A Hollywood fund-raiser Saturday night intended to bolster President Biden’s war chest turned into a platform for some of the most concerted and toughest attacks to date on former President Donald J. Trump by the Biden campaign, as entertainers, Barack Obama and even Jill Biden assailed Mr. Trump’s ethics and his suitability to return to the White House.
Ms. Biden, after being introduced by Barbra Streisand, said the choice was between her husband, “who honors the rule of law instead of trying to bend it to his way,” and Mr. Trump, “who wakes up every morning caring about one person and one person only: himself.”
“Mr. Trump has told us again and again why he wants the White House — to give himself absolute power, to not be held accountable for his criminal action,” Ms. Biden continued. His aim, she told the crowd, “was to destroy the democratic safeguards that stand in his way.”
Mr. Obama invoked Mr. Trump’s felony convictions — something that Mr. Biden has for the most part avoided doing — to applause from the crowd.
“We have the spectacle of the nominee of one of the two major parties sitting in court and being convicted by a jury of his peers on 34 counts,” Mr. Obama said. Listing off a series of what he described as offenses by Mr. Trump, he noted that “you have his organization being prosecuted for not paying taxes. Set aside all the other stuff he says —”
President Biden picked up his microphone: “He paid none.”
The tenor of the event in downtown Los Angeles was different from another star-studded fund-raiser just three months ago at Radio City Music Hall. The shift came after Mr. Trump was convicted by a New York jury on May 30 of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, a verdict that produced a surge of contributions from his supporters that narrowed the fund-raising gap between the two candidates and raised concerns among Democrats across the country, nowhere more than in Los Angeles.
