- Joe Biden doesn't want the swing voters to forget that Donald Trump is now a convicted felon.
- The Biden campaign is spending $50 million on a media offensive that includes scathing attack ads against Trump.
- The ad highlights Trump's beliefs while portraying Biden as someone who is “fighting for families.”
President Joe Biden is wasting no time trying to use former President Donald Trump's felony convictions to his advantage, and he's spending big bucks to do so.
The Biden campaign announced Monday that it would spend $50 million on an anti-Trump advertising offensive, including television ads that will begin airing in battleground states.
And the allocated funds will only cover the remainder of June, a crucial period leading up to the first presidential debate between the two major party candidates on June 27.
The 30-second “Character Matters” TV ad focuses on Trump's legal troubles, including his 34 felony convictions in a Manhattan hush-money case, his sexual assault conviction and a New York judge's ruling that he committed financial fraud.
In contrast, Biden is committed to “lowering health care costs and making big corporations pay their fair share,” the ad says.
“This election is between a convicted felon who only thinks about himself and a president who is fighting for your family,” the ad states.
“Mr. Trump comes to the first debate as a convicted felon who continues to prove he is willing to do whatever it takes and harm anyone to bring more power and more revenge to Donald Trump,” campaign communications director Michael Tyler said in a statement to Business Insider.
“That's why he was convicted, why he incited a mob to storm the Capitol on January 6th, and why his entire campaign has been an exercise in revenge and retribution, because he has no idea about the people a president is supposed to serve and will do anything for his own profit and power,” Tyler continued.
Trump and his campaign have framed his legal woes as political persecution, alleging without evidence that Biden himself orchestrated a plot against his rival to influence the upcoming election.
So far, all of the former president's losing lawsuits have been filed in state-run courts.
The Biden campaign's media offensive also includes seven-figure investments targeted at Black, Latino and Asian American voters.
The targeted attacks include individual ads highlighting the importance of the Affordable Care Act to Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander voters, ads highlighting Biden's fight against corporate greed against Spanish speakers and ads highlighting Biden's positive impact on the Black community, the campaign said in a statement.
Biden has lagged among minority voters in recent polls, and his campaign is working to overturn numbers showing Trump with a small but sustained lead nationwide and in several key battleground states.
Recent polls have also shown Biden and Trump neck and neck in Virginia, a Democratic state that the president won by double digits in 2020. Although Biden's vote share there was weak, many political observers expect Virginia voters to support him again in the fall.
Biden's approval rating, meanwhile, has slumped to an all-time low after many progressive voters harshly criticized him over his handling of the Israeli-Hamas war, and he's also struggling with voters on the economy, despite strong jobs reports and an unemployment rate that has remained below 4% since January 2022.
