Joe Biden’s re-election campaign escalated its attacks on Donald Trump over his criminal conviction in New York as Democrats urged the president to seize on the guilty verdict as an election weapon against his Republican rival.

In a memo released on Saturday, the Biden campaign dubbed Trump a “convicted felon” who would “destroy our justice system, shred our democracy, rig our economy for their billionaire donors, and attack the very idea of America”.

The statement signals that Democrats and the Biden re-election bid are preparing to be more aggressive in targeting Trump over his status as the first former president to be found guilty of a crime, rather than adopt a more passive approach.

On Friday, Biden briefly addressed the Trump verdict at the beginning of remarks on his Middle East peace plan, criticising his rival for blasting the US justice system during a remorseless tirade against the ruling a few hours earlier.

“It’s reckless, it’s dangerous, and it’s irresponsible for anyone to say this was rigged just because they don’t like the verdict,” Biden said.

Some Democrats have been pushing the US president and the campaign to go further. Christy Setzer, a Democratic strategist, said Biden and his party needed to be more “forceful” in drawing a contrast with Trump when it comes to the conviction.

“Sometimes Democrats get so precious, so afraid to get their hands dirty or afraid to anger Trump’s supporters . . . our party misses the opportunity.” Setzer said on Saturday. “Let’s not do that here, on a story that has the power to fundamentally change the trajectory of the race, and history.”

The calls for Biden and the Democrats to be more pugnacious come as a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Saturday — and conducted after the conviction — showed that 10 per cent of Republican voters and 25 per cent of independent voters were less likely to vote for Trump due to the verdict. This would indicate a significant number of defections from the Trump camp.

Tony Fabrizio, a pollster for Trump, disputed the notion of any big effect on the former president’s ability to win a second term in the White House.

“We told our donors and supporters that our polling in these target states was indicating that most all of the trial impact was “baked in the cake” and that we expected marginal impact from an adverse ruling,” he said in a memo distributed by the Trump campaign on Saturday.

“So far, that seems to be the case.”

Democrats in swing districts heading into the November election are generally offering more guarded criticism of Trump over the ruling, while others say it is important not to focus excessively on the former president’s crimes at the expense of kitchen-table issues.

“Trump continues to be a sideshow, a circus, a caricature of a buffoon, the worst thing that happened to this country in a very long time. We need to focus on our people and the American people and getting them out to vote and focus a lot less on Trump,” Jamaal Bowman, a New York congressman, told MSNBC on Saturday.

Many Republicans believe that Democratic efforts to capitalise on Trump’s verdict are bound to backfire, since the trial itself has done little to move the needle in national or swing state polling, and most voters on the right and centre-right accept Trump’s claim that the prosecution had political motivations.

“Democrats think they can put out the Trump fire with oxygen. It’s political malpractice,” Mitt Romney, the Utah senator and Trump critic within the Republican party, told The Atlantic.

But Trump’s verdict is making him politically vulnerable on a number of fronts. As well as labelling him a “convicted felon”, Democrats will be able to target him for the underlying case, of falsifying business documents to pay for the silence of a porn actress so it would not damage his 2016 campaign for president.

They will start to poke holes in Trump’s claim that he is the candidate of law and order, since he failed to accept a criminal conviction. And if Trump lashes out and grows angrier at his legal predicament, as he did on Friday, they will have new opportunities to depict him as unhinged and distracted from the issues voters care most about.

“Trump’s campaign is about him, our campaign is about America,” the Biden campaign said in Saturday’s statement.

In an interview on Fox News’ Fox & Friends program on Sunday, Trump repeated his claims that the Biden administration had overseen the “weaponisation of the justice department”.

“It’s like their slogan: I’m ‘a threat to democracy.’ I’m the opposite. They’re the threat to democracy,” added Trump.

A sign of whether Trump’s verdict damages him politically will come from polling over the next few weeks. Biden still trails by 1.3 percentage points in national polling, according to the FiveThirtyEight.com average, and the former president also has a slight edge in key battleground states.

If Biden sees that attacks on Trump’s criminal record are having an impact, he may emphasise that during their first debate in late June in Atlanta. Biden may still have to remain above the fray to remain presidential, but his allies will be less constrained.

