Rahm Emanuel is positioning himself as the future of the Democratic Party.
President Barack Obama‘s former chief of staff, who was also Joe Biden‘s ambassador to Japan, and the mayor of Chicago, has been teasing a presidential bid as of late, while blasting his party as ‘woke and weak.’
The 65-year-old plans to head to Iowa – traditionally the first state that votes – in September for a fish fry and sat down for an interview this week with The Wall Street Journal.
But it was a different Emanuel brother who shouted warnings to party elders during the last election cycle.
In Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s blockbuster new book, Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, it is revealed that Rahm’s hotshot Hollywood super-agent brother Ari Emanuel screamed at former White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain over Biden’s condition.
It was late September 2023, five months after Biden announced he would run for reelection, and Ari Emanuel had invited members of the president’s team to his annual ‘Power Players’ retreat.
‘For months now, Ari Emanuel – CEO of Endeavor, a talent and entertainment company, and a major Democratic donor – hadn’t been able to believe what he was watching,’ the authors wrote.
‘President Joe Biden was quite obviously deteriorating before the nation’s eyes, and Democrats seemed to be in complete denial about it,’ they continued.
Hollywood super-agent Ari Emanuel (left) gave one of the boldest warnings about President Joe Biden’s electability in September 2023, though it’s his brother Rahm Emanuel (right) who’s trying to fashion himself as the future of the Democratic Party
‘Emanuel would call governors and encourage them to run. He would talk to his brother, Rahm, a former Obama chief of staff and then an ambassador to Japan. He would with anyone who would listen,’ Tapper and Thompson added.
While Rahm Emanuel starts laying the groundwork for a 2028 Democratic presidential bid, Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s book reveals brother Ari was the bolder political prognosticator in 2024
Ari Emanuel turned up the volume at the Power Players retreat – yelling his concerns at Klain from the back of the room.
‘Joe Biden cannot run for reelection! He needs to drop out! He can’t win! What’s the plan B?’ Tapper and Thompson described. ‘Emanuel was flat-out yelling at Klain.’
Klain pushed back telling Ari Emanuel that there ‘was no plan B’ and that Biden, as the sitting president of the United States, got to decide.
He added that Biden had already beaten former President Donald Trump, the far-and-away-frontrunner on the GOP side, once.
Ari Emanuel was ‘incensed,’ the authors wrote.
‘What the f*** are we doing?’ the Hollywood super-agent was described as saying. ‘The first party to put a younger candidate before the voters, if we give him enough time, we can win.’
He also knew Trump well, having served as the now-president’s agent for almost a decade.
Outgoing Chief of Staff Ron Klain (left) is photographed in the East Room with President Joe Biden (right) in February 2023. Seven months later, Klain was confronted by Ari Emanuel who said Biden couldn’t run for reelection and needed to drop out
‘It was wild,’ attendee Michael Kives told Tapper and Thompson. ‘A public yelling match between them.’
Kives recalled that the event was typically a ‘civilized affair,’ in the years before.
‘Eventually, Emanuel came to believe they were all lying about Biden’s health. «We’re seeing it!» he would shout. «It’s called age! It happens!»‘ the book continued. ‘Everyone around the president – worst of all, Jill – was lying, Emanuel would say.’
‘Jill and Hunter and Jeffrey Katzenberg and Ron f***ing Klain. And the president had lied, too, when he said he would be a bridge,’ Emanuel’s gripes continued.
In an interview with Red Letter’s Tara Palmeri last month, Rahm Emanuel said he warned Democrats about Biden’s chances of success in a reelection fight but was cagey on details.
‘I can’t give you the hour and the day that I said it, but I expressed myself,’ he said. ‘A year in, two years in, was not the timeframe. I don’t have the exact date and I’m not going to sit here and guess it but I expressed myself to individuals that were important.’
‘I let people know that could have an an influence on that decision,’ he continued, refusing to divulge much more. ‘I don’t try to expose private conversations.’
In his Wall Street Journal this week, Rahm Emanuel positioned himself as a Democrat who could take the wheel of the party next.
‘I’m tired of sitting in the back seat when somebody’s gunning it at 90 miles an hour for a cliff,’ he said.
He criticized his longtime party as being ‘toxic’ as well as ‘woke and weak.’
‘If you want the country to give you the keys to the car, somebody’s got to be articulating an agenda that’s fighting for America, not just fighting Trump,’ he continued. ‘The American dream has become unaffordable. It’s inaccessible. And that has to be unacceptable to us.’
He added, ‘The public’s not wrong. They figured it out. The system’s rigged. It’s corrupt.’
