In Hollywood, Panic Over Joe Biden Builds to a Silent Shriek

So far, Hollywood is holding its tongue, at least publicly. It has not yet begun holding back donations amid widespread calls for President Joe Biden to step aside and let another Democratic contender take his place in the 2024 campaign. The patience of his supporters in the entertainment industry has a ticking clock, however. Some are saying that the concern they feel privately now could become full-fledged panic and lead to more overt measures if they don’t see change in the next two weeks.

The alarm that erupted following the 81-year-old Biden’s performance during last Thursday’s presidential debate against Donald Trump has saturated the ranks of actors, filmmakers, executives, and other deep-pocketed allies in Hollywood. Leaders in this politically active segment of the industry are trying to maintain calm, like Andy Spahn, the LA-based political consultant to Jeffrey Katzenberg, Steven Spielberg, and other show business titans, who helped raise more than $20 million for Biden’s campaign in 2020. He declined an interview about the current contretemps, but offered Vanity Fair this statement: “Everyone needs to just take a breath.”

The entertainment industry’s Democratic-leaning politicos are largely following that guidance, though their breathing is a little closer to hyperventilation right now.

On Saturday, two days after the debate, about 200 show business heavyweights gathered for a fundraising brunch at the home of entertainment attorney Ken Ziffren, the longtime Los Angeles film czar responsible for bolstering production in the city. The focus of the event was not the presidential campaign, but a group of Democrats vying for highly competitive US Senate seats. Biden’s performance dominated conversation anyway, at least offstage.

Actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt hosted the onstage discussion, which included Vice President Kamala Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff; sitting senators Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin and Bob Casey Jr. of Pennsylvania, who are up for reelection in November; and congressional reps Ruben Gallego of Arizona, Colin Allred of Texas, and California’s Adam Schiff (on his home turf), all of whom hope to make the leap from the House of Representatives to the Senate. No mention was made in their conversation about Biden’s dispiriting debate performance or the possibility of him stepping aside, but out in the audience it was an inescapable topic of chatter.

Among these powerbrokers, this is a rare moment of powerlessness. “What I’m hearing with my ear to the ground is that the notion of Biden stepping down has not gone away and may well happen. Donors are very concerned, but there seems to be a strategic effort to allow Biden to make that decision on his own in a graceful way,” says a donor who was in attendance on Saturday, a self-described moderate whose Democratic allegiance has been galvanized by disgust with Trump.

The donor adds that the consensus in Hollywood circles is that pressuring Biden publicly will only make him dig in: “All of that is strategic in regard to letting Joe save face because he’s notably stubborn. And he’s also known, to his credit, for getting up when he’s on the mat. He did unseat Trump. There seems to be this balance between letting things marinate, figuring out if he still is the best person to potentially beat Trump, or whether it really is dire.”

In need of reassurance, Hollywood is looking for a stronger performance. If the campaign’s framing is to be believed—that Biden merely had a bad night, as former president Barack Obama wrote on X—then the president has about two weeks to prove it before facing a revolt from his would-be supporters. “He gave that rally in North Carolina the next day and by all accounts it was very strong,” the donor tells Vanity Fair. “There have to be a thousand of those, because [51 million] people or more tuned into that debate. He should be out there every day. He’s got to try to flood the zone, with interviews or press conferences from the White House. Just doing one rally the next day to stop the bleeding isn’t going to remotely do what’s necessary in order for him to remain on the ticket.”

Biden’s most famous celebrity backers remain publicly loyal. On Friday morning, at the peak of panic about the debate, the campaign sent small-level donors a mass email addressed “From: Robert De Niro,” who has seldom passed an opportunity to heap scorn on Trump. “Over the years, I’ve played my share of vicious, low-life characters. I’ve spent a lot of time studying bad men,” the Oscar winner wrote. “Donald Trump is a wannabe tough guy with no morals or ethics who will do whatever he can to obtain power. As an actor, I could never play him. There’s not a shred of humanity to hang on to.” De Niro made no mention of the debate, but added, along with his request for a $25 donation to the campaign, “I strongly support Joe Biden…. I trust him completely to run the country.”

Others have acknowledged the setback while still rallying behind the president. Filmmaker Rob Reiner, one of the most outspoken Democratic voices in Hollywood, took to X to declare that even a diminished Biden was better than a malevolent Trump. “Last night’s debate was a disaster for President Biden,” Reiner wrote. “But the choice is still crystal clear: We either can choose a good decent man who cares about his fellow citizens and knows how to govern, or a Convicted Felon who will destroy our Democracy. Not a tough choice.” The night of the debate, CNN reported eyewitness details from a Los Angeles watch party, writing, “by a few answers in, Rob Reiner was screaming about losing and Jane Fonda had tears in her eyes.”

On his HBO Max series Real Time, Bill Maher struck a similar note—although far more bluntly. “I have said before, I will vote for his head in a jar of blue liquid. And after last night, time to get the jar,” he said. He noted that he had proposed more than a year ago that Biden shouldn’t run for reelection, and in an op-ed in The New York Times, Maher said an open convention to replace him could be a blessing in disguise. “Suddenly, instead of rehashing the debate from hell—worst episode of The Golden Bachelor ever—they would be hosting a competition, something Americans love,” he wrote. “This may sound like I’m doing a bit here, but I’m deadly serious that this would be good for the Democrats and give them a better chance of winning.”

