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    Biden’s trajectory is a Shakespearean tragedy. Clooney can play the president | Sidney Blumenthal

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    George Clooney can now play Joe Biden in the movie. After he urged the president to quit the race, the penultimate scene became greater than any Hollywood ending. The actor, while the King of Hollywood, has not yet won an Oscar for a leading role. This part, though, drawing on a range of classic genres, moving from pathos to tragedy to triumph, will challenge his dramatic skills as never before.The curtain rises on Biden as Richard II, beleaguered and beset, facing his overthrow from within.
    What must the king do now? Must he submit?
    The king shall do it: must he be deposed?
    The king shall be contented: must he lose
    The name of king? o’ God’s name, let it go
    The Shakespearean inevitability seems overwhelming, tragedy heaped upon tragedy with a comic thread: the plotting against him from Julius Caesar, his rages against fate from King Lear, and reality suspended with a touch of A Midsummer’s Night Dream. Then in a thunderclap the drama turns romantic through Byron’s Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte.
    Tis done – but yesterday a King
    And arm’d with Kings to strive –
    And now thou art a nameless thing
    So abject – yet alive!
    In 2011, Clooney wrote the screenplay for a film called The Ides of March in which he played an idealistic Pennsylvania governor and Democratic presidential candidate reacting to cynical plots and subplots. The New York Times called it “less an allegory of the American political process than a busy, foggy, mildly entertaining antidote to it”. Clooney did receive an Oscar nomination for his writer’s credit but no more.Now he can play in something other than a belabored story of the supposed price idealism pays to ambition. Now he can sink his teeth into a far more complicated starring role, following a far richer storyline.The film begins with a bright young star of the post-JFK generation from a middle-class background with an unusual common touch yet stricken by unspeakable tragedy and trauma. His wife and daughter are killed in a car accident, and his two sons are critically injured. Though just elected to the Senate at the age of 29, one of the youngest ever, he devotes himself to his sons. He travels daily on the train from Washington to his home in Delaware to watch over them, while still establishing himself as a peer among his fellow senators despite his youthful age.In the second arc, Biden launches a campaign for his party’s presidential nomination but wrecks his chance by borrowing the identities of various political figures put into his mouth by overheated media consultants. His earnest ambition is undone by trivial mendacity, his promise upended by careless overreaching.Then he is the chair of the US Senate judiciary committee, seeking respect, comity and bipartisan cooperation, presiding over the nomination of a US supreme court nominee who perjures himself about his sexual harassment of an employee. In the interest of misguided fairness, the senator suppresses the evidence of two corroborating witnesses.Again, he runs for his party’s nomination, now the even more powerful and knowledgeable chair of the Senate foreign relations committee, but he wins less than 1% of the vote in the Iowa caucus and glumly drops out. A charismatic up-and-comer who had served hardly any time in the Senate emerges victorious, then lifts the loser from the depth of his political despair to make him his perfectly complementary running mate.Biden emerges as a substantive vice-president, the consummate negotiator with Congress to help enact the signature achievement of the administration, the long-held dream of national health insurance. But, again, personal tragedy strikes. His beloved son, Beau, rising in politics after a military career, whom his father had pinned for a trajectory to the White House, attaining what he could not, contracts brain cancer and dies. As Biden copes with his grief, the president passes over him as his chosen successor to anoint another, who narrowly loses to a vile grifter posing as a man of the people.Again, Biden appears to stumble out of the gate yet in another run, but regains his footing. He is the only one who can bridge the whole of the party. As hundreds of thousands die during a plague-like pandemic, the economy withers. He stands as a figure of empathy and solidity against the malignant narcissist in the Oval Office. At last, when Biden wins the prize, Donald Trump stages an insurrection to prevent the certification of the election and departs in disgrace.Despite razor-thin margins in the Congress, he passes the most far-ranging legislation since the