Targeting Trump’s criminal record, Biden heightens tensions before the historic debate

Ahead of their crucial debate confrontation next week, President Joe Biden is directly attempting to take advantage of Donald Trump’s felony history in a significant new campaign ploy.

The Biden team unveiled a new advertisement on Monday that would be shown in states that are considered to be battlegrounds. It portrays the presumed Republican nominee as a self-centered felon. The tactic seems to settle a Democratic disagreement about how much to draw attention to the former president’s legal issues during a close presidential contest.

The new front in the 2024 campaign opened up after Trump sought to win votes among Black Americans, a traditional Democratic power base where the ex-president is trying to make inroads despite his tarnished personal history on race. This comes as Republicans embrace their presumptive nominee despite his conviction and bid to overturn the 2020 election result, going all in on Trump as they seek to win back the White House and the Senate and keep the House.

Biden’s new ad zeroes in directly on the guilty verdict in Trump’s hush money trial and his huge loss in a civil fraud case to strike a sharp contrast with Biden’s character. As the ex-president’s mug shot flashes on screen, a narrator says: “This election is between a convicted criminal who’s only out for himself and a president who is fighting for your family.” The ad marks the Biden campaign’s most explicit strategic use so far of Trump’s legal woes in a campaign message.

Biden campaign co-chair Mitch Landrieu explained the thinking on CNN’s “News Central”: “What this ad is about is about showing the American people about the issue that’s going to decide this campaign: wisdom, courage, character.”

Trump’s campaign responded by blasting the hush money trial as “election interference” and highlighted polls showing the former president’s strength in swing states. “The contrast between President Trump’s strength and success versus Crooked Joe Biden’s weakness, failures, and dishonesty will be made clear on the debate stage next week,” Karoline Leavitt, a campaign spokesperson, wrote on X.

Biden, who flew directly from his second trip to Europe within a week to a glitzy Hollywood fundraiser in Los Angeles on Saturday, argued there that one of the “scariest” parts of a second Trump term would be a possibility that his rival could appoint more hardline conservative Supreme Court justices. Former President Barack Obama, who joined his former vice president at the fundraiser, meanwhile bemoaned the fact that Republicans are set to nominate a candidate who was “convicted by a jury of his peers on 34 counts.”

Candidates position themselves for first presidential debate
The campaign is intensifying ahead of 2024’s first presidential debate, on CNN on June 27, a potentially defining moment of a campaign that could see an ex-president beat the sitting president who ousted him from office for only the second time in history. The showdown in Atlanta will take place with 81-year-old Biden under extreme pressure to show he’s up to another four-year term amid pervasive voter concerns about his advanced years and following Trump’s incessant mockery of the visibly aging president’s mental acuity and physical state.

The ex-president’s constant ridiculing of Biden’s faculties may, however, be lowering expectations for Biden’s performance, raising the prospect that an energetic showing from the president could have a similar impact to his barnstorming State of the Union address this year, which temporarily quieted concerns over his age. The ex-president’s volatile behavior in recent days, including after he marked his 78th birthday on Friday, is prompting the Biden campaign to argue that Trump’s state of mind — as well as his attempt to crush American democracy four years ago — means he’s unfit for a return to office. Last week, the campaign described Trump as “more unhinged than ever before” after he returned to Capitol Hill for the first time since the January 6, 2021, mob attack to be embraced by House and Senate GOP lawmakers.

The first presidential debate of this campaign is unusually early, meaning it could give the president a chance to jolt a toss-up White House race that has been largely stable for months. Trump is polling strongly in key swing states. Biden is apparently clinging to a narrowing path through the countrywide electoral map to the 270 votes needed to win the presidency. The president is being hampered by the pain felt by many Americans over high prices and elevated interest rates that have made it hard to afford new homes and car loans — giving Trump an opening to conjure nostalgia about the pre-pandemic economy during his term in office.

CNN on Saturday announced new details for the debate, agreed to by both campaigns. The event will take place in a television studio rather than in front of a live audience. It will include two commercial breaks, during which campaign staff will be barred from interacting with their candidate. Both men agreed to appear at a uniform podium, and their positions will be determined by a coin flip. Microphones will be muted except when it’s a candidate’s turn to speak.

Biden is expected to head to Camp David later this week for an intense debate camp that will involve his former chief of staff, Ron Klain, who has been schooling Democratic candidates ahead of debates for decades. Trump held a policy forum with a group of advisers and Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida and Eric Schmitt of Missouri when he was in Washington last week. His aides insisted that the ex-president would not necessarily engage in traditional debate prep but rely on interviews and rallies to hone his approach. However, Trump’s interviews, mostly with conservative media, are often full of softball questions. And he skipped all the GOP primary debates, so he might not be fully prepared when Biden gets in his grille.