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.
Meanwhile, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem and Florida Rep. Byron Donalds — both Republicans rumored to be on Trump’s running mate shortlist at one point — offered their own advice for the former president ahead of the debate.
“I think what you’re going to see is obviously the CNN moderator is going to try to do everything they can to go after President Trump, to try to get under his skin. I think President Trump, what he’s going to do is focus everything back to the terrible Biden agenda,” Donalds told Fox News on Sunday.
“I don’t think that he has to talk about get personal in this debate at all, because he’s going to have so many good things to talk about in contrast with Joe Biden’s policies … [which] have just been devastating for the families that live here in this country,” Noem told “Meet the Press.”
“That’s really what I think President Trump is planning on focusing on,” she added.
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.
Syedah Asghar contributed.
