“Why's he laughing?”-“He got the joke.” Coworkers about me in a restaurant. I was about 50. I’m near 81. Won't happen now. Wouldn’t hear it. I know a man who could run a marathon but he'd get lost. Everybody knows someone with dementia. Biden has that look.

 

UPDATE:

TRUMP'S ENTIRE CAMPAIGN IS CENTERED TO ATTACK JOE BIDEN.

"One of the two principals tasked with returning Trump to the White House, LaCivita had long conceived of the 2024 race as a contest that would be “extraordinarily visual”—namely, a contrast of strength versus weakness. Trump, whatever his countless liabilities as a candidate, would be cast as the dauntless and forceful alpha, while Biden would be painted as the pitiable old heel, less a bad guy than the buatt of a very bad joke, America’s lovable but lethargic uncle who needed, at long last, to be put to bed."

FROM: 

The Atlantic

Trump Is Planning for a Landslide Win

And his campaign is all but praying Joe Biden doesn’t drop out.

By Tim Alberta

July 10, 2024

“Making small talk with the current and former presidents while preparing for a photo, the donor said that she and Obama shared a brief joke that Biden initially seemed to miss. The current president only attempted a retort ‘in a barely audible voice’ after the photo was over and others had moved on, she said.

“The media … has done an abominable job of prioritizing what’s important and what’s not. We are on the brink of going down the road of a dictatorship. That is more important than anything else … We’re in 1933, we’re not 1938, we have the chance to stop the train.” - Jennifer Rubin

 

Biden campaign staff and allies have characterized the criticism as unfair and retroactive second-guessing, pointing to the president’s travel and his stamina through the roughly three-hour long event. They note, too, that the Kimmel portion of the evening was open to the media.

‘Several reporters were present for the President’s interview with Jimmy Kimmel at the L.A. fundraiser,’ Lauren Hitt, a campaign spokesperson, said in a statement. “None of them reported out anything like this at the time.”

The donor said she and her husband were asked by friends after the event about Biden’s condition and “struggled to answer them honestly,” fearful of eroding Biden’s support.

‘We were worried that if we told the truth — that President Biden was stiff, slow and dare we say it, fragile — that we risked losing their support for the president,” said the donor. “It was painful to be deceptive. Now, we realize we were not alone in withholding what we experienced.”

Another donor said he focused on what he considered the evening’s high points, such as Biden’s rousing slam on the Supreme Court’s recent rulings.

‘You want to believe in the possible,’ he said.

The fundraiser appears to have been a breaking point for Clooney. In an op-ed in the New York Times on Wednesday, he wrote that he loved and supported Biden — but that he believed Biden should drop out of the race, in part because of what he had observed at the event…”

“Biden ‘gave us a bunch of malarkey, and I’m really pissed,’ said Ari Emanuel, CEO of entertainment conglomerate WME, speaking at the Aspen Ideas Festival the day after the debate. Emanuel — whose brother, Rahm, was picked by Biden to be ambassador to Japan — suggested that donors should stop giving to the president’s campaign. The Biden campaign or White House hasn’t contacted him since his criticism, Emanuel said in an interview Wednesday.

‘Let’s go with the bullpen please. Let’s go with relief,’ Damon Lindelof, the producer and showrunner behind TV shows ‘Lost,’ ‘The Leftovers,’ and ‘Watchmen,’ wrote in a column for Deadline last week, calling for a “DEMbargo” on donations until Biden drops out.

Clooney’s column in the New York Times this week went further, calling on Democrats in Congress to speak out and help push for a new nominee.

‘The dam has broken. We can put our heads in the sand and pray for a miracle in November, or we can speak the truth,’ Clooney wrote.

Other Biden supporters at the fundraiser have stayed with the president. Hahn, who performed at the event, joked about calls for Biden to drop out of the race when she guest-hosted Kimmel’s show on Monday.

“Here’s the thing: I would vote for a skeleton over Donald Trump,” she said.

“In fact,” she said, “I may literally be voting for a skeleton.”

Tyler Pager, Aaron Schaffer, Shawn Boburg and Michael Kranish contributed to this report.

MORE AT:

Inside the glitzy fundraiser where Biden lost George Clooney

At the June 15 event at L.A.’s Peacock Theater, some donors said this week that they noticed Biden seemed slow. He seemed frail. As he greeted donors lined up for photos, he trailed off or spoke too quietly in small talk conversation to be heard.

Dan Diamond

July 12, 2024 at 6:00 a.m. EDT