Donald Trump continuously portrays himself as a victim, and that message is sinking in with exactly the type of voters he'll need to win another term in the White House.
The former president has been indicted four times on 91 felony counts and found liable for business fraud and sexual assault, but he constantly portrays himself as a victim of a vast government conspiracy aimed not just at him but his supporters, and those claims are resonating outside his base with center-right voters who had been skeptical of him, reported the Washington Post.
“The people that don’t like him … when they dislike him, it helps me like him more,” said Dave Alexander, a 61-year-old engineer from Iowa who called Trump his top choice for 2024. “If they ignored him, I probably wouldn’t like him as much. Does that make sense?”
Rival campaigns aren't surprised that Trump has held onto his base, but they're starting to realize that persuadable voters are actually moving toward the ex-president not just despite his indictments, but because of them.
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“I would have preferred [Ron] DeSantis, but I have to support Trump because we have to gain back our country” said New Jersey attorney Joe Marino. “I only switched over to support Trump because indicting him is an outrage and threatens democracy.”
Tim Boyle, a conservative voter from Arizona who voted twice for Trump, had been hoping a "younger, better-looking and less obnoxious person" would emerge in the Republican field, and has even considered voting for a Democrat, but the indictments have caused him to feel sympathy for Trump.
“When he was president, they impeached him twice,” Boyle said. “I’m kind of getting the same feeling about the indictments. Is this just the next thing they’re going to start doing, indicting presidents? I guess I don’t think they’re real — I think they’re more political theater. It does make me think, okay, there’s been something afoot this whole time. If Trump is powerless against the government, what chance does any of us have?”
Several voters placed Trump's legal troubles into religious analogies.
“The closer a person is to God, and the more that they’re trying to do to fulfill God’s plans and do the right thing, the more Satan attacks him,” said John Nish, an engineering manager from Iowa who likes DeSantis but has been energized by the criminal charges against Trump.
GOP insiders fear the indictments and lawsuits will cap his general election support below 50 percent, making him a guaranteed loser, but a focus group conducted by the anti-Trump Republican Accountability Project found Republican voters who listed someone else as their first choice are highly defensive of the former president against his criminal prosecutions.
“A jury could very well find him guilty and he may very well be guilty, but why are they going after him and not everybody else?” said a South Carolina voter named Larry. “If they’re going to go after him, I want to see him go after the Clintons and I want to see him go after [President Joe] Biden. The fact that they’re just going after Trump, I don’t believe that this should be happening.”
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