Following George Clooney’s bombshell op-ed in the New York Times on Wednesday, Chris Hayes devoted a good segment of his show to the increased concerns about Joe Biden’s fitness for the presidential race — and calls for him to drop out.
And while Hayes insisted that the president “is a decent man” who “has done nothing wrong,” the issue is simple: “He’s just aging,” something Hayes fears “makes him, I think, increasingly likely to lose reelection” to Donald Trump.
You can watch the full segment at the top of the page right now.
Hayes went into detail on the matter, discussing several different prominent Democrats who have either joined the calls for Biden to step down or, in the case of Nancy Pelosi, implied it’s something she’s considering. Then he got to Clooney’s op-ed.
On Wednesday, Clooney wrote for the Times that at a June fundraiser he hosted for Biden, the president “was the same man” people saw saw during the disastrous debate against Donald Trump on June 27 that sparked the calls for him to resign in the first place.
“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 fundraiser 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 debate,” Clooney wrote.
Hayes recounted this and other statements Clooney made, and then commented that his “observations are not unique. Joe Biden is a decent man who, like I said, has done nothing wrong. He hasn’t been caught in a scandal. He is just aging, and that reality makes him, I think, increasingly likely to lose reelection to a Republican candidate.”
Hayes reminded viewers that the GOP candidate in question, Trump, “is just a few years younger,” and that “we’re going to be in the same boat a few years from now if we elect him.”
Hayes concluded with a bleak picture of the stakes of the 2024 election, noting that unlike Biden, Trump is someone who has “done a lot wrong, a shocking amount wrong, and who’s promised to do more wrong if he wins. And again, there is no conversation about whether he should drop out, because that candidate’s party is too afraid to ask him to step aside or do anything against him, because any suggestion from any Republican Donald Trump should step aside for the good of their party or the country or face accountability for his many crimes and sins is met with rabid rhetorical attacks excommunication and often death threats.”
Watch the “All In” clip in the video above.
