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Frank Bruni, a contributing Opinion writer, hosted a written online conversation with Josh Barro, who writes the newsletter Very Serious, and Olivia Nuzzi, the Washington correspondent for New York magazine, to banter and bicker about the potential political fallout of Donald Trumps conviction. Below is a lightly edited transcript of their conversation.

Frank Bruni: Josh, Olivia, great to be with you. I want to start not with Donald Trump but with Joe Biden. What happens on Nov. 5 has as much to do with Bidens navigation of the coming months as with Trumps, and Biden is getting all sorts of conflicting advice.

Whats the optimal balance between running against a felon and focusing on the day-to-day concerns of less partisan, less engaged voters? I for one think Biden needs to be very careful about overdoing the felon part voters are well aware of Trumps status, transgressions and, er, character. Your thoughts?

Josh Barro: A defining feature of this campaign, as Nate Cohn has written on extensively for The Times, is that Bidens support has been holding up well among highly engaged voters and has fallen terribly over the last four years among less-engaged Americans. Much of Bidens slide in the polls is because of worsening views of him among people who did not vote in the 2020 election. So Bidens big challenge is that he really needs to reach people who arent interested in politics and arent likely to hear any given message he sends out.

Most of those less-engaged voters were probably not following the trial closely, or at all. Its important for those people to hear that Trump is a felon. Im not sure they need to hear it from Biden personally it might be a message to be pushed in paid media, by the Biden campaign or by affiliated pressure groups.

Bruni: Hmm, Josh, I dont know. Theres disengaged and then theres living off the grid. They really need a reminder that Trump is a felon?

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Opinion | Trump Is Blocking Out the Sun: Three Writers on the Politics of the Guilty Verdict - The New York Times

Democratic President Joe Biden carries a slight edge in Minnesota over former Republican President Donald Trump into their rematch, although a new Minnesota Poll shows that advantage is short of the incumbents victory margin four years ago in a must-win state for Democrats.

Biden was preferred by just shy of 45 percent of respondents compared to about 41 percent for Trump in the live-interview poll conducted last week for MPR News, KARE 11 and the Star Tribune. Thats considered a dead heat given the polls margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points in the survey done by Mason-Dixon Polling and Strategy.

A small percentage preferred a third-party candidate independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had the support of about 6 percent while a sliver remained undecided.

The poll of 800 people reached on their home or cell phones in early June also shows that both major party nominees are deeply unpopular, with more than half of respondents disapproving of each. Many respondents lack enthusiasm about their choice.

MPR News is your trusted resource for the news you need. With your support, MPR News brings accessible, courageous journalism and authentic conversation to everyone - free of paywalls and barriers. Your gift makes a difference.

Thats the case with Angela Fairbanks Jacobson, who didnt take part in the poll but discussed her preference for Biden in an interview after she donated clothes at a free-store near the south Minneapolis intersection known as George Floyd Square.

Im just, Im sad, Fairbanks Jacobson said. Its unfortunate that we dont have younger candidates, but it is what it is right now.

Angela Fairbanks Jacobson of St. Paul says she'll vote for Joe Biden but wishes the presidential candidates were younger.

Mark Zdechlik | MPR News

About 3 in 10 Biden supporters said they are very enthusiastic about his reelection effort. Slightly more, about 36 percent, were somewhat enthusiastic and the rest were not very or not at all enthusiastic for the candidate they plan to vote for.

More than 61 percent of Trump supporters are very enthusiastic about his candidacy and about 18 percent lack much enthusiasm.

In 2020, Biden beat Trump in Minnesota by about 7 percentage points. It was a far bigger gap than in 2016 when Trump came up fewer than 2 points short of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. The states 10 electoral college votes are deemed critical in Bidens reelection calculus.

In the new poll, the category of economy and jobs was the top issue for more than a quarter of respondents. That slightly trailed the state of democracy as a driving issue.

Democratic respondents said protecting democracy is their main concern followed distantly by climate change. Republicans pointed to the economy as their top concern followed by immigration.

Fairbanks Jacobson said her vote in November will be about preserving the nations democracy.

