A fundraiser in Connecticut last night,
President Biden made some of his most candid comments yet
about former President Trump's criminal conviction.
In off camera remarks, Biden told the audience that a
convicted felon is now seeking the office of the presidency.
The president added, quote, as disturbing as that is,
more damaging is the all out assault Donald Trump is
making on the American system of justice.
President Biden is reported to have said,
quote, something snapped in this guy after the 2020 election
and,
quote, it's literally driving him crazy.
Biden went on to call Trump
unhinged, Joe. So maybe a private preview,
Joe, of where we may see President Biden going publicly
as his campaign rolls out now that Donald Trump has
been convicted on
34 felony counts, right? It is Jonathan Ramirez.
It, it may be a,
a, a private preview, but this is
how Biden feels. This is how his campaign team feels.
This is how people around him feel.
They, they are glad the
trial's over. They're glad that he's going out on the
trail.
And as I said yesterday,
while that long stem Winder of a press conference was
going on Friday,
the Biden campaign was celebrating.
They said, OK, he's he sounds old,
older, more unhinged, less connected with reality.
This is why we want him out of the courthouse
and on the campaign trail.
Yeah, it seems counterintuitive, but they're exactly right.
Some senior Biden people were eager for the trial to
end because they felt in some ways it's shielded Donald
Trump from the scrutiny of the rest of the,
of the, the voters when then they actually hear him
talking again and he's in their living room again,
which he was in that news conference on Friday,
which he will be in the debate in just a
few weeks time.
Americans will be repulsed, uh,
when they, and don't want to go back to that
Trump term in terms of how the president and his
team are going to handle this.
I was previewed to me a couple of weeks ago.
As we saw last week,
President Biden's first words about the verdict were simply,
we need to respect the process.
The judicial system worked and attacks against
are disgraceful. But now we're seeing other Democrats and the
president himself begin to ramp up his attacks on Donald
Trump.
The Biden Twitter account more than a dozen times yesterday
used the phrase convicted felon.
We heard it again from President Biden last night.
Now they do they they don't believe this conviction itself
is a race changing event.
They do think though it will help among along the
margins and in a close race that could matter.
But more than that, they think it's just the latest
piece,
the latest piece, Willie, of his overall example.
They're building about how Donald Trump isn't fit for office.
Look at the lengths he would go to to keep
power.
Look how he's only out for himself and not you,
the American voter. Yeah. And given that this came in
late May,
this verdict, we'll see how long it can burn through
a long campaign,
whether it stays alive as a conversation piece.
And Molly, you're writing about this in Vanity Fair.
Molly's latest piece is titled Trump World's Post Conviction Spin
cycle.
In it, Molly writes this.
While many Trump surrogates appeared to go about their messaging
in lockstep,
there were also some rather stark inconsistencies suggesting Trump's verdict
was not something that Republicans had a clear handle on.
Perhaps the weirdest display of dissonance came from Mike Lee,
who quite simply could not seem to make up his
mind on whether the trial was a boon or a
bust.
At 5:15 PM on Thursday,
the Utah senator tweeted that by pushing for and securing
Trump's conviction,
progressives have, quote, guaranteed Trump's election.
But a mere 20 minutes later,
the senator appeared to turn the dime,
saying of the trial. I can't imagine a bigger,
more impactful contribution to the Biden campaign.
A jury has found Trump to be guilty on 34
counts of falsifying business records.
In his world, this reality does not really matter.
It's something that can be endlessly spun and mangled and
perverted into a word salad of projection and lies.
But when it comes to wiping off a stain that
is this indelible,
Trump world is going to have a much harder time,
writes Molly Jong Fast. Molly let you expand on this
a little bit on your piece.
But obviously, we heard reflexive reaction for most Republicans,
not surprising at all given a lot of them were
at the courthouse during the trial to support them
saying that this was miscarriage of justice and the criminals
justice system is broken and the country is terrible and
all those things because one time it cut against them.
How do you expect this to play,
though, for the rest of the campaign?
