CNN host Kate Bolduan questioned President Joe Biden’s 2024 campaign communications director, Michael Taylor, about whether an event outside former President Donald Trump’s trial was a mistake.
Trump supporters swarmed and shouted down Hollywood actor Robert De Niro as he departed a Biden campaign press conference outside of the courthouse Tuesday that also featured former Capitol Police officers Harry Dunn and Michael Fanone discussing the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol Riot. Bolduan asked Tyler on “CNN News Central” whether the campaign event gives credence to Trump’s argument that the trial is political and if it was negative for Biden’s reelection effort.
“The Trump campaign suggests that they think it’s blown up in your face … in the move you guys made yesterday, saying that it proves the case that they’ve been trying to make the whole time that politics is motivating the case. Jason Miller said after months of saying politics had nothing to do with this trial, they showed up and made a campaign event out of a lower Manhattan trial for President Trump. Did this backfire on you?” Bolduan asked.
“No, not at all. We’re not talking about the trial. We’re talking about the threat that Donald Trump poses to our democracy,” Tyler responded. “His embrace of political violence, that he does every single day, whether he’s outside the courthouse there in Manhattan or he’s down at Mar-a-Lago or he’s shouting into an echo chamber on Truth Social. That’s what we were talking about with Robert De Niro and officers Fanone and Dunn, who defended our democracy at the Capitol on January 6. So we’re of course going to take advantage of the media circus there. We’re going to use every tool at our disposal to communicate directly with the voters and break through this fragmented media environment and make sure that people understand the stakes. So we’re going to continue to do that every single day through the debate.”
Biden recently challenged Trump to two televised debates, proposing a slew of conditions that included no live audience and microphones getting turned off during the other candidate’s speaking time. Both candidates have accepted CNN’s offer for a June 27 debate.
De Niro accused Trump of engaging in a “coward’s violence” after the 2020 election and of directing “the mob to do his dirty work for him” at the press conference.
“Fuck you! Fuck you!” one person shouted. “You touch kids! You touch kids! You loser!”
“We’re trying to be gentlemen in this world, the Democrats. You are gangsters,” the “Goodfellas” star said. “You are gangsters! Fu*k you!”
Fox News legal editor Kerri Urbahn on Tuesday said that the Biden campaign event deploying De Niro backfired as he was heckled after his remarks, calling it “desperate” in response to a question about the motivation of the press conference.
“Because they were desperate,” Urbahn said. “Because Biden had a bad news cycle in the last few days, it’s a bad headline from Politico saying that Democrats are in full freak-out mode. So I’m thinking if I’m a comms person on that campaign team, what you want to do is figure out what is the shining object we can dangle over here that everyone will go running towards.”
First published by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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