Should Biden emphasize Trump's guilty verdict or focus on democracy instead?

The jury in the New York criminal case against Trump for falsifying business records to hide a $130,000 payment to adult film actress Stormy Daniels is now deliberating.

If Trump is found guilty, how should Biden respond?

Yesterday, the Biden campaign held a news conference outside the Manhattan courthouse where Trump is standing trial. Biden surrogates included actor Robert De Niro, who said:

The fact is whether he’s acquitted, whether it’s hung jury, he is guilty — and we all know it. I’ve never seen a guy get out of so many things, and we all know this. Everybody in the world knows this. We New Yorkers used to tolerate him when he was just another grubby real estate hustler masquerading as a big shot.” De Niro called him a “coward.” Asked if he thought Trump should be in jail, De Niro replied: “I sure do. Absolutely.”

Another speaker was former Capitol police officer Michael Fanone, who had helped defend the Capitol from pro-Trump rioters on January 6, 2021. Fanone said:

“At the end of the day, this election is about Donald Trump and his vision for the office of the president of the United States, not as a public servant who answers to the elected, to the people who elected him, but as an authoritarian, who answers to and serves only himself.”

The comments of the two campaign surrogates outside the Manhattan courthouse were in contrast to the rest of the Biden campaign, which has barely mentioned the trial.

All of which raises the question: If Trump is convicted, should Biden focus on the conviction?

On the one hand, recent polls suggest voters would consider a conviction relevant to making a decision. In a Quinnipiac University poll released last week, 23 percent of independents said a conviction would make them less likely to vote for Trump in November (6 percent of would-be Trump voters said the same). Independents make up almost half of all potential voters.

A conviction would also remind the public of the lawlessness of Trump and put into sharp relief the upcoming choice between a convicted felon and a competent, experienced president.

On the other hand, Biden and his campaign team reportedly don’t want to emphasize the conviction, if Trump is convicted. They plan to continue framing the election around abortion rights and democracy.

They have three reasons: First, they don’t think a guilty verdict will have much effect on the presidential race.

Second, they believe voters will be more motivated to vote for Biden if Biden emphasizes abortion and democracy — the two issues on which Biden is strongest and that matter more to voters’ lives than a Trump criminal conviction.

Third, they don’t want to play into Trump’s baseless claims that Biden orchestrated the criminal case.

Maybe they’re right.

(Of course, Trump may not be convicted, in which case he’ll boast that he was never guilty of anything, that this trial was politically motivated and that all his other trials are politically motivated, too.)

So today’s Office Hours question: If Trump is convicted, should Biden emphasize it? Or emphasize abortion and democracy instead?

Robert Reich is a professor at Berkeley and was secretary of labor under Bill Clinton. You can find his writing at https://robertreich.substack.com/.