So it reminded me a little bit of the Access
Hollywood tape.
Like there was a moment of panic.
It wasn't quiet. When the Access Hollywood tape broke.
There was sort of silence.
And everyone was like, are we going to stick around
with this guy?
Obviously, Republicans are in it too deep to do anything
but keep going.
I mean, Donald Trump is basically the central platform up
there,
2024 campaigns that, you know,
down the ticket. So I don't think that they're going
to cut and run from him.
And in fact, we saw lots of defending,
but we saw a kind of very weird defending,
right? So they would defend some things,
but not other things. They,
you know, they attacked the rule of law,
which is what we were expecting.
I mean, a lot of it was this playbook,
but there certainly was some tacking and weaving.
And I also think ultimately Donald Trump is,
you know, when they're not completely in lockstep,
that's something to look at.
And so I do think there were some problems there.
Ultimately, you know, Trump was always going to say that
this is what he expected and that this was how
he thought it would go.
But I think they really did think they that he
was going to skate or at least skate on some
of the charges.
Yeah. I mean, and, and they wouldn't have been alone.
I again, I was sure that that there would,
you know, be a possibility of a hung jury,
sure that maybe there would be one person out of
the 77 million who voted for Donald Trump in 2020
that was on that jury that that would not take
their duty seriously. Went I was wrong and I and
the Trump campaign was wrong.
There were 12 jurors who were willing to set aside
all pre-existing beliefs,
all pre-existing prejudices and just look at the facts of
the case,
follow the jury instructions and convict him on 34 counts.
Now, Gene Robinson, you're saying that there's something Donald Trump
could do
if you really wanted to make America great again.
And there's about as much chance of him doing that
as the Tories winning in a landslide next month.
Why don't you tell us what he could do?
Well, no, he could withdraw from the race
because he's just been convicted of
34 felonies. You know, imagine Joe,
if this were any other point in American history,
from the founding of the Republic till the day in
2015 that that Donald Trump rode down that escalator at
Trump Tower.
At any other moment in our history,
a a candidate for any office who was convicted mid
campaign of
34 felony charges would have been out
out of the race before the the jury foreman finished
reading the 34
guilty verdicts, right? I mean,
it was it would have just been automatically unthinkable
that that someone would stay in any race
given the status as a 34 times.
But again, you know, we're in this very different world.
I thought as I was sitting down to write a
column yesterday,
I thought, well, look, somebody needs to call for Donald
Trump to step out of the race.
Because you know, all these sort of,
you know, hand wringing Democrats and chin smoking,
chin stroking pundits of they've been calling for Joe Biden
to step aside and the only thing he's guilty of
is living to 81.
You know, it's just, I mean,
it's, it's just this weird topsy turvy,
upside down world that we live in.
And, and we, we need to stop every once in
a while and realize this is not normal.
This is not healthy. This is insane.
And, and, and I kind of wonder if if maybe
that we'll sink in just that fact of how
insane and unacceptable this is.
We'll, we'll sink in with some voters over time.
We'll see.
I suspect it may with,
with, with swing voters. We saw
some polls over the weekend suggesting that it it just
may do that with independent voters,
with swing voters, especially in the upper
Midwest states. But but Gene brings up such a great
point,
Willie. You know, in the good old days
back back when I was in Washington,
I mean, heck, if somebody got indicted
of 34 counts, they immediately resigned from Congress and,
you know, went to prepare their defense.
Here, Donald Trump gets gets convicted
34 * 34 different felonies.
And of course, you have United States senators who are
trying to use it as a badge of honor that
their guy
is being persecuted by the state.
Yeah, I mean, he's martyred him,
right? I mean, he's been compared to religious figures without
irony by members of the United States Congress,
by people on TV as a rallying cry behind him.
And that's the. That's the Trump way,
though, isn't it? Never surrender.
Never apologize for anything. Put your head down and keep
moving and pretend despite all the facts around you that
you are the and
always, always play the victim.
I mean, that's always it.
