The Biden campaign released a new ad Monday morning as part of a $50 million ad blitz ahead of the first presidential debate later this month, highlighting former President Trump’s conviction, and saying “character” is the central dynamic of the 2024 presidential race. 

The new ad, titled “Character Matters,” highlights the verdict in New York v. Trump, when a jury found the former president and presumptive Republican nominee guilty on all 34 counts of falsifying business records in the first degree. Trump pleaded not guilty to the charges and has vowed to appeal the decision. 

BLACK MALE VOTERS SOUR ON BIDEN, TRUMP: ‘TIRED OF BEING FORCED TO CHOOSE THE LESSER OF THE GREATER EVILS’

“This election is between a convicted criminal who is only out for himself, and a president who is fighting for your family,” the ad says, highlighting Trump’s legal challenges and saying the president has been focusing on “lowering health care costs and making big corporations pay their fair share.” 

The ad comes ahead of next week’s first presidential debate, which is set for June 27. 

The ad is part of the Biden campaign’s June $50 million paid media campaign. The campaign said the ad will run on general market television and Connected TV in all battleground states and on national cable.

Former President Trump, left, and President Biden. (Getty Images)

“Trump approaches the first debate as a convicted felon who continues to prove that he will do anything and harm anyone if it means more power and vengeance for Donald Trump,” Biden campaign communications director Michael Tyler said. “That’s why he was convicted, that’s why he encouraged a violent mob to storm the Capitol on January 6, and it’s why his entire campaign is an exercise in revenge and retribution; because that man is blind to the people a president should be serving and will do absolutely anything for his own personal gain and for his own power.” 

Tyler stressed that, in the 2024 presidential campaign, “character matters, and the President of the United States should be someone who understands that the highest office in the land is about you and your family – not a vehicle to enrich yourself.” 

President Biden, left, and actor George Clooney. (AP/Getty)

BLACK VOTERS UNHAPPY WITH BIDEN, DEMOCRATIC STRATEGISTS FEAR IT COULD ‘THREATEN HIS RE-ELECTION’: NY TIMES

“That is the ethos Joe Biden puts into the job every day: to fight for safer communities, for the middle class, and to ensure that corporations are paying their fair share. It’s a stark contrast, and it’s one that matters deeply to the American people,” he said. “And it’s why we will make sure that every single day we are reminding voters about how Joe Biden is fighting for them, while Donald Trump runs a campaign focused on one man and one man only: himself.”

The Biden campaign on Monday also said the media campaign will target voters in battleground states for June as part of its “aggressive and comprehensive efforts to engage and activate voters who will decide this election.”

The ad blitz also includes a “historic” investment to reach Black, Latino, and Asian American and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander voters, with the campaign calling it the “largest investments to date.” 

The ad campaign comes after the Biden campaign raised a record $30 million at a star-studded fundraiser in Los Angeles hosted by Jimmy Kimmel. Big names, including former President Obama and Hollywood actors George Clooney and Julia Roberts, were in attendance. 

The massive haul comes after Biden attended a star-studded fundraiser in New York City in April, where he raised more than $25 million. 

Meanwhile, the first presidential debate will be hosted by CNN on June 27 in Atlanta.

Donald Trump says the rioters who assaulted police officers in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot are “warriors.” That’s not just wrong; it’s dangerous.

On Jan. 6, 2021, more than 2,000 supporters of then-President Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol, hoping to stop the certification of President Biden’s election. Many came armed with pistols, knives, baseball bats, metal pipes, stun guns, or bear spray, and used them to attack police. Some 140 officers were assaulted.

In the ensuing three years, prosecutors have charged more than 1,400 of the rioters. More than 100 have been charged with causing serious injury to an officer or using a dangerous weapon. Several dozen are in jail awaiting trial.

Daniel Rodriguez of Fontana pleaded guilty to stunning a police officer in the neck with a taser. A federal judge sentenced him to 12 years in prison.

Peter Schwartz of Owensboro, Ky., attacked police officers with pepper spray and a folding chair. He got 14 years, largely because he had 38 prior criminal convictions.

