What Joe Biden Needs To Do To Win Back Hollywood Donors & “Show People He’s Up To The Job”
EXCLUSIVE and UPDATED: “Why isn’t Joe Biden on 60 Minutes tonight? Why wasn’t he on Meet the Press this morning?”
Those are the questions an exasperated top Hollywood donor had Sunday as the blast radius from the president’s disastrous June 27 debate performance continued to expand despite the White House and the campaign’s efforts to act like it was just a bump in the road to reelection.
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“They need to stop blaming other people, the president needs to show people he’s up to the job,” the donor, who attended the fundraiser with Vice President Kamala Harris at Rob and Michele Reiner’s on Saturday night, added. “They need to get him on TV, now!”
Expressing impatience at best and anger at worst with the campaign and the 81-year-old Biden’s weak-voiced and meandering face-off with a surprisingly focused and unsurprisingly falsehood-spreading Donald Trump on CNN on Thursday, a number of deep pocketed Tinseltown contributors on both coasts tell Deadline that face time with Harris and Biden himself over the weekend has offered minimal reassurance, to put it kindly.
“It’s all off the teleprompter, it’s all don’t worry,” a NYC donor said Sunday. “I’m f*cking worried!” A number of donors in both the Big Apple and the City of Angels said they are taking a “wait and see” approach, as Deadline reported the day after the debate.
Some donors are being more circumspect, speaking to the campaign privately. Others, not so much. “Let’s see what the plan is this week, let’s see how he turns this around,” a prominent TV showrunner and usually dependable Democratic donor said. “I want to see them flood the zone.”
Amid calls from the New York Times Editorial Board and columnists, New Yorker editor David Remnick and others for the struggling Biden to bow out ASAP in service to the nation, a repeated mantra this weekend is that if Biden, who is currently huddling at Camp David, is going to stay in the race, he has to take a drastically new stance.
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“Biden should sit down with George Stephanopoulos live for an hour this week as a start,” a well-connected producer states. “Make it event viewing, come clean.”
“Stump speeches, handpicked crowds don’t cut it anymore now. We are going to lose this thing if things don’t change fast,” the film and TV veteran went on to say. “If he can’t do it, it’s a shame to say, (but) we need someone who can to take on Trump and his crowd.”
What was especially frustrating to one top Hollywood supporter in the post-debate fallout was the Biden team’s blaming of pundits and others. “We all saw what we saw,” the supporter said.
Already attracting attention from certain media circles today, a POTUS sit-down interview is not an entirely original idea after a big gaffe or crisis; it worked for Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton on more than one occasion. However, compared to his predecessors, Biden has done relatively few of them.
Citing data from the White House Transition Project, the Washington Post reported in April that Biden had done 118 one-on-one interviews with media as of April 30, compared with 327 for Trump at that point in his term and 479 for Obama. Biden also bypassed the chance to do an interview with CBS News during the network’s Super Bowl pre-game, typically a way to draw a huge exposure in relatively relaxed circumstances.
The White House has often pushed back on figures such as these, noting that Biden has done frequent informal Q&A sessions with the media — 570 — compared to 623 for Trump at this point in his term. As White Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told the Deadline ElectionLine podcast in April, POTUS values the power and reach of local TV to reach voters over the networks.
None of the networks has announced any kind of pending interview with Biden.
Spokespersons for ABC News, CNN and CBS News did not have any kind of update, and a spokesperson for NBC News did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The president last sat for an interview with ABC News’ David Muir in Normandy, France earlier this month during the D-Day 80th anniversary commemorations.
The pitch now we’re hearing donors want for an in-depth sit down interview is that it would be a kind of event television all its own, not fleeting moments on the campaign trail. Biden could explain what happened, and why he had such a bad night.
In fact, several Hollywood political denizens, many of whom were at the Harris fundraiser on Saturday, believe the best way out of this mess for Biden if he wants to have a fighting chance against Trump is to be more like his VP. “He needs to go on CNN with [Anderson] Cooper. I hate to say this, he needs to go on Fox with Hannity like [California Gov. Gavin] Newsom did, and give back better than he gets,” another donor states. “Show people he can handle the tough questions.”
In clear damage-control mode, Harris was suddenly all over post-debate coverage Thursday night. Stressing that the president had “a slow start” but finished strong, Harris won praise from the likes of Anderson Cooper, who said to the VP: “Neither person on that stage tonight made the argument as coherently as you just did.”
A somewhat familiar face on the Rupert Murdoch-owned Fox and an adopted political son for Biden, Newsom offered a preview of a potential 2028 White House bid when he wiped the floor with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on a Hannity-hosted debate in November.
Right now, with some outlets reporting a come-to-Jesus moment among Biden family members at the presidential retreat (something Biden aides deny), Biden’s overall schedule for next week has not been made public. Gathering with family for a photo portrait by Annie Leibovitz, the president will stay at Camp David until Monday, and return to the White House around 8:20 p.m. ET, the Press Office confirmed late today. With the Independence Day holiday coming up this week, Biden has a visit to a D.C. Emergency Operations Center and a fundraiser Tuesday, a Medal of Honor ceremony Wednesday and a barbeque with military service members on the Fourth of July. Nothing else has been announced.
Anthony Scaramucci, who briefly served as Trump’s communications director, wrote on X/Twitter that over the weekend, he “went to President Biden‘s fundraiser in East Hampton and I thought he did quite well reading the teleprompter today and meeting with people. However, that is not going to be enough to prove to the American people that he’s up for another 4 years.”
He pointed to an insistent email that author Whitney Tilson has been sending out to top Democrats, which includes four ideas to deal with the post-debate fallout. They include holding an hourlong press conference at the White House and continuing them every week until after the election; doing an interview with 60 Minutes this week; meeting with the editorial board of the New York Times; and doing another appearance on a late-night show, as he did with Seth Meyers earlier this year.
The recommendations all came with a sense of urgency, that Biden had to act quickly to course correct.
In sync with much of what Tilson wrote, a longtime political operative told Deadline that Biden should be giving face-to-face interviews and town halls every week up until the Democratic National Convention at the end of August in Chicago. “More events with regular people, that’s where Joe Biden used to excel,” the operative added, noting the contrast to Trump and his Mar-a-Lago courtiers.
On top of that, Sunday night is the end-of-quarter deadline for campaign contributions, and the Biden-Harris team may face another embarrassment if they come up significantly short again against the Trump machine.
When it comes to the bottom line, the debate debacle proved a cash cow for the Biden-Harris campaign The reelection effort raised $27 million from June 27-June 28, according to a Saturday memo sent out to influential donors from campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon. However, that total is likely much less than what the campaign might have pulled in if the president had put in a strong showing.
One recipient of O’Malley Dillion’s correspondence called it “tone deaf.” Another insider dismissed the memo as part of a “don’t believe you’re eyes strategy,” citing the social media posts by leading Democratic donor John Morgan.
Biden has for too long been fooled by the value of Anita Dunn and her husband. They need to go… TODAY
The grifting is gross. It was political malpractice.
Cc/ @JoeNBC @maggieNYT @Messina2012 @katierogers— John Morgan (@JohnMorganESQ) June 30, 2024
“Joe Biden had a chance to make his case and he blew it,” a big check-writing West Los Angeles donor exclaimed this weekend. “He has a small window to make his case again directly to the American public, and hope they give him another chance.”
This post was corrected to reflect the correct numbers of one-on-one interviews Joe Biden has done since he became president.
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