Jeffrey Katzenberg is a man known for choosing his words very carefully most of the time, and tonight the WndrCo boss was pretty candid when it came to Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
“I’ve known Donald Trump for 50 years,” Katzenberg told a well-heeled West Hollywood crowd on Sunday of first meeting the former president and 2024 GOP de facto nominee via his father back in the 1970s. “The only thing I can say is he was a colossal asshole then and nothing has really changed.”
“I’ve known Joe Biden for 40 years, maybe 45 years,” the Biden/Harris campaign co-chair added in contrast. “He is actually one of the most decent human beings I know.”
Calling the ex-Celebrity Apprentice host a “catastrophe on a level that I don’t think people have fully paid attention to,” Katzenberg went on to give Trump the severe backhanded compliment of almost always openly saying “what he’s thinking and what he is going to do.”
To that end, citing Trump’s recent wide-ranging interview with TIME, longtime Democrat Katzenberg made a comparison between the much indicted GOP leader’s ever increasing harsh rhetoric and plans for a second term and the horrors of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.
“When I was in high school, we were studying Third Reich Germany and the rise of Hitler, and over the holiday, our teacher suggested to the class that, to the degree which we could, please go home and talk to your grandparents,” Katzenberg told the poolside Axios gathering tonight on the eve of Milken Institute conference. “Ask them, what did they read? “What did they see? What did they hear? What they do?”
“In the case of my family, on my mom’s side, they came from France and on my dad’s side, from Germany and they all said exactly the same thing,” the 73-year-old DreamWorks co-founder said to a group in near silence except for the planes and helicopters flying over the event. “We read it; we heard it. We literally did not believe it. Thought this guy was a clown, that what he was saying was so incredibly impossible, and unimaginable. And then we ran for our lives, quite literally.”
He brought the terrors of Hitler’s rise and reign to the fragile state of the bitterly divided America of today and Trump’s hard nationalism and extremism.
“And I said to my wife, my partner, for 49 years, when my kids, my grandkids when ask me: What did I see? What did I do? I will be able to say that I did every single thing that I could to defend our democracy.”
A major player in Democratic politics for decades now, Katzenberg was back in LA after several days in DC last week at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and the hoopla around the annual nerd prom. As well as some high level chats behind closed doors, Katzenberg attended events put on by the likes of WME, CAA and UTA in the nation’s capital in the lead-up to the WHCD on April 27.
With a Hamas delegation reportedly in Cairo this weekend for talks with Israeli, American and Egyptian diplomats and others on a potential ceasefire in nearly razed Gaza, Katzenberg noted today that protests like the ones on campuses and outside the WHCD against the Biden administration’s military support for the Jewish state in the wake of the murderous attack of October 7 has not impacted fundraising for the well-financed reelection campaign.
Dominic Patten/Deadline
In fact, he flipped the premise of the question.
“Joe Biden, for his entire career has been a huge supporter of Israel,” Katzenberg noted at the Axios BFD Talk this evening. “It’s an incredibly complex and difficult set of circumstances …I think the President both for better and for worse, has set himself a very, very high bar of wanting to bring what will be a multigenerational piece for the region.”
The former top bundler for President Barack Obama also admitted to laughter that he had yet to reach out to Taylor Swift about the superstar putting out a strong endorsement for Biden. In an election that could see battleground state won or lost by a few thousand vote, a even greater nod from Swift for Biden than what the ‘Lover’ singer gave in 2020 sends ice cold chills through the blood of more than a few GOP operatives.
As Trump’s so-called hush money trial is set to start its third week in a Manhattan courtroom on Monday, the traditionally circumspect Katzenberg additionally plunged into one of the few real unknowns beside the ballot box results in this very tight re-match campaign.
Following up on Biden’s declaration in an interview with Howard Stern on April 26 that POTUS is “happy” to get on stage with Trump., who has been banging the drum on the debate issue for weeks, Katzenberg stated “100% there will be a debate.” However, he cautioned that, based on the chaos that then incumbent Trump brought to the 2020 debates, the form the 2024 debate or debates take may have to see the moderator more active than ever before since White House candidates regularly started debating back in the Bicentennial year of 1976.
“When you look back and you just say, Okay, well, there’s a solution for that everybody in this room knows, everyone in media and entertainments knows, it’s very simple,” Katzenberg said of the possible rules of any Biden vs Trump face-to-face to stop the latter from steamrolling over everyone “If you have two minutes to speak, you speak, and then at the end of two minutes the mic goes dead. Then you go to 30 seconds as a reply, and then the mic goes dead.”
AKA – Donald Trump’s worst nightmare.
As well as touching on topics like who could take over Paramount Global and the future of AI in Hollywood, Katzenberg was asked what advice he is offering President Biden about any debate or anything else. “None of your business,” the exec said without hesitation at the top of tonight’s talk.