FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Donald Trump’s base is as devoted as ever, and the criminal charges against him aren’t dampening supporters’ enthusiasm about his 2024 presidential candidacy.
If anything, South Florida backers are more fired up on his behalf than they were before he was indicted, pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts in New York, and returned to Mar-a-Lago to rally support and lambaste the prosecutor and judge.
“Absolutely I support him,” said Cathy Rollins, of Plantation. “Am I likely to vote for him again? Absolutely. I think it’s terrible what they’re putting him through.”
Rollins said she was a lifelong Democrat until Trump ran for president in 2016 “and my brain kicked in and I realized I don’t think like a Democrat.” She described herself as a grandmother but declined to give her age.
Michelle Lilly, of Port St. Lucie, said the first time she voted in her life was in 2016, at age 49, when she voted for Trump. “If he doesn’t win in 2024, I’ll never vote again.”
“Our country needs him. Trump’s the only one who can get us back to where we need to be,” Lilly said. Of his political opponents, she said, “They’re scared of him.” Of the criminal prosecution, she said, “This is ridiculous.”
The criminal case may not help or hurt Trump among Republican voters deciding which candidate they support, but it could increase enthusiasm, said Kevin Wagner, a political scientist at Florida Atlantic University and research fellow at FAU’s Business and Economics Polling Initiative.
“When it comes to sort of the core Trump voters, I don’t think any of this matters, and if anything it probably is more motivating to them,” he said. “I don’t really think it changes the nomination dynamic at this point.”
Larry Snowden said many Trump supporters are “more energized and engaged than ever,” both because of what they see as a turn for the worse in the country since President Joe Biden took office and, most recently, what they believe is a politically motivated prosecution of the former president. “They’re more committed than ever to see him victorious in the 2024 election.”
Snowden is president of Club 47, a large Palm Beach County-based organization dedicated to supporting Trump and his MAGA movement. (Formerly Club 45, the numbers represent that Trump was the 45th president and club members hope that he’ll become the 47th president.)
‘Witch hunt’
A Manhattan grand jury indicted Trump on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records as part of an attempt to hide information that could have hurt his 2016 presidential campaign.
Prosecutors said it involved hush money payments, including to a porn star and a former Playboy model who claimed long-ago sexual encounters with Trump. He denied what the women said, and denied doing anything illegal.
“People like myself, we do feel it’s a witch hunt. We feel Trump is innocent,” Snowden said. “I see support for President Trump skyrocketing since all of this started happening with the idea of charges and arraignments.”
Snowden and his wife, Sue, long active in Republican politics, were early supporters of Trump — even when most of the Florida GOP establishment was supporting either former Gov. Jeb Bush or U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., for the 2016 presidential nomination. Sue Snowden was Trump’s 2016 campaign chairwoman in Palm Beach County.
They were at Trump’s post-court appearance at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday night.
Help or hurt?
Irma Gordon, president of the Jewish Republican Club of Broward, said the criminal charges would “definitely help” Trump win the 2024 nomination.
“Most people, the ones that I talk to think the whole thing is a farce,” she said, adding that “it already is beginning to have a rallying effect.”
Sarah Longwell, a Republican strategist and founder of the Republican Accountability Project, a national organization opposed to Trump, has been conducting focus groups almost every week for several years to gain insights into Trump voters.
She told NPR that before the indictment there had been some interest among people who voted for Trump in both 2016 and 2020 in finding a different standard-bearer for 2024.
But in a March 31 focus group, the day after the news of the indictments broke but before details were officially released, all the participants said they were for Trump — the first time that’s happened this year. “The anger in the group was just very present,” Longwell told WBUR public media in Boston. Focus groups are guided discussions, usually with six to 12 people.
“I am of the opinion that indictments help Trump in the primary but hurt him in the general. Unless one of Trump’s GOP primary competitors figures out how to make the indictments a liability by explaining Trump’s electability problem to GOP primary voters,” Longwell wrote Friday on Twitter.
Snowden said he has heard in recent days from Republican voters and activists who considered supporting other candidates in the primary, who are now solidly back with Trump. “It’s not possible for any other candidate to defeat this man in this primary,” he said.
Rich Logis, of Delray Beach, spent years working with Trump supporters, and was one himself.
People who believe the criminal charges will hurt Trump are deluding themselves, he said. “I don’t see enough voters being peeled away from Trump, supporting other candidates when it comes to a primary vote,” Logis said.
Logis said he voted for Trump in the Republican primaries and general elections in 2016 and 2020, and for Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2018, and helped organize Americans for Trump Broward, a group of people who supported the then-president in the overwhelmingly Democratic county.
He subsequently left the Republican Party, registered as a no party affiliation voter, and writes and organizes against Trump and Trumpism, and how he believes the movement went astray and abandoned the principles it used to advocate.
