Biden Twists the ‘Convicted Felon’ Knife
Plus: The hard-right reactionaries making the globe safe for MAGA.
Joe Biden called Donald Trump a “convicted felon,” and you know what? The Trump campaign just can’t believe a U.S. president would say something so low-down and mean.
That word is “shameful,” campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt, who has tweeted about the “Biden Crime Family” eight different times, said on Fox Business yesterday. Happy Tuesday.
Biden Blasts the ‘Convicted Felon’
Data continues to roll in suggests that the American public supports the judgment of those 12 jurors in New York City. A new poll from Data for Progress finds that 56 percent of likely voters approve of the jury finding Donald Trump guilty on all 34 counts; 38 percent disapprove.
Those numbers are even more promising when you zoom in the camera on true swing voters. Data for Progress identified a batch of these by looking at poll respondents’ cumulative responses to questions “including their 2020 vote recall and 2024 vote choice, their favorability towards Biden and Trump, and whether they say they’re considering more than one option in the 2024 presidential election.”
And these swing voters are even more supportive of the jury’s verdict: 60 percent of them approve of the jury’s decision; only 24 percent disapprove. Sixteen percent said they didn’t know.
Data for Progress also notes that, “as of the time this poll was fielded between May 31 and June 1, only 37% of swing voters said they had heard, seen, or read ‘a lot’ about Donald Trump being convicted of 34 felony charges, compared with 61% of likely voters overall.”
So, unsurprisingly, swing voters are following politics less closely than committed voters. And of course their minds are less firmly made up—that’s why they’re swing voters!
Which means it’s important not to allow MAGA world to flood the zone and convince these swing voters that their first instinct to support the verdict was wrong. It’s important rather to provide these voters more information and reassurance that their instinct to support the jury verdict is right. All the more reason for anti-Trump forces to maintain focus on the convicted-felon issue.
The poll also asks whether the New York trial of Trump was “fair” or “rigged.” Fifty-three percent of likely voters say they thought the trial was fair, 39 percent that it was rigged. Among swing voters the split is 52 percent to 27 percent.
This bears saying again and again: On the issue of his conviction, Trump’s 40 percent or so of core supporters are with him. Uncommitted voters aren’t.
A poll is only a snapshot of sentiment at one moment in time. But these numbers are striking enough to suggest that Trump’s conviction may turn out to be a major obstacle to his picking up the swing voters he needs to win in November—if it can be kept top of mind for the electorate.
President Biden seems to agree with this judgment.
Last night, speaking at a fundraiser in Connecticut, the president addressed the Trump conviction. His campaign went to the trouble of releasing excerpts from his prepared remarks ahead of time—meaning it was a message he wanted widely heard.
What he said, in part, was this:
For the first time in American history a former president that is a convicted felon is now seeking the office of the Presidency.
But as disturbing as that is, more damaging is the all-out assault Donald Trump is making on the American system of justice . . .
The threat that Trump poses would be greater in a second term than it was in his first term. This isn’t the same Trump who got elected in 2016. He’s worse.
Something snapped in him when he lost in 2020. He can’t accept he lost, and it is literally driving him crazy.
It’s good to see Biden calling attention to Trump’s conviction. It’s also good to see him calling out Trump’s “all-out assault” on the justice system.
First, because that assault is genuinely noteworthy and alarming.
Second, because in doing so Biden links Trump’s conviction for things he did in the past to his threat in the future. The issue is not just Trump’s falsifying business records in 2016 and 2017. It’s about the damage he might do to the rule of law and the legal system in a second term.
And I’ll add that Biden’s framing of this is politically savvy. Biden provides a kind of permission structure for voters who might have supported Trump in 2016 or 2020 to leave him now: “Something snapped when he lost in 2020.”
Many of us would say that Trump has always been like this! But Biden wants to make it easier for voters who supported Trump in the past to change their mind and their vote, and he does that with this formulation.
Obviously one set of remarks at a fundraiser isn’t going to make a big difference in this election. But if last night signals an intention on the part of Team Biden to keep hammering Trump’s felony conviction and his assault on the justice system and the implications of that for a second Trump term—that, I think, is a very good sign.
President Biden flies off to Paris tonight for D-Day anniversary observances and a state visit to France. He’ll no doubt stay away from domestic politics on the trip.
But on Sunday he’ll conclude his trip by visiting the World War I Aisne-Marne American cemetery near Belleau Wood, which his predecessor famously chose not to visit in 2018. The contrast between a president who respects the sacrifices of those who have served and his predecessor who doesn’t, as well as the contrast between a president who respects the rule of law and his predecessor who’s a convicted felon—this contrast will be there for the American people to see.
—William Kristol
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Nationalists of the Globe, Unite!
