It’s not only the Democratic Party’s political leaders and movers and shakers who are concerned about US President Joe Biden and his run for re-election after last week’s widely criticised debate performance.
The moneyed inhabitants of the top echelons of Hollywood who have consistently been some of the Democrats’ biggest and most consistent sources of major donations has been ripped apart by what they saw on their television screens during the first US presidential debate and are calling for his head, claiming that the 81-year-old’s team lied to them about his physical and mental ability to lead a successful campaign against the unplayable, deranged and dangerously orange-tinged 78-year-old Republican nominee, Donald Trump.
In June, at a celebrity-packed fundraiser organised by Hollywood mega-powerbroker Jeffrey Katzenberg and featuring Biden in conversation with former boss Barack Obama, with appearances by George Clooney, Julia Roberts and Barbra Streisand, Biden seemed in fine and fiery form.
He told host Jimmy Kimmel that all Americans needed to do was look back at what it was like under Trump to remind themselves of how bad things would get if they didn’t throw their votes behind him. The event raised $30m for the Biden campaign, a record amount for any event hosted for any Democratic candidate.
Now, however, things are now looking far more tenuous in California as emergency meetings between worried Hollywood donors and senior members of the Democratic Party have been taking place all over town and the cries from many quarters for Biden to do the right thing and step aside have become louder and more frenzied. If there’s one thing Hollywood moguls know and hate, it’s a bad TV appearance with terrible ratings.
That’s in spite of the attempts of some celebrities, like Hollywood legend and well-known Trump reviler Robert De Niro, to try to calm things down and remind everyone that Biden remains the best and only candidate with a chance to stop the return of Trump.
In an email sent far and wide to all the boardrooms, mansions and limousines of Hollywood last Friday, De Niro reminded film industry Democrats that “it’s going to take all of us to make sure Donald Trump never returns to the White House, so I’m personally asking: Will you please chip in $25 to the Biden-Harris re-election campaign to help ensure Donald Trump never steps foot in the White House again.”
Not everyone is convinced. While the town waits to hear from two of its biggest Democrat kingmakers — Katzenberg and media mogul Haim Saban — others have already taken the opportunity to make their feelings very loudly known. Chief of these is Ari Emanuel, the multibillionaire agent head and CEO of Endeavor, the conglomerate that owns the UFC and WWE franchises.
A deep-pocketed donor to the Democrats, Emanuel this week took the stage at the exclusive Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado, where he made a detour from answering standard questions from acting festival curator Tina Brown about his Hollywood career to offer his opinion on the debate debacle.
Emanuel began with a quip about the short-sightedness of America’s fabled founding fathers. While they had stipulated in the constitution that any candidate for president had to be over 35, they “didn’t give us an end date”. The Endeavor CEO didn’t stop there, calling out Biden’s advisers for not being forthright about the president’s mental and physical capacity and criticising his decision to stubbornly insist on a second term run.
Well known for not mincing his words, Emanuel said: “I had a father who died at 92, but at 81 I took away his car, and it was a very simple test for me ... If you were driving from downtown Beverly Hills to Malibu, would you want Biden to do it at night? Would you want Trump to do it at night? If the answer is neither, you cannot have them running a $27-trillion company called the United States.”
Emanuel admitted that the concerns about Biden, coming so late in the game with only four months to go until election day, may not give the Democrats much room for manoeuvring but he and other major donors are aware that their money may be able to do some talking, if needed. As he told Brown, “I talked to a bunch of big donors, and they’re moving all their money to Congress and the Senate. It’s a legal issue now ... Maybe there’s some wiggle room, but I haven’t seen it. I don’t know, I’m not a lawyer, but we’re in f**k city!”
One of the first and most angrily messaged suggestions between Hollywood’s elite about how to address the debate fallout has been that the best way to combat a bad TV appearance is to have Biden make another, much better one as soon as possible. While the Biden campaign was initially slow to act, preferring to have their candidate address his debate performance failures at a rally in North Carolina last week, it now seems that they may be listening to their panicked Hollywood funders.
Biden will make his first post-debate television appearance on Friday, when he sits down with ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos for an interview that everyone will be watching and which is sure to be centred on two burning issues: his debate performance and whether he has what it takes to convince the US and US money to beat Trump in November.
If he doesn’t, then a flustered and increasingly furious Hollywood may indeed follow through on its threats to turn off the taps, even if this seems like a knee-jerk reaction that in the light of the money Biden has already raised from Hollywood donors may not really make that much of a difference.
Perhaps Hollywood donors and other wealthy backers of the Democrats would be better served by the advice of PBS and Bloomberg host Alexander Heffner, who told Variety that “funders have the tendency to be sucked into the duopolistic status quo instead of imagining what the future should look like. Now, they have the opportunity to enlist sorely missing vibrant and charismatic voices in a game-changing convention ... It’s a Hollywood dream come true if they realise the urgency of the moment.”
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