CNN senior political analyst Mark Preston said that President Joe Biden is the “poster child” for Americans who are “angry” about what they believe was a political prosecution of former President Donald Trump.
Around 45% of Americans either “strongly” or “somewhat” agreed with the statement that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s prosecution of Trump stemmed from the desire to boost Biden, a Monday POLITICO Magazine/Ipsos poll found. Host Boris Sanchez on “CNN News Central” asked Preston about how this belief could hurt Biden, with the analyst explaining that the president is the “face of” the prosecution.
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“It certainly harms Joe Biden, the fact that he is the institution right? So when people are angry at the institution, he may not be behind every reason why people are mad at the federal government, but he is the poster child, right? He is the face of it,” Preston said. “So that in itself is problematic for him, but it really is a problem when you’re talking about but institutions as a whole now.”
“I mean, you have almost have the country right now, believes that this was done for political reasons. You have Donald Trump out there talking about how he’s going to take retribution perhaps against those who have wronged him. I’m not surprised that we’ve seen it. In fact, I‘m not even surprised the number is not even higher by some measure,” he added.
A panel of seven swing-state voters recently said they believe that the prosecution against Trump was political after a jury convicted the former president in Bragg’s case on all 34 counts of falsifying business documents to conceal a payment to porn star Stormy Daniels.
2WAY’s Mark Halperin asked the panel if Bragg’s choice to “indict and prosecute President Trump was motivated by politics,” with four out of seven voters raising their hands. The host then queried whether they believed the “timing” of Bragg’s prosecution was political and all seven voters raised their hands.
“I just feel like, not even just this case but in all the cases against him, it seems like it’s been four years,” a Georgia voter named Gerrylin said. “Why has nothing really come of any of the cases, and now that he’s on the campaign trail, it’s like now everything is ramping up? But what was going on the last three and a half years, where now everything is just surfacing and he’s just now going to trial?”