Great Society, manages the economy through its complex hazards, expands the western alliance in the teeth of Vladimir’s Putin’s aggression against Ukraine, and gets little credit. He is healing the world, but the toxicity lingers. He is blamed for his extraordinary but incomplete success. Trump rises from his ruins to be acclaimed through willfully blind nostalgia.Once too young for his responsibility, Biden is assailed as too old to hold it. There is a bit of The Last Hurrah about his last campaign, also played by Spencer Tracy in the film based on the Edwin O’Connor novel of an old Irish-American Boston mayor who, on his deathbed, responding to the talk around him that he would have done it all differently if he could live his life over, says as his last words: “Like hell I would.”Against the tide of criticism for months, Biden knows he is not suffering from cognitive decline that affects his judgment as president. He is handling the crises around the globe with skill and experience, the master of foreign policy. He has defeated the menace of Trump before. But he has occasional lapses from natural aging. He tires; he forgets a name or place. His childhood stutter seems to have made a partial return as he pauses to form and explain his thoughts. He has taken cognitive tests, previously unknown to the public, that demonstrate he has no underlying condition. But he assumed the burden of running again out of a sense of duty that he is best able to meet the troubled times.He stubbornly resists and takes umbrage at the chorus of criticism at his obvious aging, his halting and slow gait from a broken foot early in his presidency he didn’t properly treat and his sometimes broken sentences. In his mind, he’s saving the country.He offers an early debate to dispel what he considers the smears of his disability. He and his staff are certain he can repeat his adroit State of the Union appearance. But he falters and loses his place and looks painfully old. He makes subsequent public appearances to put the lie to his collapse as just “a bad night”. After a successful Nato summit, at a press conference he displays his intricate knowledge and management of foreign policy. Yet the press is not quelled. Pundits describe him as clinging to power as a selfish old man, his refusal to leave proving he’s as bad as Trump.Nancy Pelosi, now the speaker emerita, as she calls herself, still the regnant monarch of the Congress, recognizes his flaw as fatal political decline. She orchestrates a slow process of persuasion, of regretful statements from a trickle of members urging him to withdraw, which threatens to become a torrent.Barack Obama, muffled behind the curtain, lends his assent, if not by silence, to the critics. His multitude of former aides, spread throughout the media as kibitzers, have raised their voices as a chorus of Biden naysayers. Obama does not wave off Clooney, the actor casting himself the party broker. Biden feels betrayed. He is given to bouts of self-pitying, defiant and angry cries, but these do not hold off the ranks from further dividing or the walls from closing in.On 13 July, an assassin nicks Trump at a rally. The terrible event gives him the unprecedented possibility at the Republican convention to appear as a transformed figure. He could use his narrow escape to reveal an inner conversion. But after his entrance to the lights flashing his name, like the old Elvis in Las Vegas, after describing what happened to him when the bullet went by his head, he reverted to the fossilized Trump. For a droning hour and a half, he fell into his lounge act of canned jokes and insults. Since then, he has declined further into his decadent routine. At his first rally since Butler, he went on about Nancy Pelosi as a “dog” and “crazy as a bedbug”, Kamala Harris as “crazy”, and Biden as “stupid”. His encounter with death could not alter his character. With each slur and slight, Trump shrinks himself.Biden catches Covid-19. He retreats to his home in Delaware. He contemplates his mortality in the scale of his duty. He can read the polls. He comes to the epiphany that he could achieve his aims only by relinquishing his pride. He rose to the figure in Byron’s Ode:
    Where may the wearied eye repose
    When gazing on the Great;
    Where neither guilty glory glows,
    Nor despicable state?
    Yes – one – the first – the last – the best –
    The Cincinnatus of the West,
    Whom envy dared not hate,
    Bequeath’d the name of Washington,
    To make man blush there was but one!
    When George III learned that George Washington would resign after his term, voluntarily give up the office of the presidency to establish the principle of a peaceable transfer of power and preserve the American Republic, the King remarked: “If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.”

    Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth. He is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Films, fashion, law,d politics: George and Amal Clooney’s growing global reach

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      It took a famous TV doctor to diagnose the patient. After two weeks of turmoil in the US Democratic party over President Biden’s re-election bid, it was ER’s Doug Ross, AKA George Clooney, who wrote up a devastating evaluation of the incumbent president.The 63-year-old actor was not in theatrical mode when he wrote a more-in-sorrow letter published by the New York Times last week that called on Biden to withdraw from the presidential race that the White House reportedly begged him not to submit, coming three weeks after Clooney helped raise $30m for the Biden-Harris ticket at a lavish Hollywood fundraiser.But Clooney’s bedside manner was impeccable: “I love Joe Biden. As a senator. As a vice-president and as president. I consider him a friend, and I believe in him,” he wrote. “But the one battle he cannot win is the fight against time. None of us can.”Clooney was speaking for ­himself – and for a large swathe of liberal-leaning Hollywood donors angry at what they see as White House deception over the apparent decline of Biden’s health. Clooney said the man at the fundraiser “was the same man we all witnessed” in his debate performance two weeks later.In the current spirit of panic and recrimination, with a White House press corps turning every Biden appearance into a test of competence, Democrat money bundlers, including co-chair of Biden’s re-election campaign and movie producer Jeffrey Katzenberg, are under suspicion of helping to cover up Biden’s apparent health issues.Clooney’s letter has put the Ocean’s Eleven actor out of political harm’s way. The Democratic party may not be so lucky. Democrats, says James Carville, the Clinton strategist who last week called for a blitz primary to select a new candidate, “are hellbent on a mission to force the American people to do something they don’t want to do – to vote for Joe Biden”.“George has come out, [former house speaker] Nancy Pelosi has come out – I don’t know what else people can do,” Carville told the Observer. “Other than a few people in Congress, everybody thinks this is a terrible idea [for Biden to run]. But you’re up against a guy who doesn’t want to leave, and that’s just where we are.”View image in fullscreenGeorge Clooney is not the only Clooney making waves on a global stage. Last month his wife Amal Clooney was revealed to have played an important role in making the case for arrest warrants to be issued by the international criminal court (ICC) to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, defence minister Yoav Gallant and three top Hamas leaders.Biden called the ICC move “outrageous” and said that whatever the ICC prosecutor might imply, “there is no equivalence – none – between Israel and Hamas”. According to the Washington Post, George Clooney called Steve Ricchetti, counsellor to the US president, to protest about the administration’s willingness to impose sanctions in which his wife could get caught.This week, the Biden-Harris campaign attempted to blame Clooney’s letter on “pre-existing tensions” – hinting at the ICC dust-up. A Hollywood producer familiar with the couple told the Observer that the White House’s explanation for the letter was “bullshit” and the lawyer had been smeared because her work is on human rights irrespective of political division.“George has power in Hollywood. Amal doesn’t, except as George’s wife,” they added. “Her power is in the UK, at the Hague and on the pages of Vogue.”The lawyer has not commented on her husband’s political intervention, which may have come with Barack Obama’s tacit approval. But after 10 years together, George and Amal Clooney are seen as one of the most stable couples in Hollywood.View image in fullscreenThey’d met at the actor’s home in Lake Como, Italy, when a mutual friend brought her by. Clooney’s agent had also got wind of the ­introduction, the actor later revealed. “My agent said: ‘I met this woman who is coming to your house, who you’re going to marry.’ It really worked out that way.”“It felt like the most natural thing in the world,” Amal said. “I always hoped there could be love that was overwhelming and didn’t require any weighing or decision-making.”A safari in Kenya to see giraffes sealed the deal. In 2014 he proposed, they married in Venice and now have twins.The political instinct which had surfaced in Clooney films including Good Night, and Good Luck (2005) and The Ides of March (2011), soon took flight. By 2016 the couple were meeting with then-German chancellor Angela Merkel to talk refugee policy; that year they were at a UN refugee summit and soon after established the Clooney Foundation for Justice, which focuses on legal rights for those targeted by oppressive governments, tracking the money of human rights abusers and those profiting from war crimes.