Rob Reiner joins major donors calling for Joe Biden to resign

Joe Biden is touring Pennsylvania today in an effort to get his reelection campaign back on track, but here in Hollywood, the president just lost another major high-profile donor after his June 27 debate debacle.

Just over a week after hosting a fundraiser for Vice President Kamala Harris for incumbents, Rob Reiner called on President Biden to “step aside.”

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Calling the 81-year-old president a man who served the nation with “honor, decency and dignity,” the American President Watchmen director Damon Lindelof, Netflix’s Reed Hastings and Abigail Disney all pleaded with Biden last week to drop out of the race. Like the Watchmen showrunner and others, Reiner believes saving American democracy from Donald Trump is more important than seeing the sometimes uncertain and disjointed Biden stay in his final bid for the White House.

Perhaps more than previous major donors or even high-ranking elected Democrats seeking to tip the balance in favor of Biden’s withdrawal from the race, Reiner is a cannonball. A staunch supporter not only of Joe Biden but of Democratic candidates up and down the ballot over the decades, losing Reiner is like losing the grandmothers of Stalingrad for the president.

Reiner and his wife Michele hosted an event with the vice president on June 29 in Los Angeles, just two days after the president’s faltering performance live on CNN in the face of a lying but pumped-up Trump. That night, the vice president was candid (or nearly so) about “the elephant in the room.” The former California senator admitted what everyone saw with their own eyes: Biden didn’t have his “best” moment. Still, a loyal soldier, the vice president said nothing about the campaign had really changed because of “one day in June” and that Biden would crush Trump.

As many Democrats still say in front of cameras and microphones, this may be just wishful thinking at this point.

“He’s done,” another prominent Hollywood director told Deadline today of Biden after learning of Reiner’s defection.

Beyond the singular power of Reiner’s statement on Sunday, the All in the family The White House alumnus is the latest member of a chorus of Democrats who doubt Biden can overcome a disastrous debate performance. Reiner’s message is also a signal that calls for the president to step down won’t stop, even after his July 22 interview with George Stephanopoulos — which was a less-than-stellar event in its own right for those who doubt Biden’s ability to move forward.

In his public and private meetings with Democratic governors, Biden has insisted that he remains in the race. With a week likely to see even louder calls for his resignation, the president has said that his performance, which he himself called “poor,” was an isolated incident, due to a cold and exhaustion, and that he is “in it to win.”

Opinion polls, which are collapsing, do not seem to agree.

Ted Johnson contributed to this report

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