David Axelrod: The role Robert De Niro should have turned down

(CNN) — Robert De Niro has brilliantly played many roles in his long and storied acting career. He might, on second thought, have turned down the one for which he was cast on Tuesday.For more than five weeks, President Joe Biden had mostly avoided plunging into the reality show that has been Donald Trump’s criminal hush money trial in Manhattan. Biden did not want to feed Trump’s feverish charge that he was the cause of the former president’s myriad legal problems.Even as a parade of Republican applicants, supplicants and attention addicts has shown up at the criminal court building in lower Manhattan to pledge their fealty to Trump, the White House has remained (mostly) silent, and prominent Democrats have stayed away. Recently Biden has been inserting humorous asides about the trial. “I’ve had a great stretch since the State of the Union, but Donald has had a few rough days lately. You might call it ‘stormy weather,’” he dad-joked at the White House Correspondents Dinner last month.But Biden and his campaign has mostly gone for the capillary, not the jugular.Until Tuesday, that is. In the final hours before the jury would consider Trump’s fate, the Biden campaign decided to crank...