“I’m all in,” said Bianco, who has hinted he may run for California governor in 2026. “Trump 2024, baby. Let’s save this country and make America great again.”

In the video, Bianco dons his county law enforcement uniform while lashing out at state leaders, particularly Gov. Gavin Newsom and Attorney General Rob Bonta, over what he calls their “love for criminals.”

Bianco said in the video that the state leaders might be “on to something,” so he’s decided to “change teams” by backing a felon for president.

A Manhattan jury of five women and seven men on Thursday found Trump guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records. New York prosecutors said the crimes were election interference, undertaken by Trump for the sake of garnering a White House win.

Commenters on Bianco’s Instagram post were mostly critical of the sheriff’s endorsement. One person wondered if Bianco would hire a deputy with 34 felony convictions. Others questioned why the sheriff endorsed a political candidate while wearing his uniform.

A California statute prohibits public employees from wearing their uniforms when engaging in political activities. Government Code section 3206 provides that “no officer or employee of a local agency shall participate in political activities of any kind while in uniform.”

It’s not clear whether Bianco was on duty at the time the video was made.

Patch has reached out to the county’s chief executive office and the state district attorney’s office for statements.

“If you really are so upset about excessive leniency shown to criminals (which I do agree with), I’d expect your want Trump to go to prison and be held accountable for his crimes,” one person responded on Bianco’s Instagram page. “Instead you support a felon for highest office in the land and let him escape accountability for his other indicted crimes yet to be tried.”

Bianco’s comments follow similar ones made by Riverside County’s Republican leaders in the wake of Trump’s conviction.

Former state Sen. Melissa Melendez of Lake Elsinore has consistently supported Trump — from his campaign that led to a successful 2016 presidential bid right up to the day he was convicted.

“I’ve got news for you, a guilty verdict isn’t going to keep Donald Trump from being the 47th president,” Melendez said Thursday via Twitter. “You may want to get used to that idea now. MAGA.”

No Republican leaders from Riverside County have publicly criticized the former president in the wake of his convictions.

Last month, Riverside County District Attorney Mike Hestrin spoke at a fundraising event headlined by Trump’s son, Eric. The May 22 event at The Temecula Stampede was organized by the Inland Empire Family PAC. Read more here.

The post CA Sheriff Endorses Trump: ‘It’s Time We Put A Felon In The White House’ appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

But Trump’s new status as a convicted felon probably won’t significantly affect his chances of winning the 2024 presidential election.

That, too is a strange historic first: a presidential candidate convicted of felonies, but suffering little if any political damage in the process.

However sensational the charges, which stemmed from hush money payments made to an adult film actress, many voters will react to the Manhattan jury’s decision with a shrug.

The conviction won’t prevent him from staying in the race until election day. If he wins, he stands a good chance of avoiding serious penalties while he’s in the White House.

It won’t be easy to spin a conviction on 34 felony counts as a victory, but there are plenty of ways Trump can mitigate the consequences.

He’ll continue to claim that the charges were flimsy and the process was rigged against him.

If he appeals the verdict, as expected, that will allow him to argue — correctly — that a conviction isn’t final while it’s under challenge. Not incidentally, it will also keep him out of jail, at least for a while.

Why do I say the guilty verdict won’t likely put much of a dent in Trump’s electoral prospects? Because that’s what the smartest political pollsters, Republicans and Democrats, say.

Democratic strategist Mark Mellman said the conviction was “unlikely to play a significant role” in the election. “It’s possible that the polls will flutter and then return to where they were. And it’s possible that there won’t be a flutter.”

Republican pollster Whit Ayres said the verdict’s impact would most likely be “negligible.”

In an ABC News/IPSOS poll last month, only 16% of Trump’s current voters said they would “reconsider” supporting him if he were convicted in the New York case. A mere 4% said they would definitely stop supporting him. But voters are often poor predictors of their own reactions, the pollsters said.

Many Democrats told pollsters in 1998 that they thought then-President Clinton should resign if he were impeached for lying about a sexual relationship with a White House intern, Mellman noted. But when the Republican-led House of Representatives actually impeached Clinton, his popularity soared.

Trump voters have proved fiercely loyal to their favored candidate, felon or not.

A month before the 2016 presidential election, when a videotape surfaced in which Trump boasted of kissing women without asking and grabbing them “by the pussy,” his poll numbers dropped by only one percentage point and rebounded quickly.

“We have seen, over eight years, a series of events that caused people to say, ‘Surely this time, Trump will lose support.’ But he never really does,” Ayres said.

Trump himself has marveled at the phenomenon. “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?” he said in 2016. “It’s, like, incredible.”

The presumptive Republican nominee has primed his supporters to ignore a guilty verdict by relentlessly attacking the cases against him as politically motivated.

“If I were trying to design a court case that would be easy for Republicans to dismiss as a partisan witch hunt, I would design the New York case,” Ayres said, noting that Manhattan Dist. Atty. Alvin Bragg is not only a Democrat, but a vocal Trump critic.

Trump has also shown that constant repetition of even bogus claims can bend public opinion his way.

Case in point: his false claims, long since disproved, that the 2020 presidential election was rigged. A year ago, the Monmouth University Poll found that 68% of Republicans said they believed President Biden won the election through fraud. This year, after Trump spent months denouncing the election at campaign rallies, that number has ticked up to 75%.

Despite the verdict in New York, Trump has scored an important victory in all four of his criminal cases: He and his lawyers, aided by a dose of luck, have succeeded in postponing any final reckoning until after election day.

Six months ago, any of the cases could have threatened his presidential campaign: a federal prosecution stemming from his supporters’ invasion of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021; a federal case on charges he illegally retained highly classified documents; a Georgia election interference case; and the New York business fraud case.

