CNN
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The political spotlight in a presidential election engulfed in unprecedented legal drama will shift this week from the criminal trial of a former president to that of the sitting president’s son, as the race enters a fierce new phase.
Four days after presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump was convicted of 34 counts in a hush-money trial in New York, President Joe Biden’s son Hunter is facing federal firearms charges in Wilmington, Delaware. The trial is sure to be a moment of intense personal anguish for the president, and comes as he seeks a political breakthrough after weeks of publicity surrounding his case.
Later this week, the president is expected to issue a sweeping executive order that would sharply restrict migrants’ ability to claim asylum at the southern border. The move, a key milestone in the Biden administration and campaign, will be seen as an effort to blunt Trump’s lead on an issue that has been a cornerstone of his political career. But it also risks angering progressive voters who are crucial to his hopes of winning the November election but who are unhappy with some of his policies, such as his support for Israel.
As the race heats up ahead of the first presidential debate on CNN later this month, Democrats are also seeking to highlight what they warn are far-right policies on abortion this week.
Biden’s efforts to seize control of an unpredictable race come amid growing backlash over the first conviction of a former president and major party candidate. Republicans have largely backed Trump, arguing he was the victim of weaponized justice, and the former president’s team and the Republican National Committee have boasted of a $70 million fundraising surge since the verdict. Democrats, meanwhile, are debating how to leverage Trump’s conviction, with some calling for intensifying efforts to cast Biden’s opponent as a convicted felon. It remains to be seen whether the conviction will have any major political impact in a country long polarized by attitudes toward the former president.
But a CBS/YouGov poll released Sunday showed that 57% of Americans believe the Manhattan jury reached the right verdict, compared with 43% who said they thought so, and a new ABC/Ipsos poll found that by a roughly 2-to-1 margin, Americans said the verdict was correct, but that views of Trump were little changed from before the jury’s decision.
Trump was convicted of falsifying business records to hide payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election. He has maintained his innocence and plans to appeal.
While the New York hush-money charges are considered the least politically damaging of the four criminal cases against Trump, a guilty verdict would mark a moment of ignominy for the twice-impeached former president who has thus far enjoyed a lifetime of innocence. Trump’s sentencing is scheduled for July 11, just four days before the start of the Republican National Convention, and the trial will have reverberations across the campaign trail as the former president vows to use the November election as an opportunity to prove his personal innocence against what he inaccurately claims is political persecution by the Biden administration.
Republicans’ support for Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, despite his guilty verdict by a jury of their peers is a stunning spectacle of one of the country’s two major political parties effectively turning its back on the rule of law. The move suggests that Trump will not be bound by party, or perhaps the law, in a second term that he has vowed to use as “retribution” against his political opponents.
Trump, in an interview with Fox News that aired Sunday morning, said he was a victim. “This is weaponization, this is very dangerous. We’ve never seen anything like that in our country. We’ve seen it in other countries, in Latin America,” he said. His inflammatory rhetoric fails to reflect the fact that his refusal to concede defeat in the 2020 election and his incendiary behavior are far more reflective of a developing banana republic than a fair jury trial.
Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter-in-law and co-chair of the Republican National Committee, told CNN’s Casey Hunt on “State of the Union” on Sunday that Trump had been treated unfairly. “If his name was anything other than Donald Trump, this case would never have seen the light of day,” she said. “What the public is seeing now is that we can’t trust our justice system. If this sets a precedent in the United States, the public is very concerned about the America we face.”
Democrats have rejected Republican arguments that Trump would never get a fair trial because New York is a liberal city. Biden has largely stayed out of the fray since saying a guilty verdict shows no one is above the law, but some party officials have tried to politicize it. Rep. Adam Schiff of California, who is running for Senate, has a succinct answer for complaints about jury selection in the city where Trump made his name:
“The jury was selected by Donald Trump and his lawyers. They vetted every single juror. He had the same rights in court as every other criminal defendant,” Schiff also said on Sunday’s “State of the Union.” “This ordinary jury found him guilty on every count. So if you don’t want to be tried in New York, don’t commit a crime in New York.”
