Biden ad mixes Trump’s sexual misconduct with victimless crimes

“In the courtroom, we see Donald Trump as he is,” says a new Biden campaign ad. “He was convicted of 34 felonies, found guilty of sexual assault, and committed financial fraud.” One of these things is not like the others.

Those “34 crimes” sound like Trump’s most serious offenses and are the only justification for calling him a “convicted criminal,” as the complaint does. But those crimes were accounting offenses that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg converted into felonies using a convoluted, legally questionable theory that combined several interacting laws with questionable assumptions about Trump’s knowledge and intentions.

The victims in this case, Bragg said, were American voters who supposedly had a right to hear porn star Stormy Daniels’s account of having sex with Trump before voting in the 2016 presidential election. But withholding embarrassing information from voters is not a crime, agreeing to a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) with Daniels was not inherently illegal, and Trump was not charged with “election fraud,” as prosecutors misleadingly described the essence of his crime.

Trump was instead charged with falsifying business records to cover up the nondisclosure agreement after the election, which was allegedly aimed at covering up “another crime”: a violation of an obscure, rarely used New York law that makes conspiracy to promote the election of a candidate “by unlawful means” a misdemeanor. The latter offense turned the misleading business records from misdemeanors into felonies, and the 34 counts were all based on the same underlying conduct. Bragg multiplied the crimes by treating every invoice, check, and ledger entry related to the secrecy cover-up as a separate crime.

The “financial fraud” referred to in the Biden ad also had no identifiable victim. Although a New York judge in a civil case concluded that Trump had systematically exaggerated the value of his assets, there was no evidence that lenders or insurers suffered financial losses as a result. The harrowing “disgorgement order” in that case was aimed at stripping Trump of his “ill-gotten gains,” not at compensating anyone harmed by his misrepresentations.

In contrast, a New York jury’s 2023 civil verdict against Trump, which found him guilty of sexually harassing and defaming writer E. Jean Carroll, actually involved an actual victim. Carroll claimed that Trump raped her in a department store dressing room in 1996. The jury, which awarded Carroll $5 million, concluded that it was more likely that Trump sexually harassed her and then defamed her by calling her testimony a lie.

The conduct described by Carroll was by far the most serious offense he was accused of in those three cases and was consistent with the 2005 verdict. Access to Hollywood tape of Trump bragging about sexually harassing women. These comments, in turn, were consistent with the testimony of more than a dozen other women who publicly accused Trump of doing exactly what he claimed to have done to Billy Bush with impunity because he was “a star.”

At first glance, the fact that voters seem willing to elect a man who has been credibly described as a sex offender is far more troubling than the fact that they seem unimpressed by Daniels’ nondisclosure agreement or his longstanding tendency to exaggerate his wealth. Unlike the 2006 sexual encounter that Daniels described, the encounters that Carroll and Trump’s other accusers described were decidedly not consensual. They were inherently criminal violations of other people’s rights, similar to the crimes that Trump promises to curb by restoring “law and order” – a striking feature of his populist platform.

Unlike the falsified records at the heart of the other two cases, sexual abuse causes actual injuries to specific individuals, as reflected in the damages awarded to Carroll, yet this crime is overshadowed by the “34 crimes” Bragg invented.

Trump is “a convicted felon who continues to prove that he will do anything and harm anyone if it means more power and revenge for Donald Trump,” says Biden’s campaign spokesman Michael Tyler. “His entire campaign is an exercise in revenge and retribution.”

Contrary to Tyler’s implication, the concealment of Daniels’ NDA did not harm anyone in a way that violated that person’s rights. But Tyler links that cover-up to the risk that Trump, if elected, could abuse his authority to target his political opponents – a much more serious concern.

“This election is about a convicted criminal who only cares about his own benefit and a president who is fighting for your family,” Biden’s ad says. How so? Biden has “reduced health care costs,” the spokesperson claims, and “made big corporations pay their fair share.”

Judging by Biden’s approval ratings, voters were not impressed by these efforts. According to last week’s Thirty-fiveEight Overall, only 38 percent of voters were satisfied with Biden’s performance – the lowest figure recorded during his presidency.

As in 2020, Biden’s main selling point is that he is not Donald Trump, so it’s understandable that Biden’s campaign is trying to remind voters how terrible Trump is. But emphasizing Trump’s “34 crimes” will only help that if voters aren’t attentive enough to understand what those charges actually mean.