Editor's note: David Axelrod, CNN senior political commentator and host of “The Axe Files,” was a senior advisor to former President Barack Obama and chief strategist for Obama's 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns. The opinions expressed in this commentary are Axelrod's own. Find more opinion on CNN.
CNN —
Robert De Niro has played many great roles in his long and illustrious acting career, so on reflection, he might have turned down the role he was offered on Tuesday.
For more than five weeks, President Joe Biden has largely avoided diving into the reality TV of Donald Trump's hush-money criminal trial in Manhattan. Biden didn't want to encourage Trump's frenzied accusations that he was the cause of the former president's myriad legal troubles.
Even as Republican candidates, supplicants and attention-seekers continued to show up at the lower Manhattan criminal courthouse to pledge allegiance to Trump, the White House remained (mostly) silent and Democratic heavyweights did not attend. Biden has recently made humorous asides about the trial. “I've been on a roll since the State of the Union, but Donald's had some rough days recently — 'stormy weather,' I guess you could say,” he joked at the White House Correspondents' Dinner last month.
But Biden and his campaign have primarily targeted the capillaries, not the carotid arteries.
That is, until Tuesday. In the final hours before the jury was due to consider Trump's fate, the Biden campaign decided to have De Niro and two police officers attacked by rioters on January 6, 2021, appear outside the courthouse to face the throng of media present.
The avowed purpose was to highlight Trump's undermining of democracy and general unfitness for office, but the moment quickly devolved into a shouting exchange between De Niro and a small group of onlookers who criticized him for criticizing Trump — perfect fodder for Saturday Night Live, but not necessarily campaigning.
And when asked if he thought Trump was guilty of the 34 charges the jury would soon be deliberating on (to which he has pleaded not guilty), the gritty actor was happy to respond: “The fact is, whether he's innocent or the verdict is split or whatever, he's guilty and we all know that,” he said.
Remarks flared between De Niro and a crowd of Trump supporters, with the F-word flying everywhere, and the footage and De Niro's impulse to jump into the legal fray just hours before the case was set to go to the jury became the talk of the town.
Who thought this was a good idea?
I love De Niro's work and agree with many of his comments, but his remarks seem woefully ill-timed, given that the White House has moved far from the grimy mayhem of 100 Centre Street. (It's also a bit puzzling why the Biden campaign, struggling to attract younger voters, would choose De Niro to speak for them on this issue. After all, it's just another octogenarian who's appealing to Gen Z.)
Navigating Trump's legal woes has been a challenge for Biden from the start, but Tuesday's bizarre development was a dizzying turn from the distance and out-of-the-fight stance he's taken thus far. It came as the Biden campaign began airing ominous ads narrated by De Niro that directly criticized Trump's trial, character and authoritarian impulses, and as anxious Democrats were mulling over polls in battleground states tipping slightly in Trump's favor.
Are these attacks intended to further cement those already converted, or to win over a small number of swing voters enough to turn the tide?
Trump's legal troubles, anti-democratic impulses and character flaws may already be factored in, with polls citing issues closer to home, such as the cost of living and abortion rights, as more motivating for those refraining from voting.
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Perhaps Biden is choosing this moment in anticipation of a verdict, if Trump is found guilty or innocent, to shift his focus and return to other themes, but time is running out for his campaign to craft a simple, coherent and resonant message that will define the race on the president's terms.
Predictably, the Trump campaign jumped on Tuesday's events, accusing the Biden campaign of desperately manipulating the jury. “He needs to be noticed, because it's been a while since he's made a good movie,” said Donald Trump Jr., who apparently missed “Killers of the Flower Moon.” “The fact that they're holding a rally right across from this witch hunt speaks exactly to what we've all known for a long time, which is that this is political persecution,” Trump Jr. added.
The Trumps must make their case: Biden is either a bumbling, aging incompetent or the nefarious mastermind behind a string of federal and state indictments and civil lawsuits against his rival. Maybe not both, but certainly not both.
That said, whoever at Biden HQ oversaw De Niro's performance on Tuesday probably should have left it on the cutting room floor.