Christopher Quaglin of North Brunswick, N.J., tackled a police officer and choked him. A judge appointed by Trump called him “a menace to our society” and sentenced him to 12 years.

For months, Trump has called defendants like them “hostages” and “political prisoners,” as if they were being held unfairly by a repressive regime — a grotesque lie meant to attack the judicial system Trump wants to destroy.

But recently he gave the Jan. 6 attackers a more heroic title.

“Those J6 warriors — they were warriors,” the former president said at a rally in Las Vegas. “But they were really, more than anything else, they’re victims of what happened. All they were doing is protesting a rigged election.”

That’s quite a promotion. “Warriors” is a word Americans generally apply to members of the armed forces, not militants who attack police officers with bear spray.

Trump has crossed a line from defending the Jan. 6 detainees to lionizing them.

He has also promised to pardon most or all of them if he regains the White House.

The big problem isn’t how many he would pardon in 2025.

The problem is the message he’s sending to extremists who might be tempted to act in 2024: If you fight for me, you, too, can count on getting off — and on being hailed as a hero.

That’s a pretty loud dog whistle — only one step removed from “stand back and stand by,” Trump’s instruction to the extremist Proud Boys during the 2020 campaign. (They stood by until Jan. 6, when they showed up to batter down the Capitol’s doors.)

Trump’s praise for the rioters has come with an ugly escalation of his language on other themes.

He has denounced his opponents as “vermin.” a word that usually suggests extermination. He has claimed that migrants from Latin America, Asia and Africa are “poisoning our blood,” language once used by segregationists and Nazis.

And he has talked about taking revenge on Biden and others who he claims “rigged” his conviction by a New York jury for 34 felonies in a state court. (There is no evidence that the Biden administration played any role.)

Scholars of terrorism find all this worrisome.

“His message is escalating,” said Jon Lewis of George Washington University. “He’s saying: ‘We are warriors, and we have to stop this tyranny.’ It sounds intended to get his base ready for an impending conflict that will require violence.”

Trump’s promise of pardons serves a similar purpose, said Jacob Ware of the Council on Foreign Relations. “Prosecutions have two goals: punishment and deterrence. The [Jan. 6 defendants] have been punished, but Trump’s language has eroded any deterrence.”

It comes at a dangerous time. In its annual threat assessment, the Department of Homeland Security warned that any presidential election increases the risk of domestic terrorism.

The groups that led the assault on Jan. 6 have retreated in the face of prosecutions, but they haven’t gone away. Members of the Proud Boys have turned up at Trump rallies in North Carolina and New Jersey, apparently to recruit new members. Other organizations, including the Active Clubs network — successor to the California-based white supremacist Rise Above Movement — have been growing.

Federal law enforcement agencies have stepped up their attention to those threats, but they have sought to keep a low profile.

“There’s a lot of concern [in the federal government} about election violence,” said Ware, coauthor of a recent book on domestic extremism, “God, Guns and Sedition.”

“My worry is that conspiracy theories are so deeply entrenched in the [pro-Trump] movement, anything the federal government tries to do will be seen as an escalation. Efforts to protect vote counters will be portrayed as efforts to ‘protect the steal.’ Education efforts will be dismissed as ‘fake news,’” he said. “So it may be more effective for state and local governments and civil society [nongovernmental organizations] to take the lead.”

One focus of state efforts will be protecting vote-counting sites, especially in swing states with a history of slow tabulation: Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

The first step, though, is to take the problem seriously.

This isn’t just Trump being Trump.

He claims to be a champion of law and order, but he’s in favor of violence if it will help him take power — and he’s proclaiming it in plain sight.

Former President Trump courted Black voters in Detroit Saturday, when he raised President Biden’s authorship of the 1994 crime bill, which remains a sore point after three decades.

Headlining a roundtable discussion at the predominantly Black 180 Church as his campaign was announcing the launch of a Black voter coalition, Trump noted that rising crime rates hurt his audience’s community the most.