“We’re both inspired by the young people out there challenging injustice in their communities, a new generation that won’t accept the status quo,” the actor said in an awards acceptance speech two years ago.But Clooney’s intervention comes with potential costs. The Bidens, like the Clintons and Obamas, may see themselves as benefiting from rubbing shoulders with celebrities, but the intersection of entertainment and politics, and the money and ideologies that underpin it, is repulsive to many outside political-entertainment enclaves. In an echo of Trump, Biden now says the rising chorus against him is coming from members of “the elites”, despite the bad timing of first lady Dr Jill Biden appearing on the cover of the August US Vogue.The tradition of celebrity-political endorsements goes back to Frank Sinatra, who organised his friends, the Rat Pack, to campaign for John F Kennedy. Two decades later, disagreements over Ronald Reagan forced celebrities to choose where they belonged.“That’s where we are still,” explains veteran Democrat strategist Hank Sheinkopf. “Celebrities see themselves as an important part of the Democratic fundraising and thought-based operation, which a lot of Americans would not agree with.”View image in fullscreenSheinkopf says that the fight over Biden’s future is as much about the future of the Democratic party as it is about Biden’s health – and Clooney’s intervention will make Maga Republicans fight harder for candidate Trump.“Democrats are the party of the elites despite the fact that they see themselves as the party of the non-elites,” he says. Regardless of who is writing the cheques – Hollywood celebrities or a rightwing Texas industrialist – “what all elites want is a party that does what they want because they think it’s right”.“But that’s not who Joe Biden is. He represents the old pro-union, almost colour-blind left, but that’s not who the operators behind the scenes are,” he adds.Peter Bart, previous editor of the Hollywood trade bible Variety, wrote in a Deadline column that he had “great respect for Clooney’s decision” but it was also one that “will cost him”.He recalled other Hollywood stars who had mixed politics with entertainment, including Jane Fonda, Charlton Heston and John Wayne. “Apart from potential career damage, Clooney must confront donors who have spent millions at his ­urging to support a ticket he now renounces,” Bart, 91, warned.He recalled a conversation he’d had with Ronald Reagan about Nixon. “I want people to like me, even voters who vote against me,” Reagan told him. “Nixon doesn’t seem to care, but I’m still an actor.”Still, Clooney’s intervention has set him up for criticism. The progressive left and African-American voters, both voting blocs Biden is courting to firm up his support, slammed the actor for taking a position afforded him by being famous, white and male.Others have implied that perspectives are different from the window seat of a Gulfstream jet flying between homes in Los Angeles, England, France and Italy. (Besides being a successful actor, known for pranking friends, Clooney and partner Rande Gerber, husband of Cindy Crawford, split up to $1bn from the sale of their tequila brand Casamigos.)Clooney has been criticised, too, from the other side. Trump weighed in, saying Clooney “turned on Crooked Joe like the rats they both are”, and some have questioned why Clooney, and Hollywood more broadly, waited until after the debate to disclose what they had witnessed at the fundraiser.Still, the New York Times letter establishes the Kentucky-born actor as a modern-day Warren Beatty, the actor who made his political beliefs part of his public image. Beatty never ran for office and quipped it would be “more like running for crucifixion”, nor has Clooney, allowing both to ride over the humdrum day-to-day of retail politics.“George’s op-ed was provocative, well done, but voters don’t want this anyway: 73% of the voting public say they want something different,” says Carville. “They’re not asking for anything difficult – just a different nominee. We’re in a crisis.” More

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      Will Biden’s loss of celebrity support make a real difference?

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      The last two US presidential election cycles haven’t been especially notable in the already-marginal world of celebrity endorsements. Both 2016 and 2020 pitted a well-established Democrat with heavy ties to previous administrations against a fringe-gone-mainstream Republican candidate whose own previous occupation was as a celebrity, and not a particularly hip one. So it wasn’t surprising to see an even more dramatic divide between mainstream celebs endorsing the Democrat (or saying nothing more controversial than a bland “vote!”) and a bunch of C- and-D-listers stumping for Trump, as they might any number of faulty late-night infomercial products.This might well have gone similarly in 2024, if not for Joe Biden’s disastrous performance in the first presidential debate a few weeks ago. Now a less lopsided divide has formed as a form of anti-endorsement has come in: celebrities who have called upon Joe Biden to step aside from the presidential race and let a younger candidate attempt to take the Democrats across the finish line.At first, it was an interestingly eclectic group, notable for aligning the likes of Michael Moore – who isn’t exactly the core constituency for a career politician fixated on