Joe Biden was at a fundraiser for his re-election bid on Thursday evening in the suburbs north of New York City when he made a fleeting reference to the criminal cases facing his rival Donald Trump.
“I haven’t had a chance to watch the court proceedings,” Biden said after an introduction by actor Michael Douglas. “Because I’ve been campaigning.”
Biden’s comment captured the bizarre split-screen spectacle that is currently dominating this year’s presidential election — and one that could present an opening for the president to seize the initiative.
On one side of the screen, Biden is running a traditional re-election campaign as an incumbent, mixing political rallies across the country with governing duties like brokering this week’s congressional passage of $95bn in foreign aid.
And on the other, Trump is in the dock. For most of the past two weeks, he has been in a Manhattan court as a defendant in the “hush money” case brought by New York prosecutors alleging that he falsified documents relating to payments made to silence porn actor Stormy Daniels. In his every utterance to the cameras, Trump seethes at what he believes to be judicial persecution.
While it is unclear how long the trial in New York will last, much less what the verdict will be, the legal drama is unfolding at a pivotal moment in the race as both candidates shift from the primary contests to a general election that is on a knife’s edge.
According to the RealClearPolitics polling average, Biden has been gaining some ground compared to early March when he delivered his State of the Union address to Congress. Trump’s lead nationally has dwindled to just 0.3 percentage points, although the former president still has an edge in the polling of most key swing states.
For Biden, Trump’s appearances in court have offered a prime opportunity to portray his rival as flawed, self-absorbed and unfit for office. That message was at the heart of Biden’s winning campaign in 2020 and he hopes to use it again.
Although Trump’s legal travails helped him in the Republican primary contests by galvanising the rightwing base of voters who rushed to his defence, the trial is becoming more of a constraint, making it harder for him to raise money and to campaign. Politically, the trial is damaging his standing with the sliver of independent and swing voters who will end up deciding the race.
The court appearances are putting “Trump and his liabilities front and centre in a way they haven’t been in quite some time”, says Amy Walter, a non-partisan political analyst and editor-in-chief of the Cook Political Report with Amy Walter.
“The theory of the case for Biden is that even though his numbers are low, even though he’s trailing in the battleground state polls, once people start focusing on Donald Trump as the nominee and as a potential president again, voters will start coming back to Biden,” says Walter. “This is the first test of that.”
Kevin Madden, a senior partner at Penta who advised Mitt Romney’s 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns, says Trump’s legal troubles are “casting a shadow” over his prospects of winning over moderate, traditional, college-educated Republicans who backed his rivals in the primaries.
“The macro effect of the Trump trials is that a lot of the conscientious objectors inside of the Republican party that voted for Ron DeSantis or Nikki Haley or Chris Christie, they are still holding out,” says Madden. “They are not very quickly or reflexively moving back into the Republican fold.”
Trump has certainly tried to maintain some trappings of an ordinary campaign even as he moves in and out of the New York courtroom, including frequent, if brief, comments to reporters.
“This is a trial that should’ve never happened, this is a case that should’ve never been filed,” he said on Thursday afternoon before shifting to an attack on Biden. “He has no idea how to message. He can’t speak. He can’t put two sentences together. He doesn’t know what to do.”
Away from the cameras, Trump has appeared a diminished figure, occasionally falling asleep at the defence table, and often seen staring listlessly into the void.
His behaviour has prompted widespread internet mockery, with Democrats seizing on the irony of the man who branded his opponent “Sleepy Joe” struggling to stay awake in the middle of the day. Trump has also repeatedly complained about the courtroom temperature, urging the judge — via his lawyer Todd Blanche — to notch up the heat by a couple of degrees.
“We have another day in court in a freezing courthouse. It’s very cold in there, on purpose I believe,” he complained as he entered court on Friday. “It’s a rigged trial.”
At times, the proceedings have appeared to irk and even embarrass Trump. He shook his head when prosecutors on Monday referred to the notorious “Access Hollywood” tape and read into the record the words uttered by the then-reality TV star that his fame allowed him to grab women “by the pussy”.
He also appeared bored while listening to former tabloid publisher David Pecker recount in lurid detail the deals he had done to prevent Trump’s infidelities from becoming public in the run-up to the 2016 election.
A moment that underlined the power dynamics in the court came late last Friday, when Trump prematurely stood up to exit the room, only for Justice Juan Merchan to bark: “Sir, can you please have a seat.”
The Biden campaign and Democrats have been capitalising on the scenes in New York.
“I think the contrast speaks for itself,” says Tina Smith, a Democratic senator from Minnesota. “Call me an old-fashioned girl but being a defendant in a criminal trial facing jail is never a good thing.” A Biden campaign official says Trump is now “on the back foot”. “Trump is a master at trying to set the agenda and set the news coverage. And right now, he’s kind of at the mercy of it,” the official adds.
Julie Chavez Rodriguez, Biden’s campaign manager, told the FT that, as in 2020, the election would be a choice of “unity over division, competence over chaos, and the middle class over billionaires”. While Biden was “criss-crossing the country talking to voters about making their lives better”, Trump was “a would-be dictator running for his own revenge and retribution”.
During the first week of Trump’s New York trial, Biden spent three days in the must-win swing state of Pennsylvania, including a visit to Scranton, the industrial city where he was born. This week, he was in Florida trying to link Trump to strict abortion restrictions being imposed in Republican states — an issue that Democrats are counting on to benefit them in November.
But whether the attention to Trump’s criminal trial in New York will meaningfully erode his support is not certain. A Quinnipiac University poll found that while 60 per cent of US voters believe the charges to be serious, 62 per cent said a conviction would not affect their vote.
“The optics of the trial . . . are not good for Trump, but it is easy to see how people on both sides see their beliefs reinforced by the trial, rather than, ‘oh my goodness, I didn’t know this about Trump’,” says Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette Law School Poll in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Trump allies and campaign officials have rejected any suggestion that he is losing momentum because of the trial. Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for his campaign, wrote on X that such a view was only held by “out of touch” pundits. “They don’t get it and they never will,” she said. John Catsimatidis, a New York billionaire and a big fundraiser for Trump, believes the odds the trial will help the former president are “60-40”.
While Trump was forced to cancel a North Carolina rally last weekend due to bad weather, and chose to golf on Wednesday during his midweek break from the trial, the campaign has now scheduled two events next Wednesday in Michigan and Wisconsin to get him back in front of swing state voters.
In the meantime, he has tried to stay active in New York, making a quick stop in Harlem to visit a bodega, shaking hands with builders at a Midtown Manhattan construction site and hosting foreign politicians from Poland and Japan at Trump Tower. He also suggested a big event at Madison Square Garden might be in the works, although nothing has been confirmed. “We’re going to have a big rally honouring the police, and honouring the firemen, and everybody,” he said.
Some Republican Trump allies give him credit for how he is managing it all. “He has been able to get creative in some cases,” says Ford O’Connell, a Republican operative in Florida. “He is going to have to be able to use the appearances before and after court each day to be able to push campaign messages as well.”
But Biden and his team are convinced that voters will balk at handing Trump a second term. Even if the New York trial wraps up earlier than the expected six weeks and none of the federal cases make it to trial before the election, they believe that Trump is wasting precious time and resources. At the same time, the Biden campaign is ramping up fundraising, building out their field operations and honing their message in response to their Republican rival.
“His presidency was chaos, not a joke,” Biden said at the New York fundraiser, blasting him for his handling of Covid, his “love letters” to North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, the “dark days” around the January 6 2021 attack on the US Capitol, and appointing Supreme Court Justices who overturned the constitutional right to an abortion in 2022. “The voters are going to hold him accountable,” he said.
Walter, the political commentator, says the trial could change the minds of the sorts of voters who backed Biden in 2020 but are “not crazy about the job he’s done as president”. The court appearances are a daily reminder of their “dislike for Trump, how he behaves personally, but also the way he treats this process”.
But the 2024 election remains “very close”. She adds: “You have two unpopular candidates and an electorate that is very disappointed or ambivalent.”
Additional reporting by Alex Rogers
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