Transcript: America This Week, July 12, 2024: "Up in the Senile Air"

Walter and Matt revisit the Sacred Word of Clooney, the Film Actors Guild, and "Senility" by Sherwood Anderson

Matt Taibbi: Welcome to America This Week. I’m Matt Taibbi.

Walter Kirn: And I’m Walter Kirn.

Matt Taibbi: Walter, how’s it going?

Walter Kirn: Very good.

Matt Taibbi: Walter, you have a cameo in the national controversy.

Walter Kirn: That’s right. I woke this morning to several text messages giving me Trump’s Truth Social meme about George Clooney in Up in the Air, the movie of my novel, firing Joe Biden. I saw this still from the meme and I thought, “Oh no, it’s not going to be good.” And it was kind of good.

Matt Taibbi: It was awesome. Here we go. Here it is.

George Clooney: So although I wish I were here with better news, the fact is that you and I are sitting here today because this will be your last week of employment. This is not an assessment of your productivity. You got to try not to take this personally.

Joe Biden: Well, I just had a bad night.

Walter Kirn: Brutal.

Matt Taibbi: So that’s Donald Trump sharing Walter Kirn’s movie, that they somehow spliced together last night after what... In a season full of utterly ridiculous plot twists for this campaign season, this new thing with the actors weighing in, in particular George Clooney, has to be the weirdest thing yet. Is it not?

Walter Kirn: Yes, it is. It’s very weird. First of all, I want to specify that I had no role in that. That surprised me. Someone on Trump’s team must have done that. But I will say this, George Clooney, I think, speaks pretty directly for Barack Obama, as has been widely noted. They’re very close. And to see him come out ye1sterday in the New York Times spun my head, because that’s a serious paper. It used to be. And that this has been the most frontal assault on Biden, and it comes from an actor, is, like you say, befuddling. But he was the guy who, a couple of weeks ago, held the star-studded fundraiser that raised more money, he claims in his editorial, than any political fundraiser in history. So I guess that gives him the clout to say this, and frankly maybe wants to cover his ass, because he didn’t say anything at the time. He better get it out quickly.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah. So let’s get all of our teeth into that particular aspect of the story, because this, to me, is the one thing that I spotted right away that is really infuriating. So if you read this piece by George Clooney... So first of all, everybody in the world is like, “Oh my God, George Clooney has spoken. It’s over.” Which I didn’t understand. I am like “He’s a good actor, but who cares?” Right? But he writes this piece in the New York Times, and right up top, he says this, he praises Biden, says, “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 fundraiser was not the Joe big effing deal Biden of 2010. He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate.”

And then on the heels of that, there were a series of headlines that all gave absolute credence to this idea that George Clooney abandoned Joe Biden because of what he saw at the debate. Here you have a series of headlines, “George Clooney calls for Joe Biden to Step Down, says he witnessed president’s decline in person three weeks ago.” “Clooney calls for Biden to step down citing signs of his age at fundraiser, after seeing him at fundraiser,” blah, blah, blah. And this is after he raised $28 million for the guy and said nothing.

Walter Kirn: Not only did he say nothing at the time, he stood by while the press secretary accused the media of creating cheap fakes out of Biden’s departure from that very fundraiser. You know what I’m saying? He didn’t say, “No, those aren’t fake.” Yeah, he’s been silent, but now they’re trying to compress this whole timeframe as though the fundraiser was yesterday, and then he wrote the editorial.

Matt Taibbi: So that’s gross. And then there was just this fawning, mawkish, “Oh my goodness, George Clooney has spoken. It’s all over from here,” kind of thing. That was just amazing. The one that jumped out at me was Rob Reiner, and maybe I shouldn’t take anything that Rob Reiner so seriously, but he writes, “My friend, George Clooney, has clearly expressed what many of us have been saying. We love and respect Joe Biden but Joe Biden must step aside.” Okay, what does this have to do with anything? Well, we find out what this has to do with anything, because there was a series of reports that are extremely interesting, that before Clooney did this op-ed, he made a call to Barack Obama and Obama was reportedly shocked. “Shocked,” according to the New York Post. “‘The ex-president didn’t encourage Clooney to make the remarks, but didn’t try to stop him either,’ the sources added.”

By the way, this is a strange subplot of this whole Biden fiasco, is that we’re suddenly learning that a lot of conservative news outlets either have sources close to the Biden campaign or claim to, which is interesting. But anyway, the Obama story is appearing all over the place, so it appears to be true. Which tells you that this is Barack Obama dropping the hammer on Biden, or trying to, I guess, and it’s had this weird ripple effect with... Now you have Joe Scarborough, I guess, coming to the defense of Biden against the actors. But this is all straight out of parodies we watched in movies and on TV a decade ago. I don’t know. Walter, what was your reaction to all this? Because Michael Douglas also came out yesterday, and that was like, there was this multiplying effect where, “Oh my God, Clooney and Michael Douglas, what are we going to do?”

