What the Biden campaign thinks the Trump verdict means

Washington (CNN) — Well before the Manhattan jury finished deliberating on Thursday, most of President Joe Biden’s advisers concluded that a guilty verdict wouldn’t drastically alter their 2024 election strategy.

But it has stoked some hopes among supporters of the president that if 12 people who focused on Trump voted to find him guilty, there might actually be enough undecided voters who, if the Biden campaign can figure out how to get them to focus on Trump, will vote to keep him from returning to the White House.

Aides have discussed among themselves whether the Biden campaign would use the term “criminal” to describe the likely Republican nominee in their messaging, even as they acknowledge the former president’s legal issues are largely baked in and voters care about other issues more.

Still, a guilty verdict is a guilty verdict, and 34 of them hardly makes for bad news for Biden’s campaign five months before Election Day. The convictions might not move the needle in a major way in the election, those close to the Biden reelection effort told CNN, but an acquittal could have really helped Trump – and that makes Thursday’s historic decision a win for the Biden campaign, if only because it is not a loss.

A sense of despondency had started to creep in from top supporters and donors in recent weeks, as more moments that reelection campaign strategists had projected would shift the race – the beginning of the 2024 calendar year, the end of the Republican primaries, the coming of spring when they figured more people would pay attention to Trump’s record—have come and gone without any notable movement in the polls or overall dynamics. So much frustration built inside the Wilmington headquarters that on Tuesday – with attention locked on the Manhattan courtroom – they sent out Robert DeNiro to shout at the crowd, and at the reporters.

But the conviction on 34 counts has reassured some of their mantra that the more people focus on Trump and the choice ahead of them, the better Biden’s November is going to be – and to push back on the “nothing matters” sensibility that has helped power Trump through so many other dark moments over his last nine years in politics.

A senior administration official leaving the West Wing on Thursday evening – asked to respond to the verdict – raised his eyebrows and said, “It matters.” Campaign aides, meanwhile, have been instructed to remain tight-lipped in response to reporters and on social media.

Biden-centric operatives say an acquittal would not just have validated Trump’s claims of being unfairly persecuted, but fed even more fatalism from already deflated Biden supporters who have come to believe nothing can touch Trump.

“An acquittal would have fed into Trump’s view that he’s just constantly under attack and everyone’s out to get him – but 12 people, a jury of his peers, convicted him,” said one former Biden aide. “I can’t get 12 people to agree on what to get for dinner.”

And though they expect Trump to get a tsunami of online fundraising over calling himself “a political prisoner” and assumed his backers would send a flood of statements attacking the verdict and the judge, several said they’re partial to the kind of thinking expressed by anti-Trump Republican pollster Sarah Longwell on X after the verdict: “It won’t be a public opinion earthquake. But in an election where inches will matter, this just created a new barrier for undecided swing voters: voting for a convicted felon.”

Biden’s official reaction to the verdict was almost identical to the newly minted felon and presumptive Republican nominee on one key point.

“There’s only one way to keep Donald Trump out of the Oval Office: At the ballot box,” Biden wrote on social media, linking to a fundraising page.

Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, the Democrat who is chair of the Judiciary Committee, echoed that even as he praised the verdict.

“Consistent with the rule of law, a jury of his peers found the former president guilty on all counts,” Durbin said in a statement. “Now, it is up to the American people to decide if he is worthy of the seat behind the Resolute desk in the Oval Office.”

In substance, if not style, the sentiment matched exactly Trump’s assertion outside the courtroom that the “real verdict is going to be November 5 by the people.”

The day that ended in a historic guilty verdict for his predecessor began at mass for Biden, where a politician who thinks often in terms of fate and Irish poetry was marking the ninth anniversary of the death of his beloved son Beau, whom Biden has said he wanted to be president instead of him.

Absorbing the jury’s decision hundreds of miles south of the courthouse at his beach home in Delaware, and as his aides were transfixed by the news coverage of the verdict in the West Wing where foot traffic slowed to a halt, Biden did not alter his evening with family. There were no rushed plans to appear in public, instead leaving it to his campaign and White House spokespeople to respond.

“Convicted felon or not, Trump will be the Republican nominee for president,” campaign communications director Michael Tyler wrote in a statement. “The threat Trump poses to our democracy has never been greater.”

“We respect the rule of law, and have no additional comment,” said Ian Sams, a White House counsel’s office spokesman.

There remains a possibility Biden could weigh in on Friday, when he’ll return to the White House for a closed-door meeting with the Belgian prime minister to discuss plans to utilize Russian assets sitting in Western banks to continue funding Ukraine’s defense.

Later, Biden is set to welcome the Kansas City Chiefs to the White House to celebrate the team’s second consecutive Super Bowl win in an event that is usually light-hearted.

Perhaps of more value, according to some Biden allies, will be the verdict’s loud reminder that Trump is his party’s nominee – a fact they believe many voters have not truly internalized. Biden’s campaign, which continues to grapple with the reality of a tuned-out electorate, views any reminder of Trump’s potential return to office as a net positive.

Instead of a major campaign shift centered around his rival’s new status as a convicted criminal, Biden is expected to use the coming weeks to advance his warnings about Trump’s threats to democracy, culminating in CNN’s June 27 debate.

Two separate trips to Europe, including for the 80th anniversary of D-Day and the Group of 7 summit, will focus thematically on issues of democracy. The White House said Thursday the president would deliver a speech on the “importance of defending freedom and democracy” at Pointe du Hoc, one of the sites of the Allied landings in Normandy.

With wall-to-wall coverage of the trial now complete, it could be easier for the president’s message to be heard over the noise.

“The risk of the conviction is that there are people who continue to think that there’s something that will prevent Donald Trump from being the nominee or being president,” the former Biden aide said. “That is not the case. If you don’t want Donald Trump, if you have to vote against him.”

CNN’s Kayla Tausche contributed to this report.

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