bipartisan cooperation in the first place – with the likes of classic limousine liberals like Rob Reiner and Stephen King. This suggested some real traction to the idea that Biden should drop out, but was still largely limited to figures who seem a bit more likely to hop on social media and fire off some opinions. More writers than actors, in other words; same goes for figures with mock-pundit experience, like Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart. So there was particular headline-news grabbiness when George Clooney – who recently attended a Biden fundraiser – wrote a New York Times op-ed saluting the man’s service and integrity while also arguing that it was time for Joe to go. It may be the most talked-about celeb endorsement (or anti-endorsement) since Taylor Swift came out for Biden (and, probably more importantly, against Trump) shortly before the 2020 election. It even prompted a Biden response, with the president claiming – somewhat nonsensically – that Clooney, only being at the fundraiser he referred to for a brief period, couldn’t have gotten a proper impression of the president’s acuity.View image in fullscreenThough he doesn’t give off the glamour of his former running mate Barack Obama, Biden has long been able to claim some degree of default and/or anti-Trump A-list support: Julia Roberts attended the same fundraiser as Clooney earlier this year, while Robert De Niro, an outspoken critic of fellow New Yorker Trump, narrated a campaign ad, though this seems likely to stem from De Niro’s genuine – and, frankly, delightful! – seething hatred for Trump more than some personal allegiance to Biden. (In the meantime, who has been one of Trump’s biggest boosters on Insta? You guessed it: Frank Stallone.) Dwayne Johnson, who long identified as some manner of Republican, endorsed Biden late in the 2020 race. Earlier this year, though, Johnson announced that he wouldn’t be endorsing any candidates for 2024, Biden apparently not having done enough to help change the hierarchy of power in the DC Universe.It would be easy to see a shift like that as evidence of eroding support for Biden, and it probably is; having a major star specifically say, months and months before the election, that they don’t endorse either candidate (implying that this is unlikely to change), when it would be easy enough to simply say nothing or bide his time, feels unusual – just as it’s unusual for another major star to write an op-ed suggesting that a presidential candidate from his party must step down for the good of the country. But it’s also a sign of how micro-targeted a celebrity niche has become – maybe by force – in the social media era, where even silence has begun to seem like a tacit statement, rather than PR-managed decorum. Biden’s once-solid base of A-listers still skews on the older side, reflecting a time when endorsing a candidate felt at once simpler and less conspicuous. That’s true, too, of celebrities who have called for Biden to drop out: Michael Douglas and John Cusack are big names, but they’re sure not south of 50. Younger celebrities, mirroring younger demographics in general, may not be especially impressed with Biden’s handling of Israel and attendant failure to stop the bloodshed – which means they may not have been endorsing him to begin with.Of course, there’s a certain tempest-in-a-designer-teapot quality to tracking the whims of celebrity endorsements, which at least some of the general public probably views with skepticism – those clueless stars and their pet causes! George Clooney isn’t casting his vote in a swing state – or, for that matter, against Joe Biden, if it comes down to it. Biden could even argue that the shifting tastes of celebrities don’t interest him, as he’s maintained the image of a folksy, get-it-done underdog for much of his political career, even after ascending to the vice-presidency. Courting celebrity? Isn’t that a Trumpian hunger to begin with? Yet big celebrities can help with big-donor fundraising – and smaller ones arguably have bigger platforms than ever before. (John Cusack movies may not bring a million-plus people to the box office in a weekend, if they’re even released theatrically at all. But that’s his social-media audience.)From Hollywood’s love of Obama to Trump’s resurgence beginning on NBC to the sheer number of meme-based campaign posts, celebrity and politics have become more entwined than ever. Biden may not need celebrities to win, or for his sense of worth. But he does need actual support, and Clooney’s op-ed helped make him seem more like a cause than a candidate. More

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      George Clooney implores Biden to step aside in opinion article

