President Biden’s campaign launched a $50 million television ad blitz Monday to hit Donald Trump over his 34-count felony business fraud conviction.
The ad campaign is the first by the 81-year-old Democratic prez to highlight former President Trump’s conviction by a Manhattan jury May 30 — and attacks the 78-year-old GOP presidential candidate as “a convicted criminal who’s only out for himself.
“In the courtroom, we see Donald Trump for who he is,” the narrator says in the 30-second ad titled “Character Matters” before rattling off verdicts in Trump’s “hush money” case, as well as civil suits brought by the gossip columnist E. Jean Carroll and New York Attorney General Letitia James against him.
“Meanwhile, Joe Biden’s been working, lowering health care costs and making big corporations pay their fair share,” the narrator says.
“This election is between a convicted criminal who’s only out for himself and a president who is fighting for your family.”
In February, Trump was ordered to pay $355 million after a New York judge ruled that he inflated his net worth by billions of dollars over the course of a decade to dupe insurers into giving him cheaper rates and to expand his real estate empire.
A Manhattan jury also ordered Trump the month before to pay Carroll $83.3 million in damages for denying her accusations of sexual abuse and claiming they had never met. That judgment came a month after the former president had been found liable for defamation and sexually assaulting Carroll in a Bergdorf Goodman fitting room in 1996.
“It’s a stark contrast, and it’s one that matters deeply to the American people,” Biden campaign spokesman Michael Taylor said in a statement to The Associated Press, referring to the candidates’ differences that the ad campaign is trying to highlight.
But Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt accused the Biden administration of having “weaponized the justice system against President Trump,” which led to his criminal conviction.
Trump still faces two federal indictments for allegedly mishandling classified documents and interfering in the 2020 presidential election, as well as another prosecution in Atlanta, Ga., over his attempts to reverse Joe Biden’s electoral victory there.
The former president has leaned into some of the aspects of the criminal cases for his own campaign, hawking t-shirts online with his mugshot last summer in Fulton County, Ga., that read, “NEVER SURRENDER!”
“It sells,” Trump told influencer Logan Paul of the t-shirt strategy during a meet-and-greet last week.
“Elvis had one, Frank Sinatra had one — but we’ve eclipsed them,” he said of the icons whose mugshots were put on tees, too, after arrests.
It’s unlikely that any of the outstanding Trump cases will head to trial before Election Day 2024.
Biden has made Trump’s criminal trials — and first-ever criminal conviction for a former or current US president — part of his pitch to voters and donors to steer clear of the presumptive Republican nominee.
Last week, the president’s son, Hunter Biden, was convicted after a one-week federal trial in Delaware on three felony counts for lying about his crack cocaine abuse to purchase a handgun in 2018.
Biden said he would “abide by the jury decision” and not pardon his son, calling Hunter “one of the greatest, most decent men I know” after he had “overcome an addiction.”
Part of the Biden campaign’s June ad push will also put $1 million toward media reaching black, Hispanic and Asian-American voters — demographics that Trump has made inroads with since his 2020 election loss to the president.
Young, nonwhite and disengaged Democrat-leaning voters are most likely to drift from supporting Trump after his criminal conviction, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll this month.
Biden and Trump will face each other June 27 in Atlanta for the first presidential debate of the season on CNN.
Leavitt said the differences between the former president and Biden “will be very clear on the debate stage.”