Joe Biden’s reelection campaign has intensified its attacks on Donald Trump over his New York conviction, with Democrats urging the president to use it as an electoral weapon against his Republican rival.
In a memo released Saturday, the Biden campaign called Trump a “convicted felon” and accused him of “subverting our justice system, ripping apart our democracy, rigging our economy for billionaire donors, and attacking the very idea of America.”
The statement signals that Democrats and Biden’s reelection campaign are preparing to more aggressively attack Trump as the first former president to be convicted of a crime, rather than taking a more passive approach.
Biden briefly mentioned Trump’s ruling on Friday at the start of remarks about his Middle East peace plan, criticizing his rival who had slammed the U.S. justice system just hours earlier in a relentless denunciation of the ruling.
“It’s reckless, dangerous and irresponsible to say there was fraud just because you don’t like the verdict,” Biden said.
Some Democrats are urging the president and his campaign to do more. Democratic strategist Christy Setzer said Biden and his party need to contrast themselves with Trump more “strongly” when it comes to conviction.
“Democrats sometimes get too cautious, afraid to get their hands dirty or afraid to anger Trump supporters. Our party is missing that opportunity,” Setzer said Saturday. “Let’s not do that on this issue that has the power to fundamentally change the trajectory of this campaign and of history.”
Amid calls for Biden and Democrats to be more combative, a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Saturday and conducted after the conviction showed that 10% of Republicans and 25% of independents had become less likely to vote for Trump because of the verdict, suggesting a significant defection from the Trump camp.
Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio disputed the notion that this would have a significant impact on the former president’s bid to win a second term in the White House.
“We have told donors and supporters that polling in targeted states indicates the trial’s impact is almost entirely ‘default’ and that we expect any adverse ruling to have a minimal impact,” he said in a memo distributed by the Trump campaign on Saturday.
“So far, that appears to be the case.”
Democrats in battleground states ahead of the November election have generally been careful to criticize Trump over the verdict, but some say it is important not to focus too much on the former president’s crimes at the expense of his domestic issues.
“Trump continues to be a sideshow, a circus, a clown caricature and the worst thing that’s happened to this country in a long time. We need to focus on our people and the American people and get them to vote. We need to focus less on Trump,” Rep. Jamaal Bowman of New York told MSNBC on Saturday.
Many Republicans believe any attempt by Democrats to exploit Trump’s ruling is bound to backfire, given that the trial itself has had little impact on national or battleground state opinion polls and that most right- and center-right voters accept Trump’s claims that the prosecution was politically motivated.
“Democrats think they can put out Trump’s fires with oxygen. That’s political malice,” Mitt Romney, the Utah senator and leading Republican critic of Trump, told The Atlantic.
But Trump’s conviction weakens him politically in many ways: Besides labeling him a convicted felon, Democrats will be able to attack him on the underlying case that he forged business documents to silence a porn star so as not to damage his 2016 presidential election.
Their response to Trump’s refusal to accept conviction will begin to poke holes in his claim that he is the law-and-order candidate, and if he becomes as enraged and angry about his legal predicament as he did on Friday, they will have a new opportunity to paint him as crazy, distracted from the issues that voters care about most.
“Trump’s campaign is for himself. Our campaign is for America,” the Biden campaign said in a statement Saturday.
Polls in the coming weeks will show whether Trump’s ruling will be politically damaging: Biden still trails by 1.3 percentage points in national polls, according to the FiveThirtyEight.com average, and he also has a slight lead in key battleground states.
If Biden sees that his attacks on Trump’s criminal record are having an impact, he may emphasize it at the first debate in Atlanta in late June. Biden may still need to stay out of the fray to retain his presidency, but his allies will be less constrained.
“Campaign surrogates need to be out in force to compare Biden to Trump, the first major party nominee to commit a crime,” Setzer said.