Last Thursday—the date of the first ever criminal conviction of a former president—was an unfortunate day to try to break smaller news. So odds are you missed this story from the New Republic opening up a private WhatsApp group involving Erik Prince—founder of military contractor Blackwater and younger brother of former Trump education secretary Betsy DeVos—and a consortium of his right-wing pals from around the globe, from Tucker Carlson to Michael Flynn, from sitting members of Congress (Rep. Mark Green of Tennessee, Rep. Ryan Zinke of Montana) to Israeli businessmen to Romanian mercenaries.
It’s fascinating reading, a consortium of powerful and power-hungry hard-right reactionaries shooting the shit about current events—MAGA Science Theater 3000. The gang has all kinds of fun on all kinds of topics, from the Middle East leaders that most need assassinating to whether political violence will be necessary come the November election. (“It’s Trump or Revolution!” Prince’s business partner Michael Yudelson proclaims at one point. “You mean Trump AND Revolution,” someone identified only as “a right-leaning Canadian businessman” replies. “The Left is too violent to sit back and let Trump win again.”)
The whole thing is both bleakly funny—who do these people think they are?—and incredibly unsettling: They’re a lot closer to power than any sane person could be comfortable with. You should read it all, if you’ve got the stomach for it. But we wanted to zero in on one particularly illuminating exchange:
“Trump, Orban, Milei, it’s happening,” former Blackwater executive John LaDelfa posted to the group during a trip to Argentina on December 4, two days after Prince created it. “Around the Globe, we are the sensible, the rational, the majority. Don’t give in to fear. We will defeat the Marxists.”
His hopes were shared by many other Off Leash participants, among them Horatiu Potra, a Romanian mercenary who has recently been operating in the mineral-rich, conflict-plagued Democratic Republic of Congo. “The globalists want to control the entire planet [and] the only chance to get rid of them is a spark from a great power (the USA),” Potra wrote. “Surely there will be a strong man like Erik who will initiate it, otherwise there is no chance of regaining our freedom. If this spark is started, all countries will follow suit. . . . We were waiting for the signal, the spark!!”
There’s this odd two-step you often see from the current crop of Trump-style reactionary nationalists. They’re bursting at the seams with contempt for free trade, international multilateralism, and anything else that smacks of “globalism.” They don’t love the globe, they say—they love America!
And yet who do they see as brothers in their political fight? Not the median American Democrat down the street, but anybody around the world who happens to share their reactionary anti-elite priors. And what is that fight, really? Not just a reasonable reorientation of politics around national as opposed to “globalist” aims—but a global struggle against that hated elite that must be got rid of around the world.
“America First” is the rallying cry, but it’s also in many respects a lie. Making the world safe for MAGA—that’d be a more honest slogan for the new right-wing globalism.
—Andrew Egger
Quick Hits: The MAGA Education of Larry Hogan
Larry Hogan is an increasingly rare bird—a Republican moderate who managed to win and execute two successful terms as governor in deep-blue Maryland. But he may be facing a taller order this year as he runs for Senate, where he’s battling two forces he didn’t have to worry about before: on the one hand, Democratic concerns that even a moderate Republican numerically strengthens the hand of hard-right forces in the upper chamber; on the other, a Trump-controlled GOP that would rather elect Democrats than anti-Trump Republicans in the first place. On the site today, Jill Lawrence has a great piece breaking the whole thing down:
Things started off well for Republicans interested in actually winning a Senate majority. Hogan said some dozen senators called to encourage him to get into the race, and so did former President George W. Bush. By February, Hogan made it official: He was in.
This was a second round of courtship, after Hogan had resisted recruitment efforts in 2022. So, finally, success for the reality-based GOP strategy community.
But the thrill of victory has faded fast. Lara Trump, Donald’s daughter-in-law and handpicked co-chair of the Republican National Committee, all but threw Hogan under the bus Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union over his “ridiculous” and “very upsetting” statement last week just before a jury convicted the former president on 34 felony counts.
What triggered her delicate sensibilities? Hogan had posted an anodyne message urging respect for the legal process “regardless of the result,” and for “what has made this nation great: the rule of law.” But that was apparently a little too real for the MAGA set, the many Republicans who want to be Trump’s running mate or Senate majority leader, any Republican simply hoping to stay viable in GOP politics, and top Trump adviser Chris LaCivita (who declared the statement had instantly “ended” Hogan’s campaign).
“He doesn’t deserve the respect of anyone in the Republican party at this point and, quite frankly, anybody in America,” Lara Trump said of Hogan. “I think he should have thought long and hard before he said that publicly,” she added. Would she spend party money for him? “I will get back to you,” Trump told Kasie Hunt.
Cheap Shots
The title "felon" should be regarded as shameful. That's why one shouldn't engage in criminal behavior. If you're more upset about someone correctly using that term rather than someone else actually being a felon, you might be part of the problem.
Regarding Biden: it's almost like the Old Man is good at this politics thing.