The Key to Going After Donald Trump Now That He’s Been Convicted

After Donald Trump was swiftly convicted by a jury of his peers in the Stormy Daniels hush money case in Manhattan on Thursday, the Biden campaign put out a statement with all the urgency of a DoorDash order. A spokesperson criticized the former president for “breaking the law for his personal gain,” noting dutifully that “there is still only one way to keep Donald Trump out of the Oval Office: at the ballot box,” before pivoting back to the likely GOP nominee’s threat to democracy itself. It’s not that these statements are untrue, but their inexplicable restraint is very much in keeping with Biden’s long-standing (and unsuccessful) above-the-fray posture about Trump’s voluminous legal difficulties—and that needs to change.

Steering voters back to Trump’s plans to eviscerate democracy is the wrong strategy to approach this particular conviction. As much as Democrats were hoping to have trials related to the Jan. 6 insurrection and the 2020 postelection coup attempt or even the classified documents case front and center this fall, the reactionary hard-right supermajority on the Supreme Court has successfully dragged its feet long enough that those proceedings will either be delayed until after the election or perhaps be scuttled altogether with some newly fabricated interpretation of James Madison’s diaries. The public has a very clear case of democracy-in-peril fatigue, and Jan. 6 long ago lost its salience to most voters, for whom grocery prices and interest rates are more important at the moment than a scene—vivid and appalling as it was—from the loathed pandemic era.

Almost no one in the Democratic Party has been willing to talk about the substance of the Daniels trial, but the question that the Biden campaign and its allies really need to answer is: What do the details of this case say about Trump and his fitness for the presidency? Just repeating the words convicted felon over and over again in the general vicinity of Trump’s name isn’t going to do it. These new dots, they must be connected.

And there are two pretty obvious angles here for the White House and the party as a whole to pursue. One is that Trump was just unanimously convicted by a jury of his peers for election interference. He had his hapless fixer pay off Daniels not “for personal gain,” as the Biden campaign statement alleges, but to defraud the American people, to deprive them of the information that they needed to make an informed decision on Election Day 2016 and to illegitimately obtain the most powerful office in the world on behalf of the country’s far right. Donald Trump covered up his affair with Daniels so he could appoint Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. He committed felonies so that the insurrectionists at the reactionary Heritage Foundation could rewrite the nation’s tax laws to make rich people richer. And so on.

The other is a more personal angle. Biden likes to repeat the canned phrase “Don’t compare me to the Almighty; compare me to the alternative”—a motto he attributes to his father and which is about as edgy as a mid-aughts Verizon Guy commercial. But what the hush money case demonstrates clearly is that Trump is a genuinely terrible human being. What kind of man has unprotected sex with an adult film star while his wife is home recovering from labor and delivery and caring for an infant? What kind of terrible employer has an underling borrow against his own home to cover up his boss’s sordid lies and extramarital affairs? For years, leading Democrats have danced around a truly blunt assessment of Trump without ever coming out and saying it directly: The man is an evil, amoral cretin willing to betray those closest to him without a second thought. Find some coded language that can puncture the epistemic closure of conservative evangelical Christians. Call him the worst person in the entire country, which is basically what he is. Tap into the robust public opinion of the majorities who believe that extramarital affairs are morally wrong by asking: “If Melania can’t trust him, why should you?”

Whatever path they choose requires departing from the warmth and safety of “No one is above the law” framing. Letting the conviction more or less speak for itself is a conservative strategy that would make sense if Biden were decisively leading the race and wanted to avoid unforced errors. But as hard as it might be for everyone in the White House to accept, the president’s campaign is clearly trailing, according to public opinion polling. Yes, the margins are narrow, but if the election were held tomorrow, it is more likely than not that Donald Trump would win it. You can’t run out the clock when you’re losing. And that means that Biden needs to go on the offensive, just like dozens of leading Democratic officials and strategists are asking him to.

Yet Biden and his team clearly feel that having Biden stay out of the whole thing can help legitimize the prosecutions and whatever verdicts follow. This is wishful thinking. Take one fleeting glance at how people on the right are reacting to Trump’s conviction—that should be sufficient to disabuse the White House of the notion that there is anything it could possibly do to reach hardcore MAGA voters. Former Fox anchor Megyn Kelly promised prosecutions of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for unnamed offenses: “We’re going to have to look at what the statutes of limitations are on the various crimes they surely committed, “ she intoned. Charlie Kirk, the young MAGA media superstar, implored his followers to “indict the left, or lose America.” Donations to the Trump campaign surged. Nearly all Republican officeholders deemed the verdict somehow illegitimate. In other words, keeping the Trump prosecutions at arm’s length earned Biden precisely nothing from the right, which has existed in a state of continuous rage for so long that it does not have any other emotional register to draw upon.

In the criminally underappreciated 1996 movie Big Night, Tony Shalhoub plays Primo, a perfectionist chef who opens an Italian restaurant on the ’50s-era Jersey Shore with his brother Secondo (Stanley Tucci), only to be upstaged by an Olive Garden–esque spaghetti-and-meatballs slophouse up the road run by Pascal (Ian Holm), a rival. At one point, with their enterprise on the verge of bankruptcy, an exasperated Primo says, “People should come just for the food!” Secondo, a businessman, replies, “I know that, I know. But they don’t.”

Biden and his allies are like the gourmet chefs who believe that their menu should speak for itself, from Biden’s record in office to his moral superiority. But it doesn’t, and nowhere is the need to engage in aggressive messaging on Democrats’ part clearer than with these convictions. Democratic partisans want fighting words and for Biden to take it directly to his corrupt, morally bankrupt opponent. Independents and undecided voters need to once again have Trump’s flaws spelled out for them, like Pascal would advise.

“Give people what they want,” Pascal tells Secondo, “then, later, you can give them what you want.” Unless he prefers to watch—rather than participate in—the next inauguration, Biden should heed the words of Pascal.