President Joe Biden’s campaign co-chair Mitch Landrieu on Sunday hinted that Biden will hit former President Donald Trump on his legal troubles at Thursday’s presidential debate in Atlanta.
In an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Landrieu said, “It really doesn’t matter how Donald Trump shows up if he comes in unhinged, like he is most of the time, or he sits there and is quiet. People are going to know that he’s a twice-impeached convicted felon who’s been found to have defamed somebody, sexually abused somebody, and gone bankrupt six times.”
Guest moderator Peter Alexander brought up a new Biden campaign ad that calls Trump “a convicted criminal” and asked Landrieu if that line of attack would make it to the debate stage on Thursday.
“I’ll let the president say what he’s going to say, but the fact of the matter is that the sky is blue sometimes and Donald Trump is a convicted felon,” Landrieu said.
In May, a New York jury found Trump guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in New York. Juries also found Trump liable for sexually abusing and defaming writer E. Jean Carroll.
Last week, Biden campaign officials told NBC News that the president would focus on illuminating Trump’s positions on reproductive rights and tax breaks during the debate.
“Donald Trump wakes up every day pretty much thinking about himself, thinking about his rich friends, and then really thinking about ways to hurt people with the power that he would have if he were the president the United States again,” Landrieu said Sunday, adding: “And I think the president wants to be really clear about the difference between those two.”
The two campaigns had less than two months to prepare for this week’s debate after the date was announced last month. Biden has been convening with top advisers at Camp David in Maryland to prepare, while Trump attends more informal policy sessions with his team — including those rumored to be on his vice presidential short list.
Thursday is the first two of two debates that the campaigns agreed to; Trump and Biden are also scheduled to face off in September.
