Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Trump's a convicted felon and Biden isn't shy about saying so

Abbreviated Pundit Roundup is a long-running series published every morning that collects essential political discussion and analysis around the internet.

David Kurtz/Talking Points Memo:

Biden Takes Aim At Felon Trump And Out-of-Control Supreme Court

The NYT write-up of the new Biden ad takes on the kind of weird distancing that political reporting sometimes offers up as objectivity.

The headline — “Biden Campaign Ad Paints Trump as a Felon” — suggests maybe it’s an open question whether Trump is a felon. Sure, the Biden campaign is painting him that way, but who is to say, really?

The story’s lede continues with that weird posture:

President Biden’s campaign on Monday began its most aggressive effort to brand former President Donald J. Trump a felon, with the introduction of a new television advertisement that focuses on the presumptive Republican presidential nominee’s criminal conviction.

It mentions the criminal conviction explicitly, but what is up with the ascribing the branding of Trump as a felon to the Biden campaign? Why does that have to be hedged as a Biden campaign effort rather than an established fact?

The headline was subsequently amended to read “Biden Campaign Ad Calls Attention to Trump’s Felon Status,” a more accurate description.

Steve Benen/MSNBC:

Global polling: Support for U.S. stronger under Biden than Trump

New international polling confirms that the U.S. under Joe Biden enjoys the kind of international respect Donald Trump talked about but never achieved.

This has been a rhetorical staple for the presumptive GOP nominee for quite a while. In fact, as recently as April, Trump told a Pennsylvania audience, referring to his White House tenure, “We were the most respected country in the world. We were the most respected that we were ever respected. We were never more respected than we were four years ago.”

Those claims didn’t reflect reality in any way, as we were reminded anew last week in the latest findings from the Pew Research Center.

With many around the world closely following the fiercely contested rematch between U.S. President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, a new Pew Research Center survey finds that, internationally, Biden is viewed more positively than his rival.

There’s quite a bit of data to review in the report, which gauged public attitudes in 34 countries, across several continents, but there were a couple of key takeaways. First, internationally, more people have confidence in Biden to do the right thing regarding world affairs, as compared to Trump.

And second, while confidence in the White House slumped badly, during Trump’s presidency, those numbers have rebounded under Biden.

Ankush Kardori/POLITICO Magazine:

New Polling Shows the Real Fallout From the Trump Conviction

A new POLITICO Magazine/Ipsos poll shows that Trump’s criminal conviction hurts him with independents.

In the weeks since the verdict, both parties have sought to shape the public’s initial reaction, with Republicans largely denouncing it and Democrats citing the result as further evidence that Trump is unfit for office. To figure out how this unprecedented moment is being processed by the electorate, POLITICO Magazine partnered with Ipsos in a new survey.

Among the most notable findings in our poll: 21 percent of independents said the conviction made them less likely to support Trump and that it would be an important factor in their vote. In a close election, small shifts among independent and swing voters could determine the outcome.

And yet there is also good reason to believe that Trump and his allies’ efforts to discredit the prosecution and conviction have cast doubt on the validity of the verdict among many people and limited the potential fallout for the former president-turned-felon.

A sizable number of Americans, including independents, question whether the verdict was the result of a fair and impartial process. And although most respondents rejected the idea that the prosecution was brought to help President Joe Biden, a large number (43 percent of all respondents) either strongly or somewhat agreed that was the rationale for the case.

Taken as a whole, the results of the poll suggest that Americans’ views on the Trump verdict may still be malleable — and could get better or worse for Trump.

NOTUS:

Freedom Caucus Worries Trump Is Getting Taken for a Ride on Endorsements

Trump has notably supported some more moderate GOP candidates over far-right challengers this cycle, angering many conservatives and delighting establishment Republicans.

In the case of House Freedom Caucus Chairman Bob Good, Trump’s endorsement seems to come down to two things: viability and, more than anything, vengeance.

Good initially endorsed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for president, not on account of any real policy difference but because he said he wanted someone who could serve for two consecutive terms. Good endorsed Trump as soon as DeSantis dropped out, but it wasn’t enough to quell Trump. The former president is backing the HFC chair’s GOP opponent, Virginia state Sen. John McGuire, in the primary election Tuesday.

All the same, Good is running for reelection in Virginia while touting himself as a close Trump ally. His stump speeches point to Trump as the answer to all of America’s woes, and his campaign signs are plastered with Trump’s name. McGuire, meanwhile, has pointed out in his campaign signs that he is the one who Trump endorsed, not Good.

“John is running against Bob Good, who’s not good, despite his name,” Trump said Monday night during a teletownhall.

Brian Beutler/Off Message:

The Republicans Feeding You Cheapfakes Think You're Stupid

Their clips are made to hurt Biden, but their flagrant deceptiveness could backfire.

Republican operatives know these snippets of footage are chum to left- and right-wing social-media personalities, and likely to disturb more politically detached users, so they splice them in house.

Some they clip suspiciously short, because it’s easy to make someone seem lost or confused when recorded out of context. Some literally edit down the view frame, because it’s easy to make someone look loopy when you cut the people they’re talking or waving to out of view.

But last week they made a mistake.

On Thursday, RNC operatives posted a 31-second long video of Biden seeming to meander away from fellow leaders at last week’s G7 summit in southern Italy. They uploaded the clip, captioned it with rote propaganda—”WHAT IS BIDEN DOING?”—and let it fly.

Except this time, the smear job was too obvious. The original wire-service footage reveals Republicans used an artificially narrow frame; in full frame it shows Biden turned to greet skydivers who’d landed nearby the assembled democratic leaders. Republicans simply cut the skydivers out of the video.

POLITICO: