The Biden Team Has Taken to Just Stating the Obvious About Trump
This is Totally Normal Quote of the Day, a feature highlighting a statement from the news that exemplifies just how extremely normal everything has become.
“This election is between a convicted criminal who is only out for himself, and a president who is fighting for your family.” —Excerpt from a recent Biden campaign ad titled “Character Matters”
With less than a week to go until President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump debate face-to-face for the first time since 2020, the Biden-Harris campaign has released the first of multiple television ads that target “Donald Trump for who he is,” according to the ad’s anonymous narrator. It’s part of a recent $50 million ad blitz effort by the Biden campaign, and it lays it all out there in 30 seconds flat.
“He’s been convicted of 34 felonies, found liable for sexual assault, and he committed financial fraud,” states the narrator, darkly, as Trump appears on the screen, glowering from inside (and outside) multiple courtrooms, the imagery filtered in a noir-esque black-and-white hue. “Meanwhile”—cue the epic superhero-esque soundtrack and brightly colored clips of Biden signing bills and hugging workers across various industries—“Joe Biden has been working, lowering health care costs and making big corporations pay their fair share.”
The ad then flashes Trump’s infamous mug shot from the Fulton County jail, taken in August of 2023 after he was indicted by the district attorney in a conspiracy to interfere with the 2020 election. It concludes with another light montage showing a happy, smiling Biden.
It should be shocking: a convicted felon running for the highest American office on a platform stuffed with authoritarian promises to degrade democracy and violate human rights. (And let’s not even get into Project 2025.) Shouldn’t that reality alone trigger a fresh wave of collective outrage? Will it? Or are we completely numb, as a society, to the stakes of this presidential race?
The Biden ad’s stylistic qualities and presentation of dichotomies between the two candidates are nothing new, but never before has one presidential candidate been able to say about the other, “That guy is a felon.” (The Trump campaign is set to air its first TV ad for the general election on Thursday, the day of the first presidential debate.)
After the New York jury’s decision to convict Trump in the hush money trial, the Biden campaign didn’t immediately jump into creating felon-Trump ad content. Instead, they “engaged in a broad discussion about how to use the jury’s decision in the campaign,” according to a recent New York Times story about the ad. I guess that makes sense, given the current absurdity of our political climate. Trump’s conviction may have been a first of its kind in American political history, but it only noticeably weakened support among independent voters, according to recent polling from Politico and Ipsos. (Twenty-one percent of independents said the conviction made them less likely to support Trump and that it would be an important factor in their vote.) And Americans of all walks of life, according to the same poll, saw the trial as politically motivated. Specifically, 43 percent of all polled voters—Republican, Democrat, and independent—answered “Agree” to this statement proposed by Ipsos: “The decision by the Manhattan District Attorney’s office to charge Donald Trump was based on trying to gain a political advantage for Joe Biden.”
Does this make you want to hit yourself in the head with a shovel? There’s more. Following Trump’s conviction, Biden’s approval ratings, according to FiveThirtyEight’s polling average, dipped to the lowest so far throughout his presidency (37.4 percent approval). That’s not to say these two factors—Trump’s criminal status and Biden’s approval rating—have a direct causal relationship, or that there aren’t numerous other explanations for Biden’s dragging national support. It’s just that the presidential election is sort of a zero-sum game, and polled voters don’t seem to view the two candidates that way (at least right now). A hit for Trump—even a felony conviction—does not automatically equal a win for Biden.
The jury’s still out (pun absolutely intended) on the long-term effects of the conviction and even on Biden’s advertisement blitz, especially in the swing states that will play such an outsize role in November. Although Trump has the remarkable yet terrifying ability to numb the human senses with never-ending and belligerent chaos, the Biden-Harris team is clearly trying to cut through the noise with ads digestible enough for our rapidly shrinking attention spans. Such an effort might not cause any seismic shifts, but it’s a tactic—and a message—that bears repeating.
Discover more from CaveNews Times
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.