden’s letter to Garland paints a dizzying picture of years of luxurious trips and gifts showered on Thomas that were not disclosed, begging further questions.

“The scale of the potential ethics violations by Justice Thomas, and the willful pattern of disregard for ethics laws, exceeds the conduct of other government officials investigated by the Department of Justice for similar violations,” the letter, dated July 3, reads. “The breadth of the omissions uncovered to date, and the serious possibility of additional tax fraud and false statement violations by Justice Thomas and his associates, warrant the appointment of a Special Counsel to investigate this misconduct.”

Representative Jim Banks is running to represent Indiana in the Senate, but he categorically refuses to reject an armed rebellion against the federal government.

Banks was asked four times in person by a NOTUS reporter if he opposes a rebellion, and each time failed to give a clear answer. The fourth time, he even insulted the reporter.

“I don’t take you seriously enough to answer your question,” Banks said on Tuesday, following three previous attempts on Monday when he instead chose to complain about Democrats. Why has a question with a clear easy answer become such an issue? It stems from a social media post from Banks on May 30, the same night Donald Trump was convicted in his hush-money trial.

Banks’s post on X (formerly Twitter) is pinned to the top of his profile, and has a picture of the Appeal to Heaven flag without any words. That flag today is attributed to Christian nationalism and the far right. It was also a symbol of the “Stop the Steal” movement created by Trump’s followers following the 2020 election, and carried by rioters at the Capitol building on January 6, 2021. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito has attracted criticism for flying the same flag outside his vacation home in New Jersey.

When asked about the flag post, Banks initially replied, “I’ll let you make your own conclusions,” without elaborating. One of his answers on Monday did mention this year’s election, though.

“We’re in unprecedented times, and November will be the result of regular people taking our country back,” Banks said to NOTUS. “And then we’ll have a reset, and then we’ll take back our government and our country from the elites and those who are trying to destroy it. So you can infer whatever you’d like from that post.”

These remarks, coupled with Banks’s refusal to condemn violence, show the levels that the Republican Party has sunk to in the Trump era. Republicans fail to disavow any violence against those they disagree with, even when a politician’s family member is attacked with a hammer. Candidates seeking higher office seem to endorse violence against their enemies, especially those on the left. These calls have only emboldened the far right, who seize upon this rhetoric as a mandate to physically attack those whom they hate.

Thanks to Alito and the rest of the Supreme Court putting the presidency above the law, Trump probably won’t be held accountable for his incitement of violence at the Capitol in 2021. It’s a big green flag, bigger than the Appeal to Heaven flag, for his supporters and allies to do the same without the fear of consequences.

Representative Eric Swalwell dragged peewee free speech absolutist Ben Shapiro before the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, brilliantly calling out his support for the Trumpian Project 2025.

Shapiro appeared before the GOP-led hearing—titled “Collusion in the Global Alliance for Responsible Media”—to testify in support of the far-right conspiracy that media collusion is suppressing conservative voices.

During the hearing, Swalwell asked Shapiro point-blank about the right-wing Project 2025’s proposal to ban same-sex marriage.

“You think it’s a sin to have same-sex marriage?” Swalwell asked. “I’m just asking, is it a sin to be gay?”

“From a religious Jewish perspective, orientation is not a sin, but activity is,” Shapiro replied.

Swalwell then presented a large printout of a quote from Shapiro during a 2018 interview with Slate where he justified his opposition to “homosexual activity” by referring to himself, saying, “For example, I may have a desire to sleep with many women, but I do not.”

“I agree with me,” Shapiro interjected, at which Swalwell coyly hit back, “I’m sure it’s very hard to restrain yourself.”

The absurd back and forth followed questions where Swalwell asked Shapiro his opinions on various other aspects of Project 2025, much of which he expressed agreement with. Shapiro spent the rest of the hearing arguing against responsible media practices, claiming that restrictions against hate speech and misinformation inhibit free speech of conservatives and hurt propagators of far-right content, such as Shapiro’s own Daily Wire, the far-right website Breitbart, and conservative media outlet Fox News.

“It is time to stand up for the First Amendment in this Congress,” Shapiro declared in his testimony.

A multitude of research has found disinformation proliferates among the far right, stoking waves of extremist activities such as the election-denialist January 6 Capitol riot and far-right anti-vax protests that followed it.

In 2021, it was discovered that Facebook’s algorithm promoted inflammatory content and disinformation that incited violence in Myanmar, with researchers declaring Facebook was complicit in genocide. During the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, racist disinformation touted by Donald Trump falsely claiming China created the virus as a bioweapon led to violence against Chinese Americans. Research has found disinformation poses a serious threat to democracy in the United States and abroad as conspiracy theories fueled by the far right continue to spread relatively unchecked.

Senator Timothy Kaine gave a vague answer when asked about his thoughts on Joe Biden continuing his campaign to be reelected as president.

Speaking to NewsNation’s Joe Khalil Wednesday, Kaine said, “I have complete confidence that Joe Biden will do the patriotic thing for the country. And he’s going to make that decision. He’s never disappointed me. He’s always put patriotism and the country ahead of himself, and I’m going to respect the decision that he makes.”

What decision would that be, though? Biden has already said that he will not drop out of the race, so the ominous wording hints at what Kaine really thinks the president should do. The Virginia senator is a senior member of the party, having also served as the state’s governor and lieutenant governor, and was the Democratic vice presidential nominee in 2016. His opinion carries a lot of weight and signals that Biden has not won over his party, even after he has declared that he wants to stay on the ticket.

Virginia, normally a solid Democratic state, was not polling well for Biden even before his disastrous debate two weeks ago. An internal Democratic poll taken 72 hours after the debate showed the state in play for Donald Trump, so Kaine’s opinion could be reflecting that of the state’s electorate at the moment.

Kaine’s words also echo another leading Democrat, Representative Nancy Pelosi, who said on Wednesday morning that “I want him to decide whatever he decides to do, and that’s the way it is, whatever he decides, we go in.” Both Pelosi and Kaine were given chances to give their unequivocal support to Biden’s reelection campaign, and each declined.

Right now, the mood among Democrats appears worried at best. A closed-door meeting of the House Democratic caucus revealed a party very much divided on Biden’s prospects. While Biden is trying to tamp down calls for him to withdraw, many Democrats want just the opposite and are willing to say so privately and publicly. If party leaders like Kaine and Pelosi continue to hedge, will Biden’s stance lead to a party revolt?