Biden has finally taken the gloves off with his anti-Trump ‘convicted criminal’ ad

On Monday, President Joe Biden launched his opening salvo against former president Donald Trump, ten days ahead of their first debate in Atlanta. The $50 million ad does not mince words and goes directly for Trump becoming the first criminally convicted former president.

Up until now, the Biden campaign has largely refrained from attacking Trump personally, though he has teased lines at fundraisers (at one, he told donors: “For the first time in American history, a former president that is a convicted felon is now seeking the office of the presidency.”) Last year, Democratic strategists told The Independent that “the person who is doing the most effective job of driving the indictment news is Donald Trump.”

The Biden campaign has had a few reasons for keeping mum up until now. Chief of among them is that ironically, despite Trump’s repeated baseless accusations that Biden orchestrated the convictions, he needed to remain silent since Special Counsel Jack Smith fell under the jurisdiction of Attorney General Merrick Garland, whom Biden nominated.

Second, Biden likely hoped that the bad headlines alone would cause Trump’s numbers to decline. That has proven not to be the case, as poll after poll consistently shows him trailing Trump in swing states.

Now that he’s committed to another strategy, Biden does not seem content to just hit Trump with one shot; rather, he emptied the clip by mentioning each of the bad legal rulings, noting how the former president has been “been convicted of 34 felonies”as part of a scheme to falsify business records as part of a conspiracy to corruptly influence the 2016 election. The ad also cited when Trump was found liable for having sexually assaulted writer E Jean Carroll in the 1990s,