'Hypocrisy': Analyst hits out at Democrats for playing up Trump's 'felon' label

Since Vice President Kamala Harris became the Democratic Party's presidential nominee, she and her allies have framed the race as "the prosecutor vs. the felon" — drawing on former President Donald Trump's 34-count felony conviction in Manhattan for falsifying business records over a payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels to conceal a scheme to interfere in the 2016 election.

Several speakers at the Democratic National Convention said similar, with President Joe Biden saying, "Crime will keep coming down when we put a prosecutor in the Oval Office instead of a convicted felon."

But columnist Jarvis DeBerry, writing for MSNBC, warned that while this might be a punchy narrative, Democrats may be on a losing track by trying to define Trump by his felony conviction.

"The suggestion that a 'felon' is inherently and permanently untrustworthy makes for a heaping helping of hypocrisy from a party that has rightly identified overcriminalization, mass incarceration and voter suppression as systemic problems," wrote DeBerry.

Trump, after all, has proven himself untrustworthy long before and independent of his felony conviction, from boasting about being able to assault women, to trying to extort the president of Ukraine, to refusing to accept his own election loss, DeBerry wrote.

DeBerry continued that, "There has been a conscious effort in recent years — no doubt derided by detractors as 'woke' — to refrain from using language that dehumanizes people and reduces them to their status or their circumstances. Say 'enslaved people,' not 'slaves.' Say 'incarcerated people,' not 'prisoners' or 'inmates.'

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"Again, there are critics of such constructions, and, without a doubt, those constructions make for clunkier sentences. But the point remains that people who have experienced a thing are far more than the thing they’ve experienced."

Equating Trump's status as a "felon" with untrustworthiness is the same sort of deal, in his view — particularly since plenty of other politicians have gone to prison and emerged.

"Under no circumstances would the Democrats throwing around the word 'felon' have considered voting for him even if a jury hadn’t found him guilty. That’s because they’re not opposed to Trump because he’s a 'felon.' They’re opposed to Trump because he’s Trump," wrote DeBerry.

All of this comes amid broader discussion of Harris' own record as a district attorney — which, some analysts have argued, paints a nuanced picture of her as a reformer of her day but also not quite at the level of what is considered a "progressive" prosecutor now.