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.