Joe Biden is seeking to exploit Donald Trump’s recent felony conviction in a television advertising blitz, amid polling evidence that the presumptive Republican nominee’s criminal status is hurting him with independent voters.
A new 30-second advert released on Monday homes in on Trump’s 31 May conviction in a Manhattan court on 34 counts of falsifying documents to conceal the payment of hush money to Stormy Daniels, an adult actor, who testified that the pair had sex.
The ad – featuring black-and-white courtroom images of Trump – also highlights his losses in two civil court cases, one from the writer E Jean Carroll, who said the former president raped and defamed her, and a $355m fraud ruling against his businesses.
“We see Donald Trump for who he is,” the ad’s narrator says. “He’s been convicted of 34 felonies, found liable for sexual assault and he committed financial fraud.
“Meanwhile, Joe Biden’s been working,” the narrative continues in a calculated comparison between Trump and his successor in the Oval Office. “This election is between a convicted criminal who is only out for himself and a president who is fighting for you and your family.”
The ad will run in key battleground states and is the Biden campaign’s most aggressive commentary yet on Trump’s criminal status after a muted initial response.
It is part of a $50m advertising onslaught as the Biden election machine seeks to make Trump’s character a central issue in the run-up to the first scheduled televised debate between the pair on CNN on 27 June.
In the immediate aftermath of the verdict – which Trump has appealed – the president appeared to play it down, saying: “There’s only one way to keep Donald Trump out of the Oval Office: At the ballot box.”
The apparent change of course follows polling indicators that the conviction may sway potential swing voters, widely deemed crucial in a close race. A fresh poll for Politico shows 21% of independent voters saying it makes them less likely to vote for him in November – a potentially decisive factor in a contest in which opinion surveys have shown the two candidates running neck-and-neck, with Trump leading narrowly in many instances.
The poll also recorded 43% of voters as believing that the verdict was intended to help Biden.
One of Trump’s leading surrogates, the Florida congressman Byron Donalds, who has been tipped as a potential vice-presidential contender, called on the US supreme court – which has a six-to-three conservative majority, largely because of Trump’s nomination of conservative justices while he was president – to reverse the conviction, despite it having no jurisdiction over state cases.
“In New York, the only ability for this to be overturned … is going to be happening two or three years from now,” he told NBC’s Meet The Press.
“That’s why what happened in lower Manhattan was to interfere with an election, which is why Speaker [Mike] Johnson, myself included, and many Americans believe the supreme court should step in to this matter.”
At a fundraising event in Los Angeles, attended by former president Barack Obama, and actors George Clooney and Julia Roberts, Biden told the comedian Jimmy Kimmel that a Trump victory would result in at least two more conservative justices being appointed to the supreme court, which he said would be “very negative in terms of the rights of individuals”.
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