Walter Kirn: Okay, if I know anything about Hollywood actors, and I’d know a few things.

Matt Taibbi: You do. Yeah.

Walter Kirn: I’ve been around some of them. I’ve written about them. I’ve hung out on movie sets. I’ve been friends with them. Michael Douglas called somebody and said, “How is Clooney getting this all to himself? Get me out there.” My ex-mother-in-law was Margot Kidder, the woman who played Lois Lane in the Superman movies.

Matt Taibbi: Lois Lane. Yeah.

Walter Kirn: Yeah. And she had problems at one point in her life, emotional and psychiatric problems, that caused her to be on the cover of People Magazine, and be interviewed by Barbara Walters and so on. And celebrities who did not know her, I knew for a fact that they did not know her, rushed in to say how concerned they were for their friend, Margot Kidder. I don’t know that many of them had even met her. Okay? So you are going to see people now concerned about Biden’s mental state, who haven’t thought about it once in their lifetimes, but need a spot. They want to get up there with Clooney. “How dare he?” Okay, so first of all, I saw the opportunism, and that’s going to snowball. Because today, people across Hollywood, who don’t have careers, or whose careers are quiet, realized that condemning Joe Biden is a way to get some airtime, and they’re going to do it.

Matt Taibbi: Right. Right.

Walter Kirn: Second of all, George Clooney, who I did meet, he starred in the movie of my book. I believe he has political ambitions. He knew Barack Obama from his original campaign. They’ve been friends for a long time. And I think George, who was the world’s most eligible bachelor, and confirmed bachelor, who swore he would never marry, and swore many times in front of me, ended up marrying a woman who is a international human rights lawyer, makes the scene, serious person, and I believe has been on a glide path toward political office himself. And I think this was a way station on that journey.

Matt Taibbi: Okay. But that’s just so weird. All right, part of the issue here is that the Democratic Party in particular, you would never imagine this on the Republican side. Republicans, some actor, Kid Rock stands up and says...

Walter Kirn: “Trump, your time is up.”

Matt Taibbi: “Trump, your time is up.” And then every news agency in the world says, “Oh my God, Kid Rock has spoken. It’s over.” That would never happen. Are you kidding me? But on the Democratic side, the opinions of actors are, they’re very, very important. I’ve had less exposure to big time actors than you have, Walter, obviously, but I’ve had some, and the experience has been really interesting because some of them are actually smarter than even I would have thought on screen. They’re great actors, and they’re really impressive people, erudite, thoughtful in their private lives. And then other ones are people who you almost need help getting to the bathroom, right? It’s a really strange range of folks. But there’s also this thing that’s happened, I think particularly in the last 15 years or so, where Hollywood celebrities... The joke was always that Washington was Hollywood for ugly people. And now the dynamic is starting to reverse, where people in Hollywood are imagining themselves to be politicians, and I don’t think they’re in touch with how detested they are when they get into politics, very often, in middle America.

Walter Kirn: Yeah. I live in middle America, Montana, and I can tell you, just in my private street side poll, not a New York Times columnist who interviews Uber drivers, but I do get around a little. And this isn’t working, man. They need to stop this if they want to win, because Hollywood actors were used to sell COVID fear. Okay? They just were. The beginning was full of TikToks and Periscopes, and whatever, of Hollywood actors, Madonna in her bathtub, Ellen DeGeneres, et cetera, et cetera. That was the shark jump. We are so post shark jump now, as far as the taking serious advice about our democracy and our lives from actors. And if you look at the Clooney threads on X, ones that begin with just the editorial, they quickly devolve into “F You. I don’t listen to you. Go do this. Go do that sexually to yourself.” But worse, Matt, this all appears to be the prelude toward a Lollapalooza extravaganza of Hollywoodism in Democratic Party politics.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah. And we’ll get to that in a second, but I think we got to play a clip that we both thought of right away, because this is the backdrop. The South Park guys saw this coming. Maybe they saw it at the time. But there was a preview of how ordinary Americans saw this new idea of Hollywood people getting together and deciding what’s right for the rest of America, and how that was going to go over. And they satirized it in the great and only satirical puppet movie that I can remember, Team America World Police. And we both felt we should play just this whole thing. So here it is, the Film Actors Guild.

Speaker 1: This is breaking news with Peter Jennings.

Team America Peter Jennings: Team America has once again pissed off the entire world after blowing up half of Cairo. And now some Hollywood celebrities are lashing out. Alec Baldwin is head of the Film Actors Guild.

Team America Alec Baldwin: The Film Actors Guild believes that what the world needs is compassion, not violence. All that Team America does is create new enemies.

Team America Tim Robbins: Let me explain to you how this works. You see, the corporations finance Team America, and then Team America goes out, and the corporations sit there in their corporation buildings, and see they’re all corporationey, and they make money.

Team America Sean Penn: Last year I went to Iraq. Before Team America showed up it was a happy place.