“Look, the crime is most rampant right here and in African American communities,” Trump said Saturday in Detroit. “More people see me, and they say, ‘Sir, we want protection. We want police to protect us. We don’t want to get robbed and mugged and beat up or killed because we want to walk across the street to buy a loaf of bread.’”

Trump took aim at Biden and the Biden-Harris campaign during his remarks, recalling how Biden, as a senator in 1994, authored the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which Biden has since called a “mistake.” 

BIDEN CALLS SUPPORTING 1994 CRIME BILL A ‘MISTAKE’ DURING ABC TOWN HALL

“Biden wrote the devastating 1994 crime bill, talking about ‘super predators.’ That was Biden. You know, he walks around now talking about the Black vote. He’s the king of the ‘super predators,’” Trump said during the event. 

Biden authored the Senate’s version of the bill when he served as a senator from Delaware. Signed into law by President Clinton, the bill has been blamed for mass incarceration that disproportionately affected the Black community. 

BIDEN’S SENATE RECORD, ADVOCACY OF 1994 CRIME BILL WILL BE USED AGAINST HIM, EX-SANDERS STAFFER SAYS

Former President Trump, a Republican presidential candidate, is presented with a birthday cookie after participating in a community roundtable at the 180 Church in Detroit June 15, 2024.  (Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images)

The bill’s passage came on the heels of the crack cocaine epidemic that throttled Black communities in the 1980s and early 1990s.

BIDEN, IN 1992, TOUTED CRIME BILL DOES ‘EVERYTHING BUT HANG PEOPLE FOR JAYWALKING’ 

Biden had a long history of authoring legislation viewed at the time as tough on crime but now seen as controversial and contributing to the spike in America’s incarceration rates. 

As the consumption of crack cocaine spiraled in the 1980s, for example, Biden co-sponsored another bill that soon became controversial, the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986. That legislation, which was signed into law by President Reagan, established harsher sentencing penalties for possession of crack cocaine than the drug’s powder form. Crack cocaine and cocaine have a similar chemical makeup, but Black Americans disproportionately used crack cocaine compared to their White counterparts, leading to an outcry that the bill unfairly targeted Black Americans. 

President Biden speaks during a campaign event at the Martin Luther King Recreation Center in Philadelphia April 18, 2024. (Hannah Beier/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Biden has since distanced himself from the 1986 and 1994 legislation, saying of the 1986 drug bill that “the road to hell is paved with good intentions,” The Washington Post reported in 2019. He added ahead of the 2020 election that the 1994 crime bill was a “mistake” due to its effect on the Black community. 

DETROIT PASTOR WELCOMES TRUMP REACHING OUT TO BLACK VOTERS, SAYS BIDEN ‘HAS FORGOTTEN WHY HE’S IN OFFICE’

Trump in his comments suggested Biden referred to criminals in the 1990s as “super predators.” Biden did refer to criminals in that era as “predators” who were “beyond the pale,” but the specific phrase “super predators” was not used by Biden. 

Former President Trump, a Republican presidential candidate, arrives to participate in a community roundtable at the 180 Church in Detroit June 15, 2024. (Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images)

Instead, first lady Hillary Clinton used the phrase in 1996 while speaking favorably of the legislation signed into law by her husband in 1994 and has since apologized for the phrase. 

​​”Just as in a previous generation, we had an organized effort against the mob. We need to take these people on,” she said at the time. “They are often connected to big drug cartels; they are not just gangs of kids anymore. They are often the kinds of kids that are called super predators. No conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first we have to bring them to heel.”

NEW POLL REVEALS DEMS ARE LOSING SIGNIFICANT SUPPORT FROM THESE 2 KEY DEMOGRAPHICS: ‘ESPECIALLY CONCERNING’

Former President Trump, a Republican presidential candidate, speaks at a campaign event at 180 Church Saturday, June 15, 2024, in Detroit. (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio)

Amid Clinton’s failed bid for the White House against Trump in 2016, a Black Lives Matter activist confronted her about the phrase, prompting the former secretary of state to walk back the comment. 

