Barry Diller: I'm No Longer Supporting Biden
He answers 'no' when asked if he and Diane von Fürstenberg will continue to support the embattled president
Add two more names to the list of high-powered donors withdrawing support for President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign following a disastrous June 27 debate performance against Donald Trump.
In the process of reporting an earlier story about Jeffrey Katzenberg’s problematic agewashing of Biden — and the fury it has engendered in Hollywood — I emailed Barry Diller, chairman of IAC, whose hiring of Katzenberg to be his assistant started Katzenberg’s entertainment career. When I asked the billionaire, who also became part of the Paramount process earlier this week, if he and his wife, designer Diane von Fürstenberg, were holding firm with the Biden campaign, he simply replied, “No.” (Diller maxed out with a $6,600 contribution to the Biden campaign in 2023, and gave $100,000 to the president and the Democratic Party’s joint super PAC for the general election.)
When asked his thoughts on the role that Katzenberg, described by the New York Times as Biden’s “Secret Weapon”, and who took an especially active role in campaign strategy as one of seven campaign co-chairs, may have had in concealing the true state of Biden, he said, “Fundraisers are pure cheerleaders for the candidates — they can’t be expected to have a political role.”
Related:
The power couple is just the latest to back away from Biden following last week’s disastrous debate performance. Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings has called on Biden to step aside, telling the New York Times in an email, “Biden needs to step aside to allow a vigorous Democratic leader to beat Trump and keep us safe and prosperous.” The New York Times added that Hastings and his wife, Patty Quillin, gave as much as $1.5 million to back Biden during the 2020 presidential race, and $100,000 last summer to support his re-election campaign.
Producer and showrunner Damon Lindelof also published an op-ed urging Democratic contributors to seal their wallets until Biden is replaced. He also told me, via email, in the course of my reporting on Katzenberg, “We’ve had limited interaction with [Katzenberg] and didn’t need our arms twisted to contribute to the Biden campaign . . . we’re dutiful soldiers in that sense,” he told me. “For what it’s worth, I don’t personally feel like any deception occurred re: The President . . . we were all in a collective denial and I take full responsibility for that.”
At the Aspen Ideas Festival, speaking from the stage the morning after the debate on June 28, Ari Emanuel, CEO of Endeavor, however was less forgiving.
Of the debate and aftermath, he declared, “We are in Fuck City.”
He continued:
“His cohorts have told us that he's healthy for over a year. . . It's a very simple test for me. If you were driving from downtown Beverly Hills to Malibu, would you want Biden to do it at night? Would you want Trump to do it at night? Or neither? If it’s neither, you cannot have them running a $27 trillion-dollar company called the United States.”
The talent agency mogul said Biden “is not the candidate anymore” and suggested his campaign will hit a dead end as a result of big money “drying up.”
Meanwhile, Abigail Disney, granddaughter of Roy O. Disney, who cofounded The Walt Disney Co., told CNBC yesterday that she plans to withhold donations until Biden drops out.
“I intend to stop any contributions to the party unless and until they replace Biden at the top of the ticket,” she said in her statement to CNBC. “This is realism, not disrespect. Biden is a good man and has served his country admirably, but the stakes are far too high. If Biden does not step down the Democrats will lose. Of that I am absolutely certain. The consequences for the loss will be genuinely dire.”
Given that on their record over the past ten years, during which none of these otherwise-unemployable fuckwits have demonstrated the ability to do anything but destroy the business they claim to be leaders of, why would anyone pay attention to what these overinflated egos have to say about anything? Damon Lindelof has yet to demonstrate the ability to write a screenplay that makes sense, and he's just the least-useless of the bunch of them.
Has anyone checked on Perlmutter to see what he thinks of Trump ranting about "Black jobs"? Do we get to hear what the donors to the Right for America PAC think about supporting a rapist?