Matt Taibbi: That’s a very funny Sean Penn puppet.

Team America Sean Penn: They had flowery meadows and rainbow skies and rivers made of chocolate where the children danced and laughed and played with gumdrop smiles.

Team America Peter Jennings: The actors are calling for an emergency meeting. Already expected to attend are Helen Hunt, George Clooney, Liv Tyler, Martin Sheen, Susan Sarandon, Janeane Garofalo, and Matt Damon.

Team America Matt Damon: Matt Damon.

Team America Peter Jennings: In the meantime, the world wants to deal with dangerous individuals their own way.

Matt Taibbi: And then there’s another segment where they meet in the Great Hall of Film Actors Guild.

Walter Kirn: The future capital of the United States.

Team America Alec Baldwin: My fellow actors. We live in a dark time. The world is becoming more and more violent, and the idiots in charge are making it worse. What the world needs is an international advisory committee who truly understands global politics, namely us.

Team America Helen Hunt: The time has come for us to start using our acting talents in a different way.

Team America Ethan: Yes, we can use our powers to change the world.

Team America Tim Robbins: We will persuade everyone to drive hybrid cars and stop smoking.

Team America Liv Tyler: If we focus our acting on global politics, we can change everything and stuff.

Matt Taibbi: And stuff.

Team America Janeane Garofalo: As actors, it is our responsibility to read the newspapers, and then say what we read on television like it’s our own opinion.

Team America Matt Damon: Matt Damon.

Team America George Clooney: We’ve all done action films. If anyone tries to get in our way, we’ll show them just how tough us actors really are.

Matt Taibbi: All right. You get the idea, but...

Walter Kirn: Okay, I love that Alec Baldwin was the host of that.

Matt Taibbi: Oh, I know. I know. It’s perfect. And what’s so funny about that is, as you pointed out, Walter, is after you see those scenes, you’re totally rooting for Team America to blow up the Louvre or the Gaza Pyramid Complex or whatever it is. And whatever they’re for, you’re against it. And this is what’s going on now. So not only is George Clooney drop this pronouncement that everybody’s treating like it’s tablets from Mount Sinai or something like that, but even before that, the week started with this weird news about what was called a Blitz Primary, which was being proposed by the Georgetown University Law Professor, Rosa Brooks, whom we’ve talked about in connection with the Transition Integrity Project. And one of the elements of this Blitz Primary proposal that they are offering, the Blitz Primary would involve weekly forums with each candidate moderated by cultural icons.

Michelle Obama, Oprah, and Taylor Swift are among the names floated in the memo. It turned out that Stephen Colbert was also in there. And then later we had another one with James Carville, who’s an interesting character, because he’s been both a representative of the anti woke movement, and said all these things that have gotten him into trouble about how the Democratic Party is too full of preachy females. That’s his quote, not mine, folks. But he is absolutely a diehard democratic loyalist, and he essentially offered the same idea. And his idea was to cut out the celebrities. They would be in the stands while ex-presidents, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, would conduct the Blitz interviews. And here’s his quote, “Town halls, high stakes job interviews for the toughest job in the world, would surely attract television and cable partners and generate record numbers of viewers. Think the Super Bowl with Taylor Swift in the stands.”

These people are obsessed with Taylor Swift, by the way. “The young, the old, and everyone in between will tune in to see history being made in real time.” And then Clooney himself replicates this in his own bizarre editorial. “The short ramp to election day will be a benefit to us, not a danger. It would give us the chance to showcase the future without so much opposition research and negative campaigning that comes with these ridiculously long and expensive election seasons. This can be an exciting time for democracy, as we’ve just seen in the French elections,” blah, blah, blah. We’ve heard terms like it’ll be a positive only campaign season. There’d be these Blitz interviews that would go on over a period of weeks. And everyone’s imagining they would get these great ratings. Walter, what do you think would actually happen with those ratings?

Walter Kirn: Okay, well, first of all, you just triangulated Clooney, Carville and this story out of the Georgetown Academia.

Matt Taibbi: She’s a former defense official.

Walter Kirn: Right. That means that the three sides of the triangle agree. Okay? The professional politicians, the fundraisers/celebrities, and the wonks. Okay? They’re going to turn the election into a fricking TV show. They’re going to turn it into an elimination show like Survivor. This is the convergence of all their hopes, that we will completely bypass this “messy, overly long-”

Matt Taibbi: Messy.

Walter Kirn: “... slightly too democratic process,” because people are involved, for a convention of party luminaries and celebrities to be held on TV, to be linked to your phones in which you have... Because the part they’re not telling about is what’s the feedback loop going to be. It’s going to be people doing real time stuff on their phone, voting, thumbs up, thumbs down. This is the model for a new kind of non choosing, choosing of our leaders. And I’m being absolutely serious. Sometimes now I look back and go, “The ramp to this has what it’s been all about.” What? They just came up with this improvisation, and they got everybody to subscribe to it in the last week? No.