“We need a phalanx of campaign surrogates out in force, comparing Trump, America’s first felon on a major party ticket, to Biden,” said Setzer.

additional reporting by Alex Rogers in Washington

Former President Donald Trump stood in the lobby of Trump Tower in Midtown Manhattan Friday morning looking somehow ill at ease in his own building.

He wore his signature suit, shirt and tie and stood alone at a lectern with five American flags and a cold stone wall behind him. Gone was the usual human backdrop of flag-waving supporters seen at MAGA rallies. He stood alone, without script or teleprompter, armed only with two sheets of paper and a look of barely controlled rage.

It was billed as a press conference to respond to the jury verdict that had convicted him on 34 charges the day before. But it was more a speech than a press conference. A contingent of reporters with cameras stood a few yards away, but Trump spoke without interruption and took no questions.

Not far off, a small crowd of supporters including some family members applauded and cheered at intervals. Trump never quite settled on which group he was addressing, connecting only sporadically with the live TV broadcast camera. Some of the TV news channels eventually cut away while he rambled on for a total of 33 minutes.

It was the same location Trump spoke from nine years ago this month when he descended “the golden escalator” to the same lobby and announced his first campaign for the Republican nomination for president. The scene that day featured Melania and Ivanka Trump, both all in white, and a forest of cameras held aloft beneath Trump’s elevated stage. Everything about those theatrics described a different time in a different world.

Trump would recall that occasion on Friday when he almost immediately started attacking immigrants, as he had in 2015.

But first, he had to deal with the moment — and the reason he was here.

“This is a case where if they can do this to me, they can do this to anyone,” Trump said, referring to the prosecutors and Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg. “These are bad people. These are in many cases, I believe, sick people.”

It was an echo of Trump’s frequent claim to his rally crowds that they and not him are the targets of all his legal woes and political adversaries.

But Trump reserved most of his vitriol for Judge Juan Merchan, who would not move the trial out of New York and denied most of the motions filed by Trump’s attorneys.

“We just went through one of many experiences where we had a conflicted judge, highly conflicted. There’s never been a more conflicted judge,” Trump said.

Trump has long tried to make an issue of Merchan’s total of $35 in contributions to Democrats in 2020 and the Democratic ties of the judge’s daughter. At Merchan’s request, both issues had been reviewed by the New York Advisory Committee on Judicial Ethics and his refusal to recuse was upheld on appeal.

But Trump was back at it on Friday, and the accusations of bias were just getting started.

“As far as the trial itself, it was very unfair,” said Trump. “We weren’t allowed to use our election expert under any circumstances.”

Merchan actually did allow that expert to testify with the stipulation that the prosecution could also bring in its own expert. At that point, Trump’s team decided not to call the witness.

“You saw what happened to some of the witnesses that were on our side, they were literally crucified by this man,” Trump said, again referring to the judge.

“He looks like an angel but he’s really a devil,” Trump said of Merchan. “He looks so nice and soft.”

Hearing Roy Cohn in Trump’s words

Former President Donald Trump speaks at a news conference at Trump Tower on Friday following the verdict in his hush-money trial in New York City.

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Trump’s weeks of vituperating Merchan recall the maxim he had received half a century ago from a lawyer named Roy Cohn, who was known for saying: “Don’t tell me what the law says, tell me who the judge is.”

Cohn had a career matched by few in the legal profession. The son of a judge, he graduated from both Columbia and Columbia Law School at the age of 20 and went to work for the Justice Department. He helped to convict Julius and Ethel Rosenberg of helping the Soviets steal nuclear secrets. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover then recommended Cohn to Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, who hired him to help with his hunt for communists in the government.

Cohn went on to spend 30 years representing many of the biggest names in New York, including athletes, entertainers, a cardinal and organized crime bosses. In the 1970s he represented Trump’s family real estate business when it faced federal charges for racial discrimination.

Trump himself continued to rely on Cohn for years thereafter. Even after reaching the White House in 2017, he complained that none of his many lawyers fought for him like “my Roy Cohn.”

Trump’s well-worn playbook of false statements

Trump did not let his most recent court reversal take up all his on-camera time on Friday. With live TV coverage rolling, at least for a while, he veered off his latest court reversal to attack the man he wants to replace in the White House in November.