The start of jury selection in the first trial of a sitting president’s son could weaken Republican claims that the Justice Department is only targeting Republicans. Democratic Senator Robert Menendez is also on trial in New York. The Hunter Biden indictment was brought by President Trump’s appointed prosecutor, David Weiss, who was promoted to special counsel by Attorney General Merrick Garland last year to oversee the investigation. The president’s only surviving son is accused of violating federal law by illegally purchasing and possessing a firearm while abusing or addicted to drugs. Weiss has pleaded not guilty to three charges.
The White House has ruled out the possibility of a pardon, but the president has said his son did nothing wrong and has turned his life around after battling alcohol and cocaine addiction. Hunter Biden, like Trump, has a right to a presumption of innocence and a trial by jury. In a symbolic show of support, the president was seen riding a bicycle with his son on Saturday near his home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.
Democrats are hoping to use Trump’s conviction to garner support from independent and moderate voters in battleground states that will decide the election, but they are also trying to give more political clout to a central campaign theme this week after the former president’s trial has dominated headlines since mid-April.
In addition to Biden’s big announcements on immigration, Democrats are also trying to draw attention to Republicans’ hardline abortion policies. On Monday, for example, the Democratic National Committee plans to highlight a Texas Supreme Court ruling last week that said medical exemptions in the state’s new abortion law apply only if there’s a risk of death or severe disability. Democrats say the law is the kind of measure Republicans would try to implement nationwide if Trump, who built the Supreme Court majority that overturned Roe v. Wade, is reelected. But the former president has argued that abortion policy should be left to individual states.
In another sign of the Democratic offensive on reproductive rights, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York announced that Democrats will vote on a “right to birth control” bill on Wednesday as Democrats mark two years since the Supreme Court overturned a nationwide constitutional right to abortion this month. “Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans will not be able to break their anti-abortion record because the American people know that given the chance, radical Republicans will not stop their campaign to strip away this country’s fundamental freedoms,” Schumer said in a letter to Democratic caucuses.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries on Sunday previewed how his party is trying to highlight Trump’s conviction and authoritarian rhetoric while also drawing attention to its own policies. The New York Democrat said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that the jury had pronounced justice in an “affirmation of our American justice system,” adding, “This is America. This is not a system run by monarchs or kings or dictators. We are a democracy, and in a democracy, no one is above the law.”
Jeffries also pivoted to a broader campaign message, arguing Democrats would lower housing costs and address the high prices that have soured many people on the president’s economic policies. Jeffries said Democrats would address issues that the majority of voters consider important while Republicans lie for Trump. “I’d rather be on President Biden’s side of that contrast than on the extreme MAGA Republican side,” he said.
Trump, who has complained daily that the trial has kept him away from the campaign trail, is not returning to the campaign trail anytime soon. But he is expected to be on a fundraising roll this week, stopping in Beverly Hills, California, on Friday and holding a rally in the battleground state of Nevada on Sunday. In a press release announcing the rally, the Trump campaign made no mention of his conviction, instead delivering an economic message. “Weak-kneed Joe Biden and his woke Democratic friends have declared war on the middle class. Nevadans are suffering from Bidennomics due to Nevada inflation,” the press release said, also mentioning soaring gas prices.
Sen. Tom Cotton, a rising star as Trump’s running mate, defended the former president’s economic policies on NBC. “The real verdict will be on Election Day, and it will be handed down by the American people,” the Arkansas Republican said Sunday. “It will be handed down based on people not being able to pay their rent, not being able to feed their children, chaos at the border, wars happening all around the world.”
The emerging economic dispute between the two sides suggests that despite Trump’s legal quagmire dominating election coverage for months and drawing core Republican voters to the former president, it may not ultimately be the issue that determines who serves as president beyond January.