Trump has contrived to postpone the trials in three of those cases and will likely appeal his verdict in the fourth. The appeals process would last far beyond the election.

Those delays won’t make the charges go away.

But if Trump wins the election, once he is president he can order the Justice Department to halt the two federal cases. Some career Justice Department officials might refuse to carry out those orders, but a newly inaugurated president will presumably be able to find — or appoint — someone willing to do his bidding.

And under most legal precedent, state courts would put his prosecutions in New York and Georgia on hold while he’s in the White House. If he takes office in January and completes a full term, none of the cases would be decided before 2029, when he’ll be 82.

Being the first former president ever convicted on criminal charges is a dubious achievement, to be sure.

Equally unprecedented — and potentially more damaging to democracy — Trump has given future politicians a dangerous example: He has shown that felony convictions need not stand in the way of success.

The post Column: Trump is officially a convicted felon, but that may not stand in his way appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

In a hotel ballroom in Seattle, at fancy homes in California and at stops in Illinois and Wisconsin over the past week, Biden has been betting that reminding voters about Trump’s presidency and highlighting his Republican opponent’s latest campaign statements will work to the Democrat’s advantage.

At a Seattle fundraiser Friday night, Biden brought up Trump’s recent interview with Time magazine in which Trump said states should be left to determine whether to prosecute women for abortions or to monitor their pregnancies.

“I really urge you to read it,” Biden said.

Biden, who headlined another Seattle fundraiser Saturday before returning to the East Coast, has plenty of other Trump material to draw from, too.

The president highlights how Trump has promised, if elected, to be “a dictator on Day 1”, how he has suggested the United States would not necessarily defend allies from aggression and how he has pledged to “totally obliterate the deep state” in the federal bureaucracy, which he blames for blocking his first-term agenda.

“And he said a whole lot more,” Biden said during a Chicago appearance. “But the bad news is he means what he says. He means what he says. Unless you think I’m kidding, just think back to the 6th of January. This guy means what he says,” referring to the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Biden wants the 2024 election to be a referendum on Trump’s record and plans, but he also wants voters to look favorably on his own policies and actions.

Biden and his allies think the country needs reminding about Trump’s tenure and his outlandish and often concerning statements, particularly because the Republican is no longer ubiquitous on X, formerly Twitter, nor is he in front of television cameras as often as he once was.

“Chaos is nothing new for Trump,” Biden said in Chicago. “His presidency was chaos. Trump is trying to make the — the country forget about the dark and unsettling things that he did when he was president. Well, we’re going to not let them forget.”

Biden frequently highlights Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election and how he stood by when supporters violently stormed the Capitol as Congress met to certify his loss to Biden. He also points to Trump separating children from their families at the U.S.-Mexico border, tax cuts the Republican pushed through that benefited corporations and the wealthy and his repeated efforts to overturn the Affordable Care Act.

Biden’s barbs have been getting sharper of late.

He opened his Seattle fundraiser on Friday night by telling donors, “Thank you for the warm welcome. Please keep it down, because Donald Trump is sleeping. Sleepy Don.” That was a riff off of news reports that the former president has dozed off during his criminal trial in a New York courtroom. Trump has pleaded not guilty to charges in a hush money scheme to illegally influence the 2016 presidential election.

Biden also talks about Trump’s admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin and his self-described “love letters” with Kim Jong Un, the authoritarian leader of North Korea.

Biden frequently jabs at Trump for wondering aloud during the COVID-19 pandemic whether disinfectants could be injected or ingested to fight the virus. “That bleach he didn’t inject in his body; he just put it in his hair,” Biden says to laughter every time. “But, look, he’s got more hair than I do.”

Trump’s campaign said in a statement that “their records speak for themselves. President Trump created the most secure border in history and peace in the world. President Trump was the first president in modern history not to enter the U.S. in any new wars. Joe Biden’s weakness has led to wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, an immigrant invasion of our border, anti-Semitic protests on our college campuses, and crime and chaos in every American city.”

Trump doesn’t hesitate to criticize Biden and his policies. Trump is spending much of his time lately sitting in court. But before and after the proceedings, he often stands in front of cameras outside the courtroom and goes after Biden.

At a recent Wisconsin rally, Trump mentioned Biden within the first 2½ minutes of his speech and referenced the president or his administration more than 60 times during his remarks.

Trump’s criticism often takes a dark turn. Last weekend, he told donors at his Florida resort that Biden was running a “Gestapo administration.”

The Gestapo was the secret police force of the Third Reich that squelched political opposition generally and, specifically, targeted Jewish people for arrest during the Holocaust. Trump’s unfounded comparison to Nazi-era tactics is part of his effort to deny and deflect the charges against him, most notably his effort to overturn Biden’s 2020 victory.

Biden’s strategy is a gamble. Voters are divided in their views of both men’s presidencies.

An April poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that nearly half thought Trump’s presidency hurt the country on voting rights and election security, relations with foreign countries, abortion laws and climate change. But more than half of U.S. adults thought Biden’s presidency hurt the country on cost of living and immigration.

For all his criticism of Trump, Biden does get around to talking about his agenda and accomplishments. He tells supporters about his work to boost the economy and to bring the country out of the pandemic. He discusses his support for abortion rights even as he highlights how Trump has taken credit for the overturning of Roe v. Wade in part because of his Supreme Court nominations.

“Folks, the choice is clear,” Biden told supporters recently in the nation’s capital. “Donald Trump’s vision of America is one of revenge and retribution.”

“I’ve never been more optimistic about America’s chances,” he went on. “Not because I’m president, because of the state of the moment. The world needs us.”

The post Joe Biden wants to remind 2024 voters of a record and an agenda. Often it’s Donald Trump’s appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.