Former President Trump’s campaign is dismissing the effectiveness of President Biden’s latest attack ad highlighting Trump’s recent criminal conviction and firing back that it’s an “irrelevant” issue to everyday Americans.
“The Biden campaign has burnt nearly $80M in paid advertising on issues irrelevant to the everyday lives of the American People,” Trump campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt told Fox News Digital after President Biden launched a $50 million ad blitz highlighting former Trump’s recent criminal conviction and saying “character” is the central dynamic of the 2024 presidential race.
“Lighting another $50M on fire to tout yet another irrelevant issue will not change the trajectory of this race and trick Americans into thinking that Crooked Joe Biden’s presidency has been anything other than an unmitigated disaster,” she continued.
The new ad, titled “Character Matters,” highlights the verdict in New York v. Trump, when a jury found the former president and presumptive Republican nominee guilty on all 34 counts of falsifying business records in the first degree. Trump pleaded not guilty to the charges and has vowed to appeal the decision.
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“This election is between a convicted criminal who is only out for himself, and a president who is fighting for your family,” the ad says, highlighting Trump’s legal challenges and saying the president has been focusing on “lowering health care costs and making big corporations pay their fair share.”
In addition to criticism from the Trump campaign, some in Biden’s own party have suggested that focusing in on Trump’s legal issues may not be the most effective plan.
Political strategist Steve Schmidt, a fierce Trump critic who left the Republican Party during Trump’s presidency and was a paid adviser for a super PAC benefiting a House Democrat challenging Biden earlier this year for president, called the ad “a fail.”
“It’s soulless,” Schmidt recently said on his “The Warning” podcast. “It’s flat. It’s like it was written by a committee of chat GPTS.”
“The ad sucks,” Schmidt added. “It’s terrible. It doesn’t raise anybody’s pulse. It won’t do anything except burn money.”
The ad comes ahead of next week’s first presidential debate, which is set for June 27.
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Trump’s conviction has not resulted in a noticeable rejection from voters via polling in the last couple of weeks. A recent poll in Iowa shows Trump ahead of Biden by 18 points after he won the state by only 8 points in 2020.
The first battleground state polling following Trump’s conviction released in early June showed his conviction appears to have had little effect on his support.
Despite receiving a slight bump in polls following Trump’s conviction, Axios reported that Biden’s numbers have stayed about the same over the past few months while the president spent twice as much on ads as Trump since early March.
Biden’s approval rating average hit an all-time low on June 9 during Trump’s trial, Axios reported.
After Trump was found guilty of 34 felony counts, Politico reported on Biden and allies being split on how to approach the Trump verdict, with some top operatives saying the Biden campaign should focus on issues that matter to American voters to make the contrast between Biden and Trump.
“I think the most important thing he can do is connect his work to people’s lives and create a contrast between a president who is fighting to address their problems, and a disgraced and bitter former president who is obsessed with his own,” former President Obama adviser David Axelrod told Politico.
Rep. Jared Huffman, D-Calif., warned Democrats could “overplay our hand” if they put all their focus on Trump and not balance addressing a “handful of issues.”
Several groups previously scheduled multimillion-dollar ad campaigns against Trump last year, including the anti-Trump Lincoln Project group co-founded by Schmidt, during the Republican primaries, but were deemed a “waste of money” or “ineffective” and were abandoned.
Fox News Digital reached out to the Biden campaign for comment but did not receive a response.
Fox News Digital’s Brooke Singman contributed to this report.