Calling Election Day Nov. 5 “the most important day in American history,” Trump blamed Biden for all his legal travails. He said the trial in New York had been orchestrated “in Washington” to protect the incumbent administration, which he called “a fascist state.”

Trump has made these accusations before, offering no form of evidence, as he again did not on Friday. But he used the allegation of Biden involvement to pivot to attacking Biden on immigration.

It was a kind of reprise of what might be called Trump’s greatest hit. In his speech in this same venue in 2015, he had stunned the political world with his language about immigrants at the U.S. border with Mexico: “They’re not sending their best … they’re bringing drugs, they’re rapists.”

Trump on Friday broadened his assault to include a number of other specific countries and nationalities sending “millions” who were “pouring in” unchallenged across “open borders.” He mentioned Congo in Africa and China in particular.

He said the prisons of Venezuela had been “emptied out” and that countries were sending people from their mental institutions.

He offered no evidence or sources for any of these statements.

And while some of his assertions took the form of casual, unproven superlatives such as “record numbers of terrorists” entering the country, some were downright false statements starkly at odds with the facts.

Early in his Friday remarks, when he criticized the Manhattan district attorney, he had said crime was “rampant” in the city and painted it in apocalyptic terms. Crime statistics in New York City are actually much lower today than in the 1990s, a decade in which Trump ally Rudy Giuliani was elected to his two terms as mayor. Shootings and homicides are down in particular in the past two years.

But this species of misstatement or disinformation has been part of the Trump arsenal for some time. He often raises rhetorical questions and makes sweeping statements that seem to have sprung from an alternative reality.

His talent for selling his own version of reality posed a challenge to the news media as far back as his years as the star of a TV “reality show” called The Apprentice. Trump was in the middle of his 14 seasons with the show when he began publicly questioning whether President Barack Obama had been born in the U.S.

It was just this kind of falsehood — picked up and promoted by countless commenters on cable TV, websites and social media — that made Trump a political force before he was an actual candidate. And when, in the fall campaign of 2016, he informed the world that he had himself laid to rest the “birther” issue (which he blamed on Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign), it forced many in the mainstream media to reexamine their longstanding aversion to the word “lie.”

By the end of Trump’s term in office, the news media had come to routinely label many of his claims as false — especially his denial of his defeat in the 2020 election. Some had also taken to labeling as lies the Trump statements they believed he had to know were false.

But Friday at Trump Tower was another reminder that as the November election gets closer and the political season comes to predominate, Trump can be expected to test and exceed the boundaries of fact and fiction one again.

Are we better prepared to deal with it this time?

Half a century ago, one of the world’s leading reinsurers published a paper on floods, referencing ancient diluvial stories such as the Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh, and urged better monitoring of “climatic variations”.

The 1970s paper by Munich Re, now the largest in the industry, pointed to global warming, polar melt and other environmental shifts as needing further study, “especially as — as far as we know — its conceivable impact on the long-range risk trend has hardly been examined to date”.

Today, the effect of climate change fuelling natural catastrophes such as floods and wildfires is evident, and insurance companies are scrambling.

The industry has been alert to the threat for decades. Yet executives have been spooked by the surge in extreme weather events, creating a property insurance crisis in some parts of the world. 

The sector has been rocked four years in a row as natural catastrophe losses topped $100bn. Even in 2023, a quiet year for hurricanes, there were a record-breaking 37 separate events costing at least $1bn in losses.

“Very clearly the [insurance industry’s] models are not working,” said Lindsay Keenan, EU co-ordinator at campaign group Insure Our Future. “I’m amazed how they have managed to blag the regulators with their rhetoric that ‘It’s all OK, we have models for that’ over the years, and still today.” 

Reinsurers took heavy losses before sharply tightening their terms two years ago, putting extra pressure on primary insurers. US property and casualty insurers incurred more than $20bn in underwriting losses in both 2022 and 2023, according to rating agency AM Best. State Farm, the biggest US home insurer, suffered a net loss of more than $6bn in both years. It has since paused new business in California and will not renew tens of thousands of policies.

Veteran industry executives have voiced their concerns about the battle to keep up with climate effects.

William Berkley, the founder and executive chair of insurer WR Berkley Corporation, challenged fellow executives recently about their response to a changing climate that “doesn’t follow” historic patterns.

