Welcome to the online version of From the Political Bureauan evening newsletter featuring the latest reporting and analysis from the NBC News Politics team from the campaign trail, the White House and Capitol Hill.
In today’s edition, we report on Joe Biden’s big advertising advantage – and why it’s going away. Additionally, senior national political reporter Jonathan Allen analyzes why the Hunter Biden trial is bad news for Donald Trump.
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Biden’s big advertising advantage won’t last forever
By Ben Kamisar
Get ready: Donald Trump’s cavalry is coming, after months of largely unanswered bashing of the airwaves, courtesy of President Joe Biden‘s campaign.
MAGA Inc., a pro-Trump super PAC, this week announced plans to spend $100 million on ads in key swing states this summer. It’s a headline worth paying attention to for a number of reasons.
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As the Trump world parlays his felony conviction into a financial windfall, the big question for the former president and his job is how to most effectively use that money in a race in which they have been outmatched and outspent. ?
The announcement will fundamentally change the ad spending landscape in a race that has thus far been dominated by Democrats. Since March 13 (the day after both Trump and Biden were projected as their party’s presumptive nominees), Biden and his major allied groups have outspent Trump and his groups on the airwaves 3 to 1.
It’s a dramatic difference from what things looked like during a similar period in 2020. From April 8 (after Senator Bernie Sanders ended his Democratic primary against Biden) through June 6, 2020, Trump and his key allies held the lead in ad spending. Biden.
It’s hard to say how a slew of summer spending by Trump’s super PAC (and Democratic groups, too) will affect this race, a race that remains well within the margin of error despite a huge Democratic spending gap and Trump’s recent conviction. But as important as it is in a static race, Biden’s ads have been an objective advantage to his reelection campaign over the past three months — and Republicans are about to make a deep cut into that advantage.
By Jonathan Allen
The Hunter Biden trial is embarrassing for President Joe Biden and his family, but its very existence leaves a major hole in former President Donald Trump’s public defense of his own criminal convictions.
Hunter, the president’s surviving son, is accused of illegally purchasing a gun while addicted to drugs. The trial produces painful testimony about Hunter’s ill-fated romantic relationship with his brother Beau’s widow, Hallie Biden, and his frequent use of crack cocaine.
The alleged crime at the center of the lawsuit — lying about addiction on a federal firearms purchase form — stems from the so-called Brady Bill, a gun control law from the early 1990s. Joe Biden was a leading supporter of that measure, and he was quite clear about his feelings around guns and drugs when the bill was under consideration during the crack epidemic of the time.
He told The Associated Press in 1991 that he believed addicts “should be forced off the streets and placed in jails, prisons and treatment centers.”
In doing so, Hunter’s accuser is demonstrating consistency in the president’s position even when his son’s freedom is at stake, and, perhaps more importantly for the 2024 election, not interfering in a federal lawsuit in which he has an enormous personal interest. the answer.
Trump offers no evidence and has routinely accused the president of masterminding a Democratic conspiracy to pursue him through prosecution. In the wake of Trump’s conviction on 34 counts related to his efforts to help his 2016 campaign by falsifying business records to conceal an alleged affair, Trump has said he will have “every right” to prosecute his political opponents if he becomes president again in 2016. 2024.
His logic is that if Biden can direct prosecutions, so can he. But Biden does not interfere in any matters.
Biden has no formal influence over the Manhattan prosecutors who handled Trump’s case, nor did he play any role in filing a grand jury indictment against Trump or coordinating the unanimous verdict of the 12 jurors who found Trump guilty.
There is no evidence that Biden is improperly influencing the two federal criminal trials Trump faces — which are being prosecuted by a special prosecutor who operates independently and is not “subject to the day-to-day oversight” of anyone at the Justice Department where Biden supervises. Likewise, there is no indication he played a role in a case in Georgia in which Trump is accused of illegally trying to overturn that state’s 2020 election results.
So what voters are left with is Trump making a hard-to-believe claim that Biden is interfering in his trials, but not in Hunter’s case. It remains to be seen whether Hunter will be found guilty or whether the president will pardon him — Biden told ABC News on Thursday that he had ruled out a pardon — but what is clear at this point is that the president respects the rule of law when it comes to for the fate of his own son.
Trump’s base doesn’t care.
But for swing voters worried about presidents abusing their power to reward friends and punish enemies, Biden is demonstrating exactly the kind of restraint that Trump accuses him of abandoning.
That’s all from The Politics Desk for now. If you have any feedback – like it or not – please email us at politicsnieuwsbrief@nbcuni.com
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This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
