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President Joe Biden arrives in Los Angeles on Saturday, June 15, 2024. (Photo by David Klein/Media News Group/Los Angeles Daily News via Getty Images)
LOS ANGELES — After an overnight flight across nine time zones from southern Italy to Southern California, President Joe Biden is shifting his focus from Russia’s challenges to Western unity to raising billions for his reelection campaign at a Hollywood fundraiser featuring George Clooney and Julia Roberts.
Biden flew directly to Los Angeles from the Group of Seven summit of industrialized democracies, which focused on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, for a glitzy rally at the Peacock Theatre on Saturday night, with only a stop outside Washington for refueling.
Former President Barack Obama will join headliners Clooney and Roberts, and late-night host Jimmy Kimmel will interview them all onstage. In a text message sent to donors ahead of time, Roberts called it a “critical time in the election.” In his own text message, Kimmel wrote that Republican front-runner Donald Trump “is going to hate this, so let’s do it.”
Big names in entertainment have come forward to support Biden’s campaign in an effort to boost fundraising ahead of Election Day and galvanize supporters to turn out to vote against Trump.
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But this latest mingling with the stars means Biden will miss a summit in Switzerland to discuss ways to end Russia’s war in Ukraine, where Vice President Kamala Harris will represent the US.
It’s a stark reminder that presidential responsibilities and reelection efforts can sometimes be at odds.
“We expect a record-breaking and unprecedented turnout from the media and entertainment world,” Hollywood mogul, major Democratic donor and Biden campaign co-chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg said in a statement.
A fundraiser for Biden at New York’s Radio City Music Hall in March, where late-night host Stephen Colbert interviewed the president, Obama and former president Bill Clinton, raised a then-record $26 million, and the Biden campaign said it expects to raise at least $28 million at the California event.
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Yet Trump raked in even bigger numbers.
Trump raised $50.5 million at a megadonor rally at the Florida mansion of billionaire investor John Paulson, surpassing Biden’s New York rally in April. Biden’s campaign and the Republican National Committee announced a massive fundraising haul of $141 million in May, inflated by tens of millions of dollars in donations that flowed in after Trump’s conviction in the hush-money criminal trial.
The post-conviction cash boost came after Trump and Republicans announced they raised $76 million in April, far outpacing Biden and Democrats’ $51 million in the same month, shrinking the fundraising advantage Biden had built early in the campaign.
Harris is due to fly back to Switzerland in just over 24 hours after Biden missed a meeting on Ukraine.
Biden will be attending the G7 summit with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and said Harris would be a strong representative of the administration at the meeting, but Zelensky previously suggested it was “not a strong decision” for Biden to skip the event.
“I would like President Biden to attend personally,” he said late last month, predicting that Putin would “stand up and applaud” Biden for not coming. Putin and the Russian delegation will also not attend the summit.
The Biden fundraiser was expected to draw protests from pro-Palestinian activists angered by the administration’s handling of Israel’s war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Such demonstrations have become commonplace wherever Biden goes in recent months, including outside the fundraiser at Radio City Music Hall.
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Weisert reported from Washington.