Definitely supporting anybody but Trump, Fairbanks Jacobson explained. I feel that Trump is a threat to our democracy. We do absolutely not want a dictator.

"I feel he's done an OK job," C.Terrence Anderson of Minneapolis says of Biden. "I think there's definitely been some successes like infrastructure and things like that, but very disappointing in Gaza. So I think it's a mixed bag.

Mark Zdechlik | MPR News

Around the corner, 36-year-old C. Terrence Anderson shared those fears that are also driving his support for Biden.

I feel hes done an OK job, Anderson said of Biden. I think theres definitely been some successes in like infrastructure and things like that, but very disappointing in Gaza. So I think its a mixed bag.

Along Main Street in downtown North Branch, an exurb 45 minutes north of the Twin Cities, the sentiment is different.

Sean Moe, 38, was resolute in his support for Trump and his disdain for Biden.

I think Bidens screwed up the country, Moe said. Everything is expensive.

Moe said he used to enjoy grocery shopping but now hates it because of the high prices.

On Main Street in North Branch, Sean Moe was resolute in his support for Trump and his disdain for President Joe Biden.

Mark Zdechlik | MPR News

Standing next to Moe, 46-year-old Justin Burvee also had nothing positive to say about the incumbent.

He hurt us more than hes helped us, Burvee said. In every way possible, like [the] economy. I mean, I havent seen one plus. I mean, gas prices, food, I mean, everything rose. Its terrible.

The poll found Trump to be far more popular among men than Biden. Its flipped among women, who are strongly in Bidens column.

Kaytee Broskoff, 22, was at a park in North Branch with her young son, Easton, as Hanna, the family dog, looked on. Broskoff said its hard for her to afford what she needs, and she blames Biden for inflation.

Its definitely a struggle to be a single mom and live in todays world, said Broskoff, who added she might not vote this fall.

I dont know who I would vote for, she said. If I did vote, I would probably vote for Trump and I say that because my parents support him.

Biden has a dominant edge in the populous Hennepin and Ramsey counties; Trump led in all other geographic regions.

While the new Minnesota Poll found tepid support for Trump and Biden, roughly 55 percent of respondents said they approve of DFL Sen. Amy Klobuchars job performance. She won her current term in 2018 with about 60 percent of the vote.

Klobuchar is running for a fourth term, with her November opponent to be decided in a multi-candidate GOP primary. Former professional basketball player and podcaster Royce White has the Republican endorsement but former Navy officer Joe Fraser has been pushed by prominent Republicans as an alternative.

A recent New York Times poll found that Democratic U.S. Senate candidates are outperforming Biden in key battleground states.

It remains to be seen how much Klobuchar might be able to help Biden in a seemingly competitive Minnesota.

Editors note: For more poll details and methodology around the poll, check out MPR News sister organization, the APM Research Lab.

Read more from the original source:
New Minnesota poll has Biden with narrow edge over Trump as both remain unpopular - MPR News

A supporter outside a fundraising event for Donald Trump in San Francisco on Thursday isn't put off by his conviction. Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

For the first time in American history, a political party is set to nominate a felon as its presidential candidate.

Republicans continue to rally around Donald Trump, who was found guilty in the New York hush money trial on May 30. He will be sentenced on July 11, just days before the Republican National Convention begins in Milwaukee.

The team at NPR's Trump's Trials podcast broke down three ways the GOP is trying to use Trumps conviction to the party's advantage.

Donald Trump participates in a town hall event at Dream City Church in Phoenix, Ariz., on Thursday. Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

Within minutes of hearing the jurys decision in Trumps hush money case, Republican lawmakers flocked to his defense and attacked detractors.

That wasnt surprising. In fact, after Republican Senate candidate Larry Hogan, who is seen as a moderate and has been critical of Trump, wrote on the social media platform X that Americans should respect the verdict and that all leaders should reaffirm what has made this nation great: the rule of law, Trump adviser Chris LaCivita responded: You just ended your campaign.

Trump is expected to appeal the conviction after he is sentenced. For now, he is continuing to cast doubt on the judicial system.

Trump and his allies have, without evidence, said the case was rigged, accused the justice system of being weaponized by the Biden administration, and claimed the case was politically motivated. In doing so, they are seeking to cast suspicion on the validity of Trumps guilty verdict and further paint him as the victim of a conspiracy led by the Biden administration.

