Ari Emanuel, an art collector and the chief executive of sports and entertainment giant Endeavor, weighed in on US president Joe Biden’s recent debate performance, telling a crowd at the Aspen Ideas Festival last month he was “pissed off at the Founding Fathers” for not writing a maximum age clause into the US Constitution.
Beverly Hills-based Endeavor in 2016 acquired a 70% stake in Frieze, the media and events company that puts on some of the art world’s biggest fairs in London, New York, Los Angeles and Seoul. The company went public with an initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange in 2021.
Emanuel took the stage with journalist Tina Brown at the festival the morning after the CNN presidential debate in Atlanta on 27 June, during which Biden appeared incapable of clearly articulating his thoughts, sometimes trailing off and not finishing his sentences. Ever since, there has been rampant speculation about whether 81-year-old Biden is fit for another term in office, or if he will step out of the race for president before the Democratic National Convention in August.
“I had a father who died at 92, but at 81 I took away his car, and it was a very simple test for me,” Emanuel said to loud applause at the festival in Aspen, Colorado, according to The Hollywood Reporter. “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? If the answer is neither, you cannot have them running a $27 trillion company called the United States.”
Emanuel said Biden’s team is not being fully transparent about Biden’s mental and physical faculties, according to The Hollywood Reporter, and criticised Biden over reports that during campaigning for the 2020 race he planned to only serve as president for one four-year term before stepping aside.
“He said he was going to run for one term, and he’s doing it to restore democracy. He then runs for a second term—that’s the first bit of malarkey, as he would say,” Emanuel said.
Asked by Brown about Trump’s performance at the debate, Emanuel said: “He is who he is. I don’t know if he’s slowed down. I have no idea. You know, he looked okay there.”
He also suggested the two leading presidential candidates had something in common, aside from their similar ages (Trump is 78), adding that both have marketed themselves as the only person who can save the US.
“Donald Trump said, ‘I’m the only one.’ Right? ‘I alone can make all these problems go away.’ And now Biden is saying, ‘I’m the only one that can beat Trump.’ Seems like it’s pretty similar here!” Emanuel said. “We’re looking at a man who’s saying the other guy’s a liar, and he’s telling us malarkey!”
Emanuel is known for being a longtime Democratic donor, and his brother Rahm served as chief of staff to president Barack Obama before becoming the ambassador to Japan for Biden’s administration. Emanuel floated the idea of withholding campaign contributions, something a number of high-profile donors like designer Diane von Fürstenberg and film producer Abigail Disney have announced they’re doing to pressure Biden to step aside.
“The lifeblood to a campaign is money, and maybe the only way this gets [solved] is if the money starts drying up,” Emanuel said, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Biden is resisting calls to step down.
"If the Lord Almighty came down and said, ‘Joe, get out of the race,’ I’d get out of the race,” Biden told ABC News on Friday. “The Lord Almighty’s not coming down.”