Actor and filmmaker George Clooney has said it was a “mistake” for Vice President Kamala Harris to replace Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee in last year’s U.S. presidential election against Donald Trump.
Speaking in an interview with CBS, Clooney reflected on the controversial transition that took place after Biden withdrew from the race, saying he still stands by his earlier public call for the president to step aside — but believes the party mishandled what came next.
Clooney made headlines in July of that year when he published a New York Times op-ed titled “I Love Joe Biden. But We Need a New Nominee.” In it, he praised Biden’s decades of public service but said the then-81-year-old president could no longer effectively lead a campaign, noting that “the one battle he cannot win is the fight against time.”
Just two weeks after Clooney’s op-ed appeared, Biden announced that he would not seek re-election, paving the way for Harris to become the Democratic nominee. However, her campaign struggled to gain momentum, and she ultimately lost to Trump in the November election.
Clooney told CBS he had no regrets about urging Biden to step aside but admitted that the outcome was far from what he had envisioned. “I would write it again,” he said. “We had a chance. I wanted there to be, as I wrote in the op-ed, a primary — to battle-test the candidates quickly and get the process going.”
Instead, there was no Democratic primary, and Harris was effectively handed the nomination. Clooney said that decision left her in a politically difficult position. “The mistake with it being Kamala,” he said, “is that she had to run against her own record. It’s very hard to do that when your message has to be, ‘I’m not that person.’ She was given a very tough task.”
Clooney described the situation as “a mistake, quite honestly.” He emphasized that his concern had always been about ensuring a strong Democratic showing in 2024, not undermining the president personally.
In his original New York Times essay, Clooney wrote that it was “devastating to say it,” but the Joe Biden he met at a Los Angeles fundraiser weeks before the op-ed “was not the same Joe Biden of 2010 — or even 2020.” Clooney said the president’s public appearance mirrored what Americans saw in his disastrous debate performance against Trump, which fueled fresh concerns about his age and cognitive health.
Those remarks angered many Biden allies — including the president’s son, Hunter Biden. In an expletive-laced interview with YouTube host Andrew Callaghan of Channel 5, Hunter accused Clooney of exaggerating his father’s decline. “What do you have to do with anything?” he said. “Why do I have to listen to you?”
Despite the backlash, Clooney maintains that his intervention was motivated by loyalty to the Democratic Party’s long-term success. “I love Joe,” he said, “but we needed to prepare for the future.”
Meanwhile, Vice President Harris has hinted that her political career is far from over. In a recent BBC interview, she said she would “possibly” run for president again and expressed confidence that the U.S. would eventually see a woman in the Oval Office.
For now, Clooney’s remarks have reignited debate among Democrats about whether the party’s leadership transition was handled wisely — or whether, as he now suggests, it was a costly mistake that helped return Donald Trump to the White House.
