One of Donald Trump’s most avid — and visible — supporters has gone public with his split with the president after the midterm blowout that made the Republicans the minority party in Congress.
Rick Frazier, 70, spent a decade as one of Trump’s “Front Row Joes,” the "superfans" who follow him to rallies across the country. His western Ohio home is still full of keepsakes, including a photo signed by Trump and a letter the president sent after Frazier’s daughter died of an overdose in 2023.
The retired factory worker was won over in 2015, believing Trump would clean up Washington. Now he watches “South Park” mock the president and laughs along. “He’s the king of swamp,” Frazier told the Washington Post.
Speaking with the Post, he admitted that his disillusionment built slowly. Frazier was frustrated by Trump’s reluctance to release the full Epstein files and by his rally-stage mockery of the word “affordability.” The breaking point was Trump’s pardon of a former Honduran president convicted of helping traffic cocaine into the U.S., a move Frazier couldn’t reconcile with the drug crisis that killed his daughter.
“See, that got me all upset,” he told the Post adding he is "done" with Trump.
In the midterms, he stuck with his Republican congressman, Jim Jordan (R-OH), but voted for Democrats for governor and Senate as Ohio flipped blue.
Frazier says he’ll return to voting for the best candidate, regardless of party. He still likes Vice President JD Vance. But for now, he’s a voter up for grabs, telling the Post, “I’m kind of going to go back to the way I was before Trump, I was independently swinging wherever the best guy was running. And that’s the way I think it should be."