To be clear, the Department of Justice and the Biden administration were not involved in this case. Thats because this was a state case (which also means Trump would not be able to pardon himself if he wins the election in November).

At rallies and outside fundraising events, supporters have started bringing signs reading things like "our favorite felon" and "we stand proud w/ the convicted! Trump 24."

A supporter holds a sign reading "Our Favorite Felon" outside a fundraising event for Donald Trump on Thursday. Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

Conservatives' false claims that the trial was rigged are often followed by calls for revenge.

Fox News host Jesse Watters said on X, Were going to get back up and vanquish the evil forces that are destroying this republic. Conservative commentator Megyn Kelly said on her radio show, These Democrats will rue the day they decided to use lawfare to stop a presidential candidate.

Others have suggested pursuing legal action against the prosecutors and judge involved in the hush money case.

Trump himself was asked about retribution in an interview with Dr. Phil on Friday. In the interview, Dr. Phil said he believed that revenge and retribution was unhealthy for the country and Trump did not have time to get even if elected president again. Trump responded by saying: Revenge does take time, I will say that. And sometimes revenge can be justified.

The Trump campaign claims it raised $53 million in the first 24 hours after the verdict, and $141 million for the entire month of May. NPR Senior Political Editor and Correspondent Domenico Montanaro points out, [This] will make a significant dent in helping the Trump campaign catch back up to the Biden campaign, whos had a significant advantage all along.

But Trump may not use all this money on the campaign. As Trumps Trials reported in February, about $50 million, up until that point, had been diverted from one of his political PACs to pay for his legal fees.

Trumps certainly using this conviction, as he did the indictments, to try to help him shore up his base and raise money, Montanaro said. But again, does that mean independents, persuadable voters in key states, are going to look fondly [at this]? We dont know.

What to watch: In the coming weeks, we are expecting the Supreme Court to release its decision on whether sitting presidents have legal immunity. Trump is claiming he cannot be prosecuted for his alleged actions surrounding the attempts to overturn the 2020 election because he was president and therefore immune. The courts decision will determine if the federal election interference case goes to trial at all.

Want to dive more into the details and how the Trump campaign is trying to seize this moment? Listen to the full episode of the Trumps Trials podcast.

Read the rest here:
3 ways Republicans are trying to use Trump's conviction to their advantage - NPR

When a Manhattan jury found Donald J. Trump guilty, it should have sent shock waves through the nation. Yet, though the trial and conviction of a former president was unprecedented in American history, it seems most people couldnt have cared less. As Michelle Goldberg recently noted, only 16 percent of respondents to a Yahoo News/YouGov poll said they had followed the first few weeks of the trial very closely, and when asked how they felt, many replied, bored.

In its way, that must have annoyed Mr. Trump: how insulting, that no one would care. There was media coverage, but no frenzy, no rallies around the world in protest when he was convicted. But to win in the court of public opinion, Mr. Trump must now transform a trial in a run-down Manhattan courtroom from a shoulder shrug into an unforgettable event, with a story powerful enough to keep his supporters energized, if not outraged, and to drum up sympathy from the undecideds.

For months, Mr. Trump has been laying the groundwork, spinning his tale of tyranny and martyrdom (his own of course) and styling himself as the victim of an administration that has to play dirty to eliminate a rival as formidable as he. That story of persecution has only grown louder in recent days. Moments after hearing the jury pronounce him guilty, he predictably called the trial rigged, the judge conflicted, and a trial by jury as well as government institutions like the justice system irrelevant compared with the verdict that galvanized voters will presumably hand him in November. Politics, not the law, is his mtier, and history is not his concern. His preoccupation, and his talent, is storytelling.

Instinctively he grasps the kind of broader stories that break through from the courtroom to the public. These stories fueled what pundits, particularly in the 20th century, frequently dubbed the trial of the century trials that captured the hearts and minds of the public, that sold newspapers, and that would grip the whole nation, if not the world, with their cultural significance. Each of these trials riveted the country by bringing to the foreground moral values and failings that affected all Americans.