Maher said his pick would be California governor Gavin Newsom, who made the TV rounds after the debate to shore up support for Biden. “Watching him make the case against Mr. Trump in the pre-debate interviews and defend Mr. Biden post-debate reminded me: This guy is good at this,” Maher wrote. “He is forceful, is never at a loss for words or stats, never stumbles, is never intimidated. He’s unbullyable, and that’s important against Mr. Trump.”

Newsom was one of the attendees at a Friday night birthday party for sports and entertainment mogul Casey Wasserman, whose 50th celebration at a hangar in the Santa Monica airport was attended by power players from Hollywood and politics. Disney CEO Bob Iger and Jim Gianopulos, the former head of 20th Century Fox and later Paramount Pictures, mingled with Newsom alongside Bill Clinton and Nancy Pelosi. Another Hollywood insider close to many executives and political donors tells Vanity Fair that Biden’s woes crashed that party too: “There was a lot of talk there, but nothing really seemed to come out of it. It was just people griping.”

This observer describes the stages of grief that Hollywood’s big-money donors experienced after the debate: “It went through two cycles. One was obviously fury and anger: ‘We must get rid of him. Biden must be replaced.’ People went dark, and started talking about who would replace him. The biggest thing I noticed in the second part of the cycle was that people in Hollywood decided that they didn’t want to go out on a limb to push Biden out. Because if whoever is replacing him does not win the election, they’re going to be a pariah. It was a really interesting dynamic. We don’t want him, but we don’t know what’s better.”

The lack of public declarations for Biden to step down, this insider says, was not just about waiting and seeing, but also about the fear of being ostracized. “If Trump wins and I’m out there publicly telling Jeffrey Katzenberg, ‘You’re wrong to back Biden,’ could I end up in Hollywood jail, so to speak?”

There’s also a sense that Biden may have already gotten what he needs from the entertainment industry, having already done fundraisers in Los Angeles. “He just raised enough to get him to the general [election],” the observer says. “I don’t know, if he comes back into town for another ATM stop, how much he’ll get. We’ll see how it plays out, depending on Biden’s moves over the next, say, six to eight weeks.”

That’s longer than some Hollywood donors and activists will tolerate. “The issue is his need to clearly demonstrate to the American public that he’s capable, and that he’s able to manage the cut and thrust of politics. He has time—but not if he operates as if it is business as usual, which is what the campaign seems to want to do,” says one high-level industry figure.

The Democratic National Convention begins on August 19 in Chicago, and the discussion about who could take over the candidacy can only move out into the open if Biden agrees to step back soon. Some Hollywood supporters expressed frustration that there wasn’t a competitive primary, and hope Biden will face reality and allow a truncated version of that politicking to happen now.

“It would be interesting to map out what the options are,” says another entertainment executive who has been a longtime supporter of Democratic candidates. “You’re voting for democracy at this point. Someone should lay out the road map that if it’s not Joe, who could it be? Who could win? It’s only been a few days, but it’s the only thing anyone is talking about.”

In addition to Newsom, other favorite contenders among the Hollywood set are Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker, and Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar. Harris, the sitting vice president, is lower on the list for many because she has long struggled with poor approval ratings.

Creating further fear was the Supreme Court ruling on Monday that bolstered Trump’s claim of “absolute immunity,” when the panel’s six conservative justices decreed that US presidents cannot face “criminal prosecution for actions” that are “official” duties, badly damaging the federal government’s ongoing prosecution of Trump for his efforts to undermine the results of the last election. “He would be completely unchastened in a second term,” says the Democratic donor who attended the Senate fundraiser on Saturday, adding that the ruling calls to mind Richard Nixon’s once shocking 1977 statement that “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”

“It’s a little more nuanced, but in essence the Supreme Court has now codified what Nixon said,” the donor says. “It makes people even more nervous about what a second Trump term would look like.”

The Biden predicament is complicated by the fact that many Hollywood supporters have become close with the president, the first lady, and their senior staff, over the years of his presidency and his terms as Obama’s vice president. “He’s really smart, and it’s crushing because I think he’s so nice and Jill is really great. They have a decency about them,” the entertainment exec says. “There’s an integrity to the current administration, which is worth some conversation—because there will not be with Trump.”

The longtime donor also expresses sorrow that the situation has come to this: “It’s frustrating, because he had, by many accounts, a productive presidency. Six months ago or a year ago he could have gone out in a blaze of glory, and said, ‘You know what, man, I’m 80 years old. I did my job. I’m proud of it. I unseated this madman, and I’m going to help search for and support the most likely successor to ensure we beat Trump again.’ Many believe he should do it now, but it becomes much more complicated because he loses face.”

Nonetheless, the donor now wants Democratic Party leaders to stop trying to spin the situation and accept reality: “I’m concerned about this delusional thinking.”

Even as Biden’s Hollywood supporters try to remain calm as Spahn suggests, they want strategizing to continue in DC. “I love the idea of taking a breath,” the entertainment exec says. “But you’re hoping, privately, that people are coming up with a plan B.”

Joy Press contributed to this report.