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      The Hollywood actor George Clooney, one of the Democratic party’s biggest fundraisers, has called on Joe Biden to step aside to save democracy from Donald Trump.In an opinion article in the New York Times, Clooney expressed deep affection for the US president but said that personal interaction with him at a recent fundraising event in Los Angeles – the Democratic party’s most successful ever, raising more than $30m – suggested that the stumbling performance in last month’s debate in Atlanta was not an aberration.“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,” the actor and longtime Democratic party member and fundraiser wrote.“He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate.“Was he tired? Yes. A cold? Maybe. But our party leaders need to stop telling us that 51 million people didn’t see what we just saw,” he said, referring to explanations from the White House and Biden himself for his bad debate performance.More bluntly, he said explicitly that Biden could not prevail in an electoral rematch with Trump: “We are not going to win with this president.”Stressing that his call was made reluctantly, Clooney paid tribute to the political battles that Biden had won throughout his career but said his age represented an insurmountable adversary.“But the one battle he cannot win is the fight against time. None of us can,” he wrote.Clooney’s plea came as Biden continues to insist on staying in the race while senior Democrats agonise about how to apply pressure on him to change his mind, and serious questions continue over Biden’s health and viability for re-election.The actor called on leading party figures to come off the fence and make the case to Biden, while dismissing as “disingenuous” the president’s argument – stated in a letter to Democrats in Congress this week – that the party’s membership had already chosen the nominee in the primaries.‘Most of our members of Congress are opting to wait and see if the dam breaks,” he wrote in remarks clearly critical of continuing inaction. “But the dam has broken. We can put our heads in the sand and pray for a miracle in November, or we can speak the truth.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHe concluded: “Joe Biden is a hero; he saved democracy in 2020. We need him to do it again in 2024.”Clooney’s intervention comes weeks after a disagreement with the White House over Biden’s criticism of the international criminal court’s move to issue an arrest warrant for Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, over allegations of war crimes in Gaza.The actor’s wife, Amal Alamuddin Clooney, worked on the case. Clooney called Steve Ricchetti, the president’s counsel, to complain about Biden’s labeling the warrant as “outrageous”.Warrants were being sought for the arrest of Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defense minister, and three leaders of Hamas, which controls Gaza.Shortly afterwards, however, Clooney appeared at a huge fundraising event in Los Angeles for the campaign, which headlined with Biden and Barack Obama. More

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      Borat targets Trump, Ye and antisemitism at Kennedy Center Honors

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      Borat targets Trump, Ye and antisemitism at Kennedy Center HonorsSacha Baron Cohen skit receives mixed response at ceremony for lifetime achievements in the arts The British actor Sacha Baron Cohen reprised his character Borat and stole the show at America’s prestigious Kennedy Center Honors on Sunday night, targeting the former president Donald Trump, the rapper Kanye West, now known as Ye, and antisemitism.President Joe Biden smiled broadly and his wife, Jill, was in fits of laughter as Cohen told risque jokes in the comical accent of Kazakh television journalist Borat Sagdiyev.“I know the president of US and A is here,” Borat said to an audience including politicians and celebrities during a segment celebrating the Irish rock group U2. “Where are you, Mr Trump?”As the audience howled, Borat went on: “You don’t look so good. Where has your glorious big belly gone? And your pretty orange skin has become pale.” He then asked if the Russian leader, Vladimir Putin, and the nerve agent novichok were responsible.Borat, the star of two hit satirical films, added: ‘But I see you have a new wife. Wawawoooah! She is very erotic. I must look away before I get a Bono.”The comedian, who is Jewish, then turned his attention to antisemitism in the wake of Trump having dined at his Mar-a-Lago home with the Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes and Ye, who subsequently praised Adolf Hitler and was banned from Twitter for posting an image of a swastika.Borat said: “Before I proceed, I will say I am very upset about the antisemitism in US and A. It not fair. Kazakhstan is No 1 Jew-crushing nation. Stop stealing our hobby. Stop the steal! Stop the steal!” Some guests burst into laughter while others sat in uncomfortable silence.He continued: “Your Kanye, he tried to move to Kazakhstan and even changed his name to Kazakhstanye West. But we said: no, he too antisemitic, even for us.”Borat proceeded to sing a short parody of U2’s song With or Without You with the lyrics changed to “With or without Jews”. He broke off and asked: “What’s the problem? They loved this at Mar-a-Lago. They chose Without Jews.”The Bidens appeared to enjoy Baron Cohen’s routine but it also came as a shock in typically staid and buttoned up Washington. Asked by the Guardian what she thought of it, Biden’s sister Valerie Biden Owens said diplomatically: “I think I like U2”, while Roy Blunt, a Republican senator for Missouri, said: “Not much”.Glenn Youngkin, the governor of