Always play the victim. Always play the word.
You know, he was, he was asked in in this
weekend Fox and Friends interview about
evangelical supporting him. We even saw
people that used to be I,
I, I, I
just saw shocking things by
evangelical so-called leaders. One of them
having Trump next to Jesus on a cross
saying, why wouldn't you vote for somebody
who's been convicted? You worship somebody who was convicted.
And that shows you just the depravity
that that that many of these people are willing to
sink to.
It's just straight out blasphemy.
I was just going to say there used to be
a word for that blasphemy.
But Molly, the, the, the point of all this is
that Donald Trump could not pull this off alone,
right? He would be a convicted felon and he would
sound as insane as he does sound in that interview
with Fox and Friends over the weekend for 90 minutes
or however long it lasted.
But the entire party, the entire media,
yeah, on that on his side,
rallies behind him and legitimizes his claims of of victimhood.
And what was interesting this whole weekend was that the
message out of Trump world was this helps him,
right? We raised gonzo money again,
We're going to have to wait to see the filings,
but it's still a lot of money either way.
And he said, you know,
this helps him, this makes him more powerful.
You limbs have done it now,
right? Even though remember, it's a state case.
And the other thing is that this doesn't exist in
a vacuum.
He has three other cases plus all of these civil
cases.
I mean, this guy isn't just this isn't just like
one rogue prosecutor.
I mean, the guy has done all of these things
which have led to all these investigations.
So look, I, I think that to watch Trump world
pump him up,
both to try to play him as the victim and
to also say that he must stay in because he
is the only way that they're going to survive is
a is a bizarre thing.
You know, they, they, they,
there is such a bubble too,
Jonathan Omir that these people live in.
I mean, and even people in sort of the media
orbit
that I've talked to they
they think 34 felony convictions.
It's great for Donald Trump,
great for fundraising, firing up the base man.
People are going to do whatever it takes to vote.
It fires up his, his
44%, his 43%, you know,
and ceiling maybe
4647%. But,
you know, they actually believe it.
I, I Trump, Trump knows better than to believe that
this is something that he wants.
But but there are people around him that have convinced
himself living in bubble that these
34 felony convictions, the greatest political advance for,
for Trump in some time.
And, and they're just completely delusional.
I mean, they're right that it'll fire up the base.
They're right that it'll be good for fundraising,
at least for the time being.
But there's a couple things here.
First, we do know, as we've long said on this
show,
the way to know what Donald Trump is actually thinking
is what he posts on Truth Social in the middle
of the night.
And he it has been screed after screed after screed
expressing anger and frustration at what has happened in these
legal cases.
And also, I've talked to people around him.
He doesn't want to go to prison.
He didn't want to be convicted.
They had convinced themselves they would at least get a
hung jury.
They were surprised by the the verdict and particularly that
it was unanimous.
But even if this does help politically with his base,
there's simply no way it helps beyond that.
Now Democrats feel there's worries already about complacency that they
that the members of the base will say,
well, Trump's been convicted, he can't win.
No. And that's why the overarching message from the Biden
campaign immediately was he can still win,
conviction or not. We've got to get out there and
beat him at the ballot box.
But it's about those swing voters.
And in particular, as someone in the Biden camp put
it to me yesterday,
the people who are going to decide this election,
the suburban voters, some of them older voters,
they care about a couple things and they care about
democracy and they care about decorum.
And they're just turned off by the idea.
The Biden people believe that Donald Trump not only has
been,
as is now, indeed a convicted felon,
but the other part of that Fox interview over the
weekend,
Willie, was that he threatened retribution.
He said, we're going to use the Department of Justice
to get back at the people who did this to
me.
And that, I think, is going to be upsetting to
a lot of voters who are going to cast their
ballots and actually decide,
yeah, kind of confirmed everything people believed about what's going
to happen.
I'm going to fire off the generals.
I'm going to put in MAGA.
We're going to have our own people in there.
We're going to get rid of effectively the federal government
and replace it with our own a lot.