Ari Emanuel’s Aspen Assault on Joe Biden and the Democrats

Ari Emanuel, CEO of Endeavor

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Ari Emanuel insists he’s a kinder, gentler man these days, but in the aftermath of the June 27 presidential debate, the agency’s resolute director continues to angrily spar with Joe Biden and his top aides.

In front of a packed house at the Aspen Ideas festival in Colorado, the Endeavor CEO had been invited to chat with the festival’s interim curator, Tina Brown, about his career in Hollywood. But with Biden’s shaky performance dominating headlines, Brown took a quick detour. “Democrats are jumping out the window,” she began after Emanuel took his seat. “What are you thinking?”

“I’m angry at the founding fathers,” Emanuel said. “They had the start date at 35 years, but they didn’t give us the end date. And then everybody died (at the time), so they didn’t have to give us the end date.”

Emanuel criticized Biden’s advisers for being less than forthcoming about his physical stamina and mental acuity and lambasted the president for reneging on a campaign promise to retire after just one term. “He said he was going to run for one term, and he’s doing it to restore democracy. Then he runs for a second term — that’s the first blunder, as he would say. He and his accomplices have told us he’s been healthy for over a year,” Emanuel continued.

“I had a father who died at 92, but at 81, I took his car away, and it was a very simple test for me,” he said to loud applause. “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 can’t let them run a $27 trillion company called the United States.”

Asked for his impressions of Trump, Emanuel responded more cautiously. “He is who he is. I don’t know if he’s slowed down. I have no idea. You know, he looked good (when he was up there),” adding ominously: “He’ll do what he says (in a second term). That’s what he’s doing. That’s what we should expect.”

He suggested the two candidates had something in common. “Donald Trump said, ‘I’m the only one.’ Right? ‘I’m the only one who can make all these problems go away.’ And now Biden says, ‘I’m the only one who can beat Trump.’ It seems like it’s pretty similar here, (but) we have a great bench in the Democratic Party. We’ve got one guy saying the other guy is a liar, and he’s telling us nonsense!”

Emanuel, a prolific Democratic donor, said late-campaign concerns about Biden’s viability left the party with little room to maneuver. “A brokered convention, no. Now there’s a question of whether delegates can do anything … so the lawyers have to look at that … The lifeblood of a campaign is money, and maybe the only way to solve that is if the money starts to dry up,” said Emanuel, whose brother Rahm, a former chief of staff to President Obama, is currently the administration’s ambassador to Ireland.

“You’ll see in the next few weeks, if the money comes in… I’ve talked to a bunch of big donors, and they’re funneling all their money to the Congress and the Senate. It’s a legal issue now,” he sighed, a situation that he said leaves Democrats with few tenable options. “Maybe there’s some wiggle room, but I haven’t seen it. I don’t know, I’m not a lawyer, but we’re in deep shit!”

The Aspen Ideas Festival, which is celebrating its 20th year this summer, is a typically quiet event that brings together influential figures from politics, media, and the arts for panels and debates on current events. This year, Peter Thiel, Michael Eisner, Sam Altman, David Petraeus, and a host of former and current senators, including John Kerry and Kay Bailey Hutchinson, were on hand to discuss topics ranging from the environment to the war in Gaza. But in the early days after the debate, the only topic on everyone’s mind was Joe Biden. At parties and panels on the Aspen Institute’s immaculately manicured campus, the president’s fate and the dire prospect of a Trump victory were a constant refrain among the festival’s progressive patrons.

Emanuel had even harsher words for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whom he lambasted in a fiery speech at the Simon Wiesenthal Center last month. “I think he’s a narcissist,” Emanuel said when asked what motivated his much-publicized rant against Bibi. “I think for 20 years, Netanyahu has done one thing, and that’s to stay in power. His group of Cabinet members are causing enormous problems. And the ultra-Orthodox and the right wing in Israel are causing problems in the West Bank. (Palestinians) should have a homeland. Look, my grandparents had the first pharmacy in Israel. I remember going there after the Six-Day War… So my commitment to Israel is well-known. Netanyahu has done one thing and one thing only: to stay in power, and he doesn’t deserve it.” He doesn’t deserve my family’s legacy and the legacy of the people of Israel. The Palestinians deserve better in the West Bank.” And it’s for us, the Jews, that we want to give them a homeland – for our survival. We’re not giving them anything… And we have to put an end to all these selfish leaders around the world who think they have to hold on for the rest of their lives, because only they can do that.

At a luncheon following Emanuel’s appearance, a politically connected studio executive said The Hollywood Reporter Some of his alarmed associates called Jeffrey Katzenberg, the Biden campaign co-chair, to ask for reassurance or clarification. Katzenberg, who spent the weekend accompanying the president to the Hamptons, apparently offered neither. “I think Jeffrey was as surprised as everybody else by this situation,” the lolita executive said. “He knows that appearances aren’t good, but he says the fundamentals are still strong; everybody just has to hold on. But Jeffrey comes from Hollywood, right? He knows that appearances are everything.”

Later in the day, another Hollywood heavyweight active in national politics confided over cocktails that some of his well-funded colleagues were lobbying hard to convince another Democrat to run. “They’re calling Newsom, Whitmer and Josh Shapiro,” he said. “Basically, anyone who has a heart and a base.”

Despite the doom and gloom of some Hollywood Democrats, not everyone in Aspen was ready to write off Biden. Pollster Celinda Lake, a veteran of Democratic campaigns, advised patience, noting that debates typically have a negligible impact on presidential elections. Conservative attorney George Conway, the MAGA-hating ex-husband of top Trump aides, said the panic was premature. “There’s still plenty of time to correct this,” he said. “Four months is an eternity in politics.”

California Rep. Katie Porter expressed a similar view. “I don’t know why everyone is so shocked,” she said. “No one said he was a great debater. But when you look at what he’s accomplished in his first term, on all sorts of progressive priorities, I think it’s safe to say that Biden is the best president we’ve had in 50 years, and you don’t want to get rid of someone like that so easily.”

For his part, after he finished warning about the danger to American democracy, Emanuel couldn’t resist one last attack on another Aspen attendee: Open AI CEO Altman. “I think he’s a crook,” he said in response to a question about the controversial AI mogul. “Elon gave him a lot of money — it was supposed to be a nonprofit, now he’s making a lot of money. I don’t know why I would trust him. I don’t know why we would trust these people.” (According to public records, Musk contributed more than $44 million to Open AI between 2016 and 2020.)

“Elon once said to me — and this scared me — he said, ‘You know, Ari, your relationship with your dogs? … Think of it this way. You’re the AI ​​dog,’” Emanuel told the captivated audience. “I don’t want to be a dog.” (Altman declined to comment.)

Despite his combative posture, Emanuel insists he has become less intense in recent years – a gentler man than the Entourage “There was a period where I was running the agency with a lot of anger, a lot of fear, a lot of pressure,” he recalls. “Then I did a lot of work on myself, and there was a transition period where we had a lot of business… fear and anger were not conducive to the size that we had. So I changed. I still have a lot of pressure. (But) I don’t get crazy with people like I did, like that parodied (show) did. And I realize, you know, there are other ways to get through this. It worked. I’m not perfect, because sometimes I get angry, but it’s so much better.” I mean, Mondays were really bad for people, because I would think about things, I would see things, and I would come in and it would just be a volcano, oh, it was horrible… That’s just no way to live your life.”