Other potential candidates, “the whole lot of them, they are just imitations. Donald Trump is the original Trumpist. … And intuitively voters do not want the remake, they want the original.”
Rallying around Trump
Two days after Trump was in court, U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds, a Republican who represents parts of Collier and Lee counties, endorsed his 2024 presidential candidacy.
And Snowden said he sees many signs of support for Trump in South Florida and nationally. He pointed to:
- Strong fundraising has been reported by the Trump campaign since the indictment. The campaign has said it has raised $12 million online. (Officially filed figures won’t be available for weeks.)
- Supporters formed crowds along the route Trump took from his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach to and from Palm Beach International Airport on Monday for his flight to New York and again on Tuesday for his return after appearing in court.
- Attendance at Club 47, the pro-Trump organization that helped mobilize people to show up along the motorcade route, “has shot up. It’s never been stronger than it is now.” Snowden said its gatherings at a hotel meeting facility in West Palm Beach now routinely sell out, and people reserve their spots earlier than ever before.
- Speakers now come to Club 47 leaders hoping to get invitations; in years past it had to hunt for people to appear.
DeSantis
DeSantis, an all-but-declared candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, has long been seen by many as a leading alternative to Trump.
Mike Seldin, of Tamarac, said he thinks Trump still has enormous support among Republicans, but he decided long ago that DeSantis would be a better nominee in 2024.
“I think the country’s ready for a younger man, a strong man, a man who doesn’t have all kinds of … things in his past. And I think that Ron DeSantis is going to be that man if he decides to run,” he said. “I just think Ron DeSantis is the man for the future.”
If DeSantis doesn’t run? Seldin said he’d vote for Trump.
“I’ve always been a Trumpster,” Seldin said. “Being a Trumpster, I hope it’s not going to affect him.” But, he said, he thinks the charges are “definitely going to affect him.”
Lilly said she likes the idea of a DeSantis presidency — but not yet, and not at the expense of Trump.
“We’re not voting for DeSantis. DeSantis needs to take a seat and wait a turn,” Lilly said. “DeSantis can’t pull us out of where we’ve gone, only Trump can,” she said. “If (Trump) wins and then DeSantis runs in 2028, I’ll definitely vote for DeSantis.”
Beyond the primaries
Assessing the impact of the criminal charges on Trump’s chances in the general election in 19 months can be a fraught exercise.
Longwell and Logis see it as a negative.
Wagner, the political scientist at FAU, said Never Trump Republicans and Democrats wouldn’t support him as the nominee. But the biggest unknown is voters in the middle, many of whom aren’t as politically attentive as the deeply engaged partisans on either side.
Historically, Wagner said, political science research “suggests that candidates that are involved in investigations, indictments and potentially going through the criminal process, that tends to be a negative for those kinds of voters. However, Donald Trump is not every candidate, and so in a lot of ways we don’t know.”
Another unknown factor is what comes from other investigations, by the Fulton County, Georgia, district attorney and by a federal special counsel spearheading two probes, and a civil investigation by the New York state attorney general.
Fired up
Lilly said she’s been to Trump rallies before, but never to anything around his Mar-a-Lago estate and club, which he declared his home in 2019.
She turned her bright green 2014 Mustang convertible with manual transmission — the color officially is “ gotta have it green “ — into a motorized show of support for Trump and drove with her daughter, Amanda Walker, from Port St. Lucie to West Palm Beach.
The car was adorned with a “Make America Great Again Trump 2024″ flag.
Hanging from the rearview mirror: a Trump ornament that usually goes on the Christmas tree decked out with Trump decorations that she’s put up every year since 2019.
The highlight: two Trump masks (stuffed with bubble wrap) attached to the rear headrests made it look as if there were two Trump mannequins in the back.
When she parked at the shopping plaza on Southern Boulevard between Parker Avenue and Lake Avenue in West Palm Beach that over the years has been a frequent gathering point for Trump’s supporters, the car attracted lots of attention. At times, she said, so many people gathered around for pictures she couldn’t get to the car.
The highlight, she said, came when she took a drive through Palm Beach’s tony shopping district.
“I turned on to Worth Avenue with the top down and Trump in the back. There were people in Lilly (Pulitzer) dresses and Louis Vuitton taking pictures of Trump in the back seat. I was so excited that so many high falutin’s were Trump supporters. I thought I was going to get snubbed. But people loved my car. It was crazy.”
Lilly’s faith in Trump is unshakable. “When he spoke for the first time when he ran for president in ‘16, I could understand him. He wasn’t like your normal politicians who used the big words that I couldn’t understand,” she said. “And then he just stole my heart.”
And she’s convinced he’ll be leading the country again after next year’s election because people “are waking up. They are seeing how this country is and they know how it was when Trump was running things. Trump didn’t get the full eight years to run the country, to take care of us.”
