George Clooney, a Major Biden Fund-Raiser, Urges Him to Drop Out

George Clooney, the Hollywood actor and Democratic financial powerhouse who co-hosted a major fund-raiser for President Biden last month, wrote in a New York Times guest essay on Wednesday that Mr. Biden was too old to seek re-election and should end his campaign.

“The one battle he cannot win is the fight against time,” Mr. Clooney wrote. “It’s devastating to say it, but the Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fund-raiser was not the Joe ‘big F-ing deal’ Biden of 2010. He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate.”

Mr. Clooney, who last month hosted a $28 million fund-raiser in Hollywood for Mr. Biden that his campaign said was the largest ever for a Democratic candidate, is by far the highest-profile figure in the party to call for the president to end his campaign.

The Biden campaign planned the Hollywood fund-raiser around Mr. Clooney’s schedule, according to a person who helped arrange the event and insisted on anonymity to discuss the preparations. The event required Mr. Biden to fly from a Group of 7 gathering in Italy to California and back to Washington in a short period. Mr. Biden later blamed jet lag from that trip for his lethargy in the days leading up to the first debate and his weak performance during it.

His guest essay was published just hours after Representative Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker who remains influential in Democratic politics, suggested during a television interview that “it’s up to the president to decide if he is going to run.”

Mr. Biden and his top aides have insisted that he is staying in the race until the end. On Monday, he told top donors that he was done addressing the debate — though he brought it up again during a video call