Joy Behar slams George Clooney for calling for Joe Biden to step down: 'I'm mad at George Clooney right now'
"The View" cohost Sunny Hostin added that she, too, didn't like that Clooney penned a "New York Times" op-ed criticizing Biden.
Joy Behar admitted at The View's Hot Topics table that she has the hots for George Clooney, but she's also turning up the heat on the Oscar-winning actor for flaming Joe Biden in his New York Times op-ed calling for the president to drop out of the 2024 election.
"President Biden is fighting right now for his political future," Behar — filling in as moderator for Whoopi Goldberg, who tested positive for COVID — said at the top of Thursday's live show. "George Clooney wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times claiming that after he saw Biden's condition at the recent fundraiser, he doesn't think he's up for the gig. George Clooney? Couldn't he tell him that in person, for god's sakes?"
Behar, 81, said that she doesn't feel that Democrats calling for Biden to bow out of the race "understand what's at stake yet," and cited Biden's economic track record as a standout accomplishment that Clooney, 63, should have mentioned in his essay.
ABC; Taylor Hill/WireImage
Joy Behar on 'The View' ; George Clooney"I'm mad at George Clooney right now, even though we dated," Behar joked. "I wish!"
Cohost Alyssa Farah Griffin, who previously worked for Republican candidate Donald Trump's White House communications team before resigning and subsequently speaking out and testifying against her former boss, pushed back on Behar's sentiment.
"I respectfully disagree. Joe Biden's feelings don't matter more than our country. This is not the media, this is not a narrative, these are Democrats, lifelong, who want to defeat Donald Trump and who know how to win races, saying that Joe Biden cannot win as things are going," Griffin, 35, said. "It's top Obama advisors, top Clinton advisors, the biggest, most prolific democratic fundraiser, George Clooney — these are people who want to see Donald Trump defeated. They're not doing this for fun or sport, they want to see Joe Biden do better."
Behar cut in to tell Griffin, "We know that!" to which the conservative panelist responded, "Then why are you mad at him?"
Sunny Hostin, the show's legal expert, echoed Behar when she expressed disdain for Clooney's choice to write about his issues with Biden — whom the actor called a close friend in the piece — publicly.
"I don't like that George Clooney did this, I don't like that George Clooney aired this dirty laundry to the world," Hostin, 55, said. "I think these conversations are happening, I think they should be happening because our democracy is at stake, but they should be happening privately with the Commander-in-Chief, who we should have the utmost respect for."
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Entertainment Weekly has reached out to Clooney's publicist for comment.
"I love Joe Biden. As a senator. As a vice president and as president. I consider him a friend, and I believe in him. Believe in his character. Believe in his morals. In the last four years, he’s won many of the battles he’s faced," Clooney wrote in the Times essay, published Wednesday. "But the one battle he cannot win is the fight against time. None of us can. 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 [June 27] debate."
Amid repeated calls from both sides of the political aisle to pull out of the upcoming election matchup against Trump, both Biden and White House representatives have passionately stressed that he's not going anywhere. Biden stated in a July 5 X post that he's “not letting one 90-minute debate wipe out three and a half years of work. I'm staying in the race, and I will beat Donald Trump."
The Biden campaign had no comment when reached Wednesday by EW.
The View airs weekdays at 11 a.m. ET/PT on ABC.
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