Take the Scopes monkey trial in Tennessee in 1925, about a new law that barred the theory of evolution from being taught in public schools, which became a showdown between a three-time presidential candidate, the eloquent politician William Jennings Bryan, and the famous defense lawyer Clarence Darrow. Covered day after day on the front page of newspapers coast to coast, it even found its way into Hemingways novel The Sun Also Rises. The issue here was faith and reason, or what passes for both, and whether government could mandate belief. A young high school teacher, John Scopes, purposefully broke the recently passed law to show, as the brilliant attorney Arthur Garfield Hays argued, that such laws result in hate and intolerance, that they are conceived in bigotry and born in ignorance ignorance of the Bible, of religion, of history, and of science.

There was the trial of the anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two Italian immigrants accused of robbery and murder in Massachusetts, which caused such international indignation that rallies against their execution were held from London to Johannesburg. Edna St. Vincent Millay published a poem titled Justice Denied in Massachusetts in The New York Times to protest the handling of the Sacco and Vanzetti trial, and Felix Frankfurter called the misrepresentations, suppressions and misquotations of its presiding judge disgraceful.

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Opinion | Trump's Most Dangerous Gift - The New York Times

Seated in front of a computer at his Mar-a-Lago resort, Donald Trump will be asked to explain, politely, why he is a man who can be trusted.

The former president has been judged by a jury of his peers, being found guilty of 34 felonies. It is now time, in the eyes of the New York criminal justice system, to devise a fitting punishment. Accordingly, a probation officer on Monday will ask Trump, via video conference, whether he accepts responsibility for his crimes; they will assess his finances (and his mental health); they will consider his family life and ties to community; and they will want to know whether the presumptive Republican nominee continues to associate with criminals.

The list of past and present members of Trumps inner circle who have been found guilty of serious crimes is long and growing. Just this year, two of his former White House aides, Peter Navarro and Steve Bannon, were sentenced to prison for defying congressional subpoenas. Allen Weisselberg, former chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, is currently on Rikers Island. Paul Manafort, Trumps 2016 campaign manager, and MAGA dirty-tricks specialist Roger Stone each received multi-year prison sentences only to be freed by Trump pardons.

"[Former] President Trump has surrounded himself with a bunch of killers who work every day to help him win," as Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung put it to Axios in March. If thats still the case come July 11, when Trump is due to be sentenced by Judge Juan Merchan in his hush-money case, that could be a serious problem

Theres nothing wrong with his telling the probation office, I didnt do anything wrong, and Im not admitting guilt, and Im planning on appealing, Andrew Weissmann, a former federal prosecutor, told MSNBC. Every defendant has a right to do that.

More difficult, Weissmann said, will be the question about whether Trumps still associating with criminals.

Hes going to have to discuss whether he still coordinates with Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Steve Bannon. Remember, all those people have been found guilty by a jury and are felons themselves, Weissmann noted.

In March, CNN reported that Manafort was in discussions with Trumps campaign team about a possible role going forward. But last month, citing the media and its desire to use me as a distraction, Manafort said that he would not be doing any formal campaign work but helping from the sidelines every other way I can.

But as for Stone, hes been a frequent presence at Mar-a-Lago lately, Axios reported in March, noting that he attended Trumps victory party there on Super Tuesday.

Going forward, such a celebration could land Trump behind bars himself.

Barbara McQuade, a former U.S. attorney who teaches law at the University of Michigan, told MSNBC that the terms of probation that Trump will likely have to comply with may prove difficult. A prohibition on associating with other convicted felons, typical in cases of other offenders, would in particular be challenging for him.

But if hes not willing to comply with those kind of conditions, his alternative is prison, McQuade said. Given his other legal troubles, and his repeated contempt violations in the hush money case, its possible hes headed that way regardless. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg would at least be justified in requesting it, according to McQuade.

I think in light of the way that Donald Trump violated the gag order in this case and his continued lack of remorse in this case, she said, [it] would lean heavily in favor of requesting at least some prison time.

Read more

about Trump's legal problems

The rest is here:
Legal expert: Probation terms may prove "challenging" for Trump but "his alternative is prison" - Salon