Celebrities and elites at the highest echelons of American society and industry have showered President Biden’s re-election campaign with massive donations, which could undercut the 46th president’s homespun “Scranton Joe” and “Amtrak Joe” image. 

Biden took the stage of Los Angeles’s Peacock Theater earlier this month, when he was flanked by former President Obama and late night host Jimmy Kimmel. The audience, performers and others attending the event in Biden’s support included Hollywood elites such as George Clooney, Julia Roberts, Barbra Streisand, Jack Black, Jason Bateman, Kathryn Hahn and Mindy Kaling, Vanity Fair reported. The star-studded fundraiser was a monetary success for the president’s re-election campaign, shattering previous Democratic fundraising benchmarks with $30 million in donations, the Biden campaign said earlier this month. 

The swank fundraiser, however, comes at a time when inflation continues throttling the average American household, and the president pitches himself to voters as a man of the people with humble roots in Scranton, Pennsylvania. 

“2024 will be a choice between two very different economic visions for America: Donald Trump, who sees the world from his country club at Mar-a-Lago, and President Biden, who sees the world from kitchen tables in Scranton,” Biden’s campaign website reads. 

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Former President Trump, UFC president Dana White during the UFC 295 event at Madison Square Garden on Nov. 11, 2023, in New York City. (Chris Unger/Zuffa LLC via Getty Images)

The 2023-2024 election cycle is anticipated to be the most costly in history, with Forbes reporting political ad spending would top $10 billion across White House and congressional races. 

Following Biden announcing in April of last year that he’d “finish the job” and run for re-election, the Biden-Harris campaign amped up its fundraisers for the anticipated rematch against former President Trump. 

President Biden speaks with host Jimmy Kimmel as he makes his first in-person appearance on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” in Hollywood, California, June 8, 2022. (Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images)

As Hollywood’s writers’ strike raged last year, Biden engaged with Broadway stars to boost campaign funds, with performers such as Sara Bareilles, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Ben Platt appearing on behalf of Biden in September for a star-studded fundraiser, the AP reported. 

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As 2023 drew to a close, Biden went on a Hollywood-focused fundraiser blitz. Singer James Taylor performed during a Boston fundraiser in December, before the president traveled to Los Angeles, where he held a series of fundraisers, including one joined by filmmaker Steven Spielberg, director and actor Rob Reiner and producer Shonda Rhimes, in addition to California politicos such as Gov. Gavin Newsom and Reps. Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff. Singer Lenny Kravitz performed during the event, which cost $1,000 to $500,000 per ticket, the Los Angeles Daily News reported at the time. 

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Vice President Kamala Harris also attended swank fundraisers last year, including one on Martha’s Vineyard. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Vice President Kamala Harris also attended swank fundraisers last year, including one on Martha’s Vineyard with “Suits” actor Wendell Pierce during an event billed as “grassroots” that sold tickets for $50 to $10,000. 

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Hollywood stars and executives were among the first to pad Biden’s campaign coffers ahead of the election cycle kicking off in earnest this year. Former Walt Disney Studios chair Jeffrey Katzenberg, for example, made an $889,600 contribution to Biden last year, as did Lin-Manuel Miranda, when he donated $20,000, Deadline reported last year. Other Hollywood and tech leaders made sizable donations to the Biden Victory Fund, DNC, or other Democratic initiatives in 2023, such as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman donating $200,000, actor and voice actor Seth MacFarlane donating $100,000, and music composer Michael Skloff donating $100,000, the outlet reported. 

The Biden campaign and Democratic National Committee announced earlier this year that they raised $97 million in the last three months of 2023, which PBS reported was “boosted” by Biden’s swank events with Hollywood stars. 

President Biden and former Presidents Obama and Clinton during a campaign fundraising event at Radio City Music Hall in New York, March 28, 2024. (Reuters/Elizabeth Frantz)

The Biden-Harris campaign continued courting celebrities and other moneyed elites this year, including at New York City’s Radio City in March, which was hosted by actress Mindy Kaling, with late night host Stephen Colbert moderating a conversation with Biden, Obama and former President Bill Clinton. Special guests such as Queen Latifah, Lizzo and Ben Platt were also in attendance, according to media reports. The event pulled in more than $26 million, according to the campaign. 

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Harris also headlined fundraising events in her native California earlier this year, where she joined a clean energy leader in San Francisco, before another stop at the home of author Robert Mailer Anderson and Oracle heiress Nicola Miner in the city’s Pacific Heights neighborhood. The Pacific Heights fundraiser cost attendees upward of $100,00 per person, and included support from theater director Jonathan Moscone and Mayor London Breed, as well as a performance from singer Carole King, the San Francisco Standard reported at the time. 

Trump, whose real estate background and reality TV success cemented him in Hollywood’s orbit pre-politics, has also held high-profile fundraisers this election cycle, but seldom with movie elites. Instead, he has held swank events at his Mar-a-Lago estate, met with residents of wealthy areas such as Atlanta’s Buckhead neighborhood, and has attended high-profile public events at Madison Square Garden, but not for fundraising purposes. 

