How Trump’s fundraising off his criminal conviction
Plus: How 34 newspaper front pages covered Trump being found guilty on 34 charges
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How 34 newspaper front pages covered Trump being found guilty on 34 charges
How Trump’s fundraising off his criminal conviction
How Biden’s fundraising off Trump’s criminal conviction
Scroll to the end to see: the new generic look for generic brands. 🥫
How 34 newspaper front pages covered Trump being found guilty on 34 charges
Former President Donald Trump was found guilty on 34 felony counts Thursday by a 12-person jury for falsifying business records related to payments made to keep a porn star silent ahead of the 2016 election. Trump is the first former president in U.S. history to be a convicted felon.
Newspaper front pages across the U.S. showed images of Trump at court wearing a blue tie and headlines like “Trump guilty” and “Trump convicted.” The New York Daily News went full page with the historic news while the Idaho Statesman teased it above the fold.
The jury found Trump guilty on all counts following a five-week trial and two days of deliberations. The case was brought by the Manhattan District Attorney's Office. The DA’s office argued the payments, made following leaked audio of Trump saying he could grab women because he was famous, were an illegal conspiracy to influence the 2016 election, and the jury agreed.
Trump denied wrongdoing and said outside the courthouse following the verdict, “I am a very innocent man.”
How Trump’s fundraising off his criminal conviction
In fundraising ads, emails, and messages running shortly after the jury’s verdict on Thursday, Trump characterized the case as a witch hunt.
“I AM A POLITICAL PRISONER!” reads copy used on his website and ads running on Meta. “I was just convicted in a RIGGED political Witch Hunt trial: I DID NOTHING WRONG!”
Trump’s campaign website was converted Thursday to a fundraising landing page that didn’t scale very well to desktop and showed his mugshot. By this morning, it was updated with an embedded Rumble video of his press conference at Trump Tower and a rolling ticker showing small-dollar donors’ first names and last initials.
The official GOP X account and accounts for Donald Trump Jr. and top elected Republicans all shared a link with a “Never Surrender” graphic of Trump Thursday that linked to a fundraising landing page.
Trump’s campaign said it raised nearly $35 million following the guilty verdict.
“From just minutes after the sham trial verdict was announced, our digital fundraising system was overwhelmed with support, and despite temporary delays online because of the amount of traffic, President Trump raised $34.8 million dollars from small dollar donors,” Trump campaign advisers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles said in a statement.
The National Republican Senatorial Committee said it had its highest fundraising day of the cycle on Thursday, bringing in $360,000, according to Politico.
How Biden’s fundraising off Trump’s criminal conviction
President Joe Biden purposefully avoided weighing in on Trump’s criminal case to prevent giving Trump ammunition to claim the case was politically motivated. With the verdict now in, though, expect to hear Biden and his surrogates be more willing to sound off.
It started Tuesday with actor Robert De Niro and two former officers who defended the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021 attack, Harry Dunn and Michael Fanone, speaking as Biden surrogates at a press conference outside the Manhattan courthouse. De Niro also lent his voice to a new Biden campaign ad titled “Snapped.”
“From midnight tweets to drinking bleach to tear gassing citizens and staging a photo op,” De Niro says in the spot. “We knew Trump was out of control when he was president. Then he lost the 2020 election and snapped, desperately trying to hold onto power. Now he’s running again, this time threatening to be a dictator, to terminate the Constitution. Trump wants revenge and he’ll stop at nothing to get it.”
Biden’s campaign also sent out a fundraising text Friday about Trump’s own fundraising news. “Trump’s campaign just announced he raised $35 MILLION after a jury found him guilty yesterday,” it read. “We need your help to fight back and keep him out of the White House.”
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is also fundraising off the news. She released the worst-designed clip art mug you’ve ever seen showing an outline of her sipping tea and the words “Turns Out She Was Right About Everything” in a goofy font. Clinton said on social media the proceeds from the sale of the mug would go towards her group Onward Together.
Have you seen this?
The Donald Trump I saw on The Apprentice. Producer Bill Pruitt says a nondisclosure agreement he signed when he worked on the reality show with Trump has expired, so he wrote about his experience, including the time he claims Trump used the n word. [Slate]
CVS, Walmart, and the rise of private labels as shoppy shop dupes. As store brand products take up a larger share of consumers’ shopping carts, retailers are beefing up their private label offerings with new brands that are increasingly taking on a similar design. Generic brands have a new generic look. [Fast Company]
A.I. disclosure required in campaign ads, FCC chair says. U.S. Federal Communications Commission Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel on Wednesday proposed requiring disclosure of content generated by artificial intelligence in political ads on radio and TV. [Reuters]
Researchers paid people to log off Facebook and Instagram before the election. Here’s what happened. Researchers found those who temporarily deactivated their accounts had less knowledge of current events, slightly less belief in misinformation, and were slightly less likely to self-report voting for former President Donald Trump. [Yello]
History of political design
George Romney button (1968). One of the slogans used during the presidential campaign of the late Michigan governor and father of Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) was “The Way to Stop Crime is to Stop Moral Decay.”
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