Anyone who thought Joe Biden would be gloating at Donald Trump’s election-day indiscretion as a convicted felon was let down.
Instead the Democrat’s campaign issued a sober warning that the only way to prevent Trump returning to the White House remained the ballot box.
The challenge now will be for Biden to extract political gain for Trump’s historic criminal conviction, but in such a way that he avoids fueling Trump supporters’ belief that the prosecution itself was political.
“In New York today, we saw that no one is above the law,” Biden campaign communications director Michael Tyler said in a statement.
“But today’s verdict does not change the fact that the American people face a simple reality. There is still only one way to keep Donald Trump out of the Oval Office: at the ballot box.”
Following the conviction of the former resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue on all 34 counts in his hush money case, the White House was even less eager to get its hands dirty.
A brief statement from Ian Sams, a spokesman for the White House Counsel’s Office, stated, “We respect the rule of law and have no additional comment.”
Biden did not provide a statement on Thursday.
Nine years to the day after his 46-year-old son Beau passed away from brain cancer in 2015, the president was at his Delaware home on a day that already held immense personal significance for him.
Biden is definitely in a better place now that Trump has made his historic conviction, which in any other election year would have been a crushing blow. For weeks, polls had shown Biden and Trump to be tied nationally, with the Democrat leading the Republican by a slight margin in the majority of the crucial swing states.
In the past, Biden has occasionally cracked jokes about Trump’s legal situation, making fun of him for nodding off during the trial and claiming he has been too “busy” to be out campaigning.
However, he has mostly been silent on the matter; the question now is whether he will remain above the fray in a presidential manner or take a more assertive stand.
“Big deal”
In one of the tightest White House contests in recent memory, Biden will be hopeful that the verdict can affect even a tiny number of undecided or hesitant voters.
“The fact that I’m Joe Biden and I have no criminal record helps him,” Democratic strategist Rachel Bitecofer stated.
In response to the ruling, Biden has already started a social media fundraising campaign.
David Karol, an AFP reporter and University of Maryland government and politics professor, said that Trump’s conviction “speaks for itself.”
“In my opinion, Biden doesn’t need to address this type of issue in order to get voters’ attention. It is historic and quite significant.
In addition, Biden expressed a desire to “avoid the impression that he is directing the prosecution of his opponent.”
On the other hand, Karol stated that he “wouldn’t be surprised” if Biden found it difficult to avoid bringing it up in their first election debate, which is set for June 27, two weeks before the Republican is sentenced.
Meanwhile, Biden was cautioned by former Obama White House advisor David Axelrod not to be “tempted to flood the zone about the conviction.”
“Biden would be better served by focusing even more on people’s everyday worries while Trump wallows in his own problems. It would be a striking difference, Axelrod stated on X.
Considering his own familial circumstances, Biden might similarly be hesitant to react.
Hunter, the survivor, is scheduled to appear in court on gun-related charges the next week, so Wendy Schiller, a political science professor at Brown University, advised him to “avoid talking about court cases at all.”
