President Joe Biden’s campaign is facing criticism after organizing an event with actor Robert De Niro outside the courthouse where former President Donald Trump’s hush money trial is happening.
On Tuesday, De Niro and cops who were present during the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol traveled to Manhattan, and stood outside the courthouse while Trump’s trial was ongoing to blast the former president. But the stunt is not getting glowing reviews even as the campaign insists it was not talking about or politicizing the trial.
And on Wednesday, former Obama-era adviser David Axelrod wrote a column for CNN criticizing the move.
“For more than five weeks, President Joe Biden had mostly avoided plunging into the reality show that has been Donald Trump’s criminal hush money trial in Manhattan. Biden did not want to feed Trump’s feverish charge that he was the cause of the former president’s myriad legal problems,” Axelrod wrote.
He noted a “parade of Republican applicants, supplicants and attention addicts has shown up at the criminal court building in lower Manhattan to pledge their fealty to Trump,” and while that was happening, the White House “remained (mostly) silent, and prominent Democrats have stayed away.”
And while Biden has been “inserting humorous asides about the trial,” he noted the Biden campaign has “mostly gone for the capillary, not the jugular.”
“Until Tuesday, that is. In the final hours before the jury would consider Trump’s fate, the Biden campaign decided to crank up De Niro and two of the police officers attacked by an insurrectionist mob on January 6, 2021 to appear outside the courthouse and engage the phalanx of media there,” the column said. “The stated goal was to highlight Trump’s trespasses on democracy and general unfitness for office, but the scene quickly devolved into a shouting match between De Niroand a small crowd of hecklers who roasted him as he roasted Trump. Great fodder for ‘Saturday Night Live,’ but not necessarily the campaign.”
Axelrod noted at one point, De Niro declared of Trump, “The fact is whether he’s acquitted, whether it’s hung jury, whatever it is, he is guilty, and we all know it,” and at another point, “Fingers were pointed between De Niro and the Trump-loving hecklers. F-bombs flew. “
“Who thought this was a good idea?” the columnist asked.
He added, “Predictably, the Trump campaign jumped all over Tuesday’s events, accusing the Biden campaign of desperation and jury tampering.”
“The Trumps have to get their stories straight. Either Biden is a bumbling, senile incompetent or the diabolical mastermind of a far-flung series of federal and state indictments and civil suits against his rival. He may be neither, but he can’t be both,” Axelrod continued. “That said, whoever at Biden HQ directed De Niro’s performance Tuesday probably should have left it on the cutting room floor.”