President Biden is seen speaking in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)

Biden previously had a massive fundraising advantage over Trump in the 2024 race for the White House, but recent windfalls following Trump’s conviction in the New York criminal trial have essentially erased Biden’s lead, Fox News Digital reported this weekend. Trump and the RNC notched their second consecutive month in May of outraising Biden and the DNC, all while not yet launching a general election ad buy. Biden’s campaign, conversely, has spent at least $65 million on ad purchases. 

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“The only people in America who support Joe Biden’s failing campaign are elitist Hollywood celebrities,” Trump spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in a statement earlier this month. 

Biden’s ritzy fundraisers were also slammed in a Wall Street Journal op-ed last week by Fox News contributor Daniel Henninger, who noted that after decades of the Democratic Party benefiting from Hollywood money, the 2024 election cycle could change the game for the left-wing party as inflation continues spiraling. 

Demonstrators rally before President Biden’s fundraiser on March 28, 2024, at Radio City Music Hall in New York City. (Alex Kent/Getty Images)

“The Democratic Party’s celebrity dependency has been background noise for decades and not a problem… until now. This presidential election remains closely contested. With the cost of living the No. 1 issue, each swing-state vote deserves attention. In this high-stakes context, the spectacle of the incumbent president jetting from Europe to Hollywood is the kind of look Mr. Biden and his party don’t need. He’s Hollywood Joe,” Henniger wrote. 

“​​But notice that on the day Mr. Biden tapped the Hollywood ATM, Mr. Trump campaigned at a black church in Detroit. It is becoming hard to suppress the reality reported in polls that Mr. Trump, former host of “The Apprentice,” is peeling off layers of the traditional Democratic coalition – blacks, Hispanics, younger Americans and possibly even Jewish voters. The Democratic base once had something resembling a common identity, but not so much anymore. And it’s getting late to fix that,” he continued. 

Biden’s campaign did face criticism last month when actor Robert DeNiro headlined a campaign event outside the Manhattan courthouse where Trump faced – and was ultimately found guilty – 34 counts of falsifying business records.

Actor Robert De Niro points to a supporter of former President Trump following a news conference outside Manhattan Criminal Court in New York, on May 28, 2024. ( Yuki Iwamura/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

“Donald Trump wants to destroy not only the city, but the country. And eventually he could destroy the world,” De Niro said at the press conference. Biden and Harris were present during the campaign event. 

Following his remarks, De Niro was shouted down by supporters as a “washed-up actor” and “trash,” and was accused of being a “paid actor for the DNC.” 

“You’re a f—ing idiot,” De Niro shouted at one of the pro-Trump protesters. 

The event was subsequently slammed on social media by critics as a “terrible look for Democrats,” and compared to the satirical political comedy show “Veep.” 

Fox News Digital reached out to the Biden campaign for comment regarding recent star-studded fundraisers and if they could undercut the president’s “Scranton Joe” image while inflation continues spiraling this election cycle. 

The first debate between President Biden and former President Trump on Thursday night will be a real test of Americans’ sense of civic duty. I essentially get paid to watch; political journalism is my job. But given the sort of cringey schoolyard ruckus that Trump provoked between the two men in their initial encounter four years ago, it’s a fair question why anyone else would tune in.

Except out of dedication to good citizenship.

So here we go again, to paraphrase Ronald Reagan’s memorable riposte to then-President Jimmy Carter in their 1980 debate. Don’t expect edification, not when Trump is involved, but hope for some anyway.

About 73 million viewers tuned in for the Biden-Trump melee in September 2020 — not for the entire 90 minutes, I’m confident — and additional viewers livestreamed the spectacle. For perspective, that compares to about 160 million registered voters. The audience was smaller than anticipated, down from the record-high 84 million who watched Trump’s first face-off with Hillary Clinton in 2016, and down as well from the number who viewed the Carter-Reagan debate 40 years earlier.

Nonetheless, as my colleague Stephen Battaglio recently wrote, presidential debates are “one of the last mass audience experiences left in a highly fragmented TV landscape.” Six of 10 U.S. adults said they would watch all or most of Thursday’s showdown, and nearly a quarter said they would closely follow the news coverage about it, according to a PBS News/NPR/Marist poll this month. Good for them. In our polarized nation, a presidential debate is a rare communal experience, if far less enjoyable than a Super Bowl.

Just as with the NFL championship, most viewers will head into the presidential debate cheering for one contender or the other, and nothing about the show in Atlanta — no lie or imbecility from Trump, no gaffe or stumble from Biden — will dissuade them from their man’s team. That makes the candidates’ target audience the few persuadable voters. The ones who actually will go to the trouble of watching the virtually unwatchable in the hope that it will help them make up their minds.

Just about everyone, however, will be united in their focus: How do both men look, sound and perform? Biden and Trump are the oldest people ever to serve as president, and each has been credibly criticized as too old to do it again.

As Republican pollster Whit Ayres put it to PBS News, “Can Joe Biden not look like a senile old man? Can Donald Trump not be an obnoxious jerk?”

