Academy Award-winning actor George Clooney believes the Democratic Party has to get its act together — and it probably won’t be asking him to lead that effort.
In an Esquire magazine interview published Monday, the 64-year-old movie star cited the Civil War, the war in Vietnam and the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy Jr. as very difficult tests the U.S. survived. He noted those 1968 shootings were accompanied by rioting in the streets and a fierce national divide that eventually cooled.
According to Clooney, the U.S. is again in a period where things will get worse before they get better.
“We’re going to get through it, but a lot of damage is going to be done along the way because of where we are. And it is heartbreaking to see,” Clooney said. “And Democrats are gonna have to get their act together.”
Clooney was an outspoken Donald Trump critic during the President’s first term in office, calling him a “dumb goofball” desperate to befriend celebrities before being elected.
Clooney later became critical of Trump’s Democratic opponent Joe Biden, whom he called on to end his candidacy following a disastrous July 2024 Presidential debate between the elderly candidates.
“I love Joe Biden,” Clooney wrote in a New York Times op-ed published days before Biden, then 81, withdrew from the race. “But the one battle he cannot win is the fight against time.”
The “Gravity” actor told Esquire he doesn’t envision doing anything like that again.
“I don’t think so,” Clooney said. “I think people have heard enough from me.”
Clooney explained in his New York Times piece that he’d recently attended a fundraiser for Biden where he realized the incumbent wasn’t up for another four years in office. He told Esquire he felt a need to speak out at that time “because I’d been a personal witness to things.”
Trump has called Clooney “a second rate movie star.”
Biden’s son Hunter Biden also addressed Clooney in a July interview where he wondered “What right do you have to step on a man who’s given 52 years of his f—–g life to the service of this country?”