Virginia, said: “I was surprised to see him,” and sped away without elaborating.Along with U2, the actor George Clooney, the singer-songwriter Amy Grant, the singer Gladys Knight and the composer Tania León were celebrated at the 45th Kennedy Center Honors, the most prestigious honours for lifetime achievements in the arts. There was also an appearance from Sesame Street’s Big Bird.One audience member from the political world also received a standing ovation. Paul Pelosi, the husband of the House of Representatives speaker, Nancy Pelosi, used the weekend’s honors-related events to make his first public appearance since being attacked in October in their San Francisco home.The Pelosis sat next to the vice-president, Kamala Harris, and her husband, Doug Emhoff, in a balcony. Paul Pelosi wore a black hat and a glove on his left hand.The show highlighted the five artists’ work, and represented a return to pre-coronavirus norms. There was no requirement for testing to attend and few guests wore masks. Anthony Fauci, the chief medical adviser to the president, was among the guests.Clooney, a double Oscar winner, was also praised for his engagement in political causes and spoke to reporters after attending a White House reception.Asked how he thought Biden’s presidency was going, Clooney replied: “Beautifully. I love him. He’s a kind man with great intentions and he has some incredible legislation which kind of gets overlooked and they’re not very good at bragging about right now. He’s done a really good job and I’m very proud to be a supporter.”A follow-up question about whether Clooney, 61, would consider a career in politics prompted his wife, the barrister Amal Clooney, to smile and shake her head. The actor said in agreement: “Listen, we have a really nice life.”In a celebration at the state department on Saturday, Clooney told guests: “I’ve been lucky enough to meet millions of people, every country, literally 125 countries, and they all, without exception, agree and they’ll come up to me and say specifically that, ‘You sucked as Batman’. It’s unified. We could solve world problems if we just all could agree on more than just that I suck as Batman.”At Sunday’s main event at the Kennedy Center, Julia Roberts, who has co-starred in several films with Clooney, wore a floor-length gown with framed images of him on it and called him a “Renaissance man”. The actors Don Cheadle, Matt Damon and Richard Kind also paid tribute, with Damon recalling how Clooney once stole the then-President Bill Clinton’s stationery and wrote notes to fellow actors on it.But the one who moved Clooney to tears was his 88-year-old father, Nick, a journalist and TV anchorman. He recalled that he was hosting a TV show in 1968 when Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis. His family came into the green room. “Seven-year-old George had a large paper bag in his hand. I asked him what in the world was in the bag.“Well, he went to the coffee table, he turned the bag upside down. Out poured all of his toy guns landing with a clack. He said: ‘Pop, I don’t want these any more. None of them. Never.’ Well, I tore up my speech. Nothing I would’ve written would have been nearly as eloquent as what George had just done and said.”Nick Clooney said he was often asked what he wanted people to know about his son. “Well, here it is: George’s best and most important work is still ahead of him.”Knight, who has won seven Grammy awards, is famous for hit songs including I Heard It Through the Grapevine and Midnight Train to Georgia as the lead singer of The Pips, which became Gladys Knight and The Pips in 1962. Singers including Garth Brooks and Patti LaBelle performed some of Knight’s songs.Grant rose to prominence as a contemporary Christian music singer who later crossed over to pop stardom, winning six Grammys. The singers Sheryl Crow, Brandi Carlile, CeCe Winans and BeBe Winans were among the artists who honored her.Cuban-born León is a conductor as well as a composer, whose orchestral piece Stride won the 2021 Pulitzer prize in Music. The jazz pianist Jason Moran, the singer Alicia Hall Moran and the cellist Sterling Elliott played one of her creations, Oh Yemanja.The final tribute of the evening was to U2, which, with members Bono, The Edge, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr, has won 22 Grammys. Eddie Vedder performed Elevation and One, while the Ukrainian singer Jamala joined Carlile and others to perform Walk On. The actor Sean Penn described U2 as “four scrappy Dublin punks” who were also “great musical poets of the ages”.Other guests at the event included the transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, the senators Amy Klobuchar, Patrick Leahy, Joe Manchin and Mitt Romney, and representatives James Clyburn and Steny Hoyer, the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, and the British ambassador, Dame Karen Pierce.Deborah Rutter, the president of the Kennedy Center, said: “This is probably the largest number of the administration and of Congress that we’ve ever had so that feels really great. People are ready to be back together fully and they want to see a good show.”TopicsBoratSacha Baron CohenDonald TrumpKanye WestAntisemitismU2George ClooneynewsReuse this content More