The answer to the first question is yes, Biden can, as evidenced by his impressive performance recently at Normandy for the 80th anniversary of D-day, and months earlier in his feisty State of the Union address. He desperately needs to look and sound presidential again, for a much larger audience of voters who are, by definition, politically engaged. But he also needs that feistiness — not to give as good as he gets from Trump (who would want that?), but to sparingly and strategically counterpunch in ways that underscore Trump’s inanity. For example, Biden’s zinger in 2020: “Will you shut up, man?” He spoke for so many millions of us that night.

The answer to the second question is no, Trump can’t be anything but obnoxious. For his own electoral sake, however, he really must try. CNN’s debate rules lend him a hand: Given Trump’s penchant for the kind of nonstop interruptions and insults that all but wrecked the 2020 debate, CNN will cut off both candidates’ mics when it’s not their time to speak. And there will be no studio audience for the performative Trump to play to.

Perhaps that’s why he’s started calling it a “Fake Debate.” The rest of us can hope it’s more like the real thing, with fewer theatrics, lies and butting-in — a matchup that a high school debate coach might recognize.

Except for this: The extent to which viewers’ emphasis will be on the two candidates’ style over substance will be all but unprecedented in the history of presidential debates — especially the 64 years that they’ve been televised. (Would-be spoiler Robert F. Kennedy Jr., fortunately, failed to make the cut for the CNN-sponsored debate; the conspiracist hasn’t yet qualified for enough states’ ballots.)

Emphasizing style over substance is perhaps inevitable, and even important, when such old men are seeking reelection as leaders of the free world. But it’s not a good thing at a time when so many issues troubling the nation demand substantive policy responses.

Take the existential threat of climate change. As Biden and Trump prep for debate, much of the nation is enduring deadly record-high heat, along with the wildfires and intense storms that have become commonplace on our warming globe. Biden is implementing the most ambitious clean-energy agenda ever, and Trump has sworn he’ll repeal it. That dichotomy deserves probing questions from the CNN moderators, and our attention to the answers.

And what about the continued threats to reproductive rights in the wake of the Dobbs decision that Trump’s justices on the Supreme Court made possible? The debate will come three days after that ruling’s second anniversary. Or the unsustainable growth of the national debt, to which both Biden and Trump contributed? Or the ongoing chaos in the nation’s immigration system, which was a big problem on Trump’s watch, too, despite his false revisionism about how well-controlled the southern border was then.

The candidates are likely to respond with more heat than light, especially the policy-phobic Trump. Yet his advisors’ Project 2025 plan is chock full of radical, detailed policies for gutting the civil service, repealing environmental laws, enforcing mass deportations that would rock the economy and defunding or closing whole government departments, should he regain the office. Trump must be forced to answer for those dangerous ideas — by the moderators, Biden or both.

If everyone who says they’ll pay attention does so, Americans will have passed the civic duty test. We can hope the candidates will pass theirs, delivering more than gaffes and groans. Alas, there’s nothing in Trump’s sorry rhetorical record to suggest he will rise to the occasion. Yet that, too, would be informative. Stay tuned.

@jackiekcalmes

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation allowing people to kill black bears on their property while vetoing a bill that targets slow drivers in the left lane.

The governor signed 14 bills from this year’s legislative session and vetoed three, his office announced Friday.

H.B. 87 provides a stand-your-ground defense for Florida residents to shoot and kill black bears on their property to defend themselves and their property.

Under the bill, anyone who shoots and kills a bear must notify Florida Fish and Wildlife within 24 hours of killing the bear, and they may not keep or sell the bear carcass. Legal immunity will not be provided for anyone who lures bears onto their property.

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Supporters of this law say Floridians have a right to defend themselves and their property, while opponents contest it could lead to increased deaths of the once-threatened animals, according to WFOR.

Opponents said they would consider legal action against the law.

“We will file a lawsuit to get that bill overturned.” Katrina Shadix of the group Bear Warriors told Fox 35. “This will be protecting the future of Florida black bears, the survival of a species we love so much. And, also going to save the lives of our children who are at risk of being shot by a stray bullet meant for a bear.” 

The law will take effect on July 1.

DeSantis vetoed H.B. 317, which would have prohibited drivers from cruising in the left lanes of highways with at least two lanes and speed limits of at least 65 mph. The bill, which would have fined violators up to $158 for an offense, included exemptions for drivers who were passing other drivers, preparing to exit, turning from the left lanes or being directed to the left lanes by traffic-control devices.

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The governor signed 14 bills from this year’s legislative session and vetoed three. (Eva Marie Uzcategui/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

“The language of this bill is too broad and could lead to drivers in Florida being pulled over, ticketed, and fined for driving in the furthest left lane even if they are not impeding the flow of traffic or if there are few or no other cars in the immediate are,” DeSantis wrote in his veto letter.

The governor also said the bill could “potentially increase congestion in Florida’s urban areas as drivers may decide to not utilize the furthest left-hand lane at all for fear of being ticketed.”