“It doesn’t seem like we are changing fast enough for the pace of change we have to adjust to,” Berkley told a gathering at New York University in April.

Insurance models “struggle to factor, with any precision, the probabilities that are accruing from climate change”, said Paula Jarzabkowski, an expert on risk at the University of Queensland. “I suspect that factoring climate risk into underwriting models is adding an uncertainty factor to premiums.”

Industry figures who spoke to the Financial Times identified a few reasons why the sector had fallen behind the curve.

A key issue was the one-year term of insurance policies — the question of whether to insure or reinsure a property or postcode for the coming year only — with little incentive to take a longer-term view. 

Adopting a conservative approach to climate threats also risked the loss of business or driving up capital requirements, some argued.

“The individual insurance companies look at this and say ‘there is very little advantage to us’ . . . being a leader in this area,” said one insurance expert, speaking privately.

This feeds into a second charge made by some: the risk models provided by the very biggest groups, Verisk and Moody’s RMS, were slow to reflect the effect that accelerating climate change was having on day-to-day losses.

Their priority was to gauge “peak perils”, such as hurricanes, that can cause calamitous losses that can bring the sector to its knees, rather than “secondary perils” such as wildfires and storms, which may have a lesser individual cost — until they begin to widen and cascade.

Big risk modellers reject the idea that they did not focus enough on secondary perils. Jay Guin, chief research officer for extreme event solutions at Verisk, said the company had “been offering models for secondary perils for over 20 years and has made significant investments”. 

But it was not until the 2017-18 wildfire losses in California that the whole industry began to take a “more critical look” at such events, Guin said. “We have improved most aspects of the model and have accounted for the impact of climate change.”

Executives describe an industry that is now recalibrating the threat from fires and floods. “Everyone has been surprised [by the surge in secondary perils]. It’s a fair criticism that we fell behind,” said Christian Mumenthaler, the departing chief executive of reinsurer Swiss Re.

He said it had been very difficult to predict how global warming would feed through to the cost of localised events, such as floods, which might affect one building on a street but not another.

Julie Serakos, head of the model product management team at Moody’s RMS, cited other complicating factors such as population growth in vulnerable regions and inflation in payouts. “There’s just more exposure to these types of events.”

Investment has now poured into new software tools and expertise that allow insurers to develop a longer-term view of climate effects.

Despite these efforts to catch up, however, the risk remains that the models will not fully reflect the catastrophic outcomes.

“As scientific evidence on climate change accumulates, you typically find the risks are higher in the new risk assessments compared to the previous one,” said Wim Thiery, a climate scientist at Vrije Universiteit Brussel.

Scientists have also been unnerved by an unprecedented stretch of record heat over land and sea over the past year. Global average temperatures surpassed the 1850-1900 average by 1.61C in the 12 months to April.

Members of the UK’s Institute and Faculty of Actuaries argued in a recent report with University of Exeter scientists that more attention should be paid to the risk that extreme climate scenarios could be made more likely by a series of atmospheric and physical feedback loops, including the collapse of ice sheets. These tipping points would add even more guesswork to the modelling.

“It’s product recall time for some of these models, things are moving more quickly [than predicted] . . . we need to move on to the next generation of climate scenarios,” said Sandy Trust, head of organisational risk at British fund manager M&G, and a co-author of the report.

Another issue is how the consensus models developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN body of scientists, are interpreted by the private sector.

Scientists and actuaries “are sailing past each other like ships in the night despite the fact they are using the same language of climate risk”, said Kris de Meyer, head of the UCL climate action unit. 

The scientific method focuses on the most likely outcomes within the full range of scenarios. The insurance world, conversely, aims to forecast the worst case, however unlikely, to avoid fluke events.

The response from the all-important reinsurance sector has been to draw back from covering secondary perils and to push up prices for primary insurers, who have passed them on to consumers. Greater numbers of property owners are relying on state-backed insurers as a last resort.

Most in the industry expect a continuation of that trend. “The reality is that climate change is essentially a slowburn,” said Steve Bowen, chief science officer at reinsurance broker Gallagher Re. “The general trend [in losses] is going to continue to go up.”

This is the second article in an FT series about the consequences of climate change on insurance. Read part one here.

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