“Looking back, I shouldn’t have used those words, and I wouldn’t use them today,” Clinton told The Washington Post in 2016. 

TRUMP ENLISTS PROMINENT BLACK REPUBLICANS TO APPEAL TO THEIR PEERS: ‘FISHING WHERE THE FISH ARE’

Trump’s pitch to Black voters in Detroit comes as polling indicates Trump is gaining popularity among the voting bloc. Last month on CNN, a data analyst appeared stunned as the network explained Trump’s support among Black voters more than doubled to 22% compared to 2020, while Biden saw a 12% drop. Overall, Biden still holds a strong lead over Trump among Black voters. 

President Biden speaking in Los Angeles (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)

Biden won Michigan by three points in the 2020 election, but recent New York Times polling conducted in six battleground states last month found Trump leading in a handful of key states, including Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia and Nevada. The poll, published last month, found Biden holds more favorability in one battleground state — Wisconsin. 

BIDEN CAMPAIGN ‘RATTLED’ AS PRESIDENT ‘HEMORRHAGES VOTES’ IN BLACK COMMUNITY TO TRUMP, SAYS REP. HUNT

Following the roundtable discussion, the Biden-Harris campaign hit back that the 45th president’s audience at the church was “noticeably empty and white” and that his “eleventh hour” outreach to Black voters “isn’t fooling anyone.” 

Guests pray at the close of a roundtable discussion with community leaders and former President Trump, a presidential candidate, at the 180 Church June 15, 2024, in Detroit. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)

“Donald Trump thinks the fact that he has ‘many Black friends’ excuses an entire lifetime of denigrating and disrespecting Black Americans, but Black voters know better — and Trump’s eleventh hour attempt at Black ‘outreach’ isn’t fooling anyone,” Biden-Harris 2024 Director of Black Media Jasmine Harris said in a press release. 

“Black voters haven’t forgotten that this man entered public life calling for the death penalty for the innocent Central Park 5 and entered political life spreading racist conspiracy theories about Barack Obama. We haven’t forgotten that Black unemployment and uninsured rates skyrocketed when Trump was in the White House. And we sure haven’t forgotten Trump repeatedly cozying up to white supremacists and demonizing Black communities to his political benefit — because that’s exactly what he’ll do if he wins a second term. Black voters sent Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to the White House in 2020, and they’re ready to make Donald Trump a two-time loser in 2024.” 

Former President Trump headlines a Republican National Committee spring donor retreat in Palm Beach, Fla., May 4, 2024  (Donald Trump 2024 campaign)

Trump’s newly-formed Black coalition, Black Americans for Trump, was launched just days ahead of Juneteenth, which commemorates the end to slavery in the U.S. and is celebrated June 19 each year. 

TRUMP CAMPAIGN SETS UP SHOP IN BLUE PHILADELPHIA IN FIGHT FOR KEY BATTLEGROUND STATE

“Never has it been more clear that Joe Biden’s reckless reversal of President Trump’s America First policies is the very reason why Black communities have been utterly decimated under his Administration with sky-high grocery and gas prices, untenable housing costs, an invasion of illegal migrants and rampant violent crime,” Team Trump Senior Advisor Lynne Patton said in a statement in the campaign’s press release. 

“On day one, Donald Trump will reinstate all his proven policies on immigration, law and order, energy and the economy and put Black America First.” 

The Detroit skyline May 12, 2020 (AP Photo/Paul Sancya, File)

Trump was joined by Black leaders and supporters during the roundtable discussion Saturday, including former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson, Republican Michigan Rep. John James and former Detroit Police Chief James Craig. 

The pastor of 180 Church, Lorenzo Sewell, joined “Fox & Friends First” Friday ahead of the roundtable, lauding Trump’s visit as one that “means so much” to the community.

“Sometimes we forget about the Black vote. Sometimes we forget about the power of what it means to vote for those who are in office and, in urban America, our voice matters. That’s why it means so much to us that the former president will come and value our voice,” Sewell said.