GOP Voters Rally Around Trump Following Jan. 6 Indictment: 'Who Else Would We Support?'
The general media consensus seemed to be that, when the indictments against former President Donald Trump by special counsel Jack Smith began rolling in, Trump’s supporters would subject themselves to a “Game of Thrones”-style walk of atonement, stripped of their MAGA hats as they walked to chants of “shame, shame!” from the Jake Tappers and Chris Hayeses in the cable-news peanut gallery.
Something quite the opposite has happened, however. No matter what you think about the charges, both the timing of them and the media spin behind them isn’t lost on GOP voters. Fox News discovered that firsthand when they traveled to the Alabama GOP summer meeting, where the attendees were sticking with the former president.
And while it didn’t hurt that Trump was giving a speech at the venue in Montgomery on Friday — his first speech since being arraigned on Thursday on charges related to the Jan. 6 Capitol incursion — the love for the 45th president seemed to be unshaken, judging by the sampling.
“Are you serious?” asked one attendee, identified as “Mike.”
“Donald Trump is the best president that this country has ever had . . . and that goes back to Ronald Reagan. [Reagan] was a great president, and he ain’t as good as Donald Trump.”
“Who else would we support?” an attendee, identified as “C.J.,” told Fox.
“Our immigration problem, our economy? Trump. We’ve got to. We’ve got to bring America back. It’s terrible what Biden has done to our country. It’s horrible. We’ve got to get it back.”
Even the undecideds seemed to acknowledge that the charges hadn’t hurt the former president with his political base.
Alabama state Sen. Lance Bell hasn’t made up his mind about whom he’ll be endorsing yet — but he told Fox News that the charges are actually going to help Trump politically.
“I think the charges are helping him, because people are seeing the political prosecution,” Bell said. “So I think the charges are helping him pick up support. It’s sad when we’re having that in our country — when we’re having political prosecutions.”
And, indeed, this was an idea that Trump repeatedly hammered home during his speech in Alabama. At one point, he reiterated that “they want to silence me, because I will never let them silence you.”
“They want to take away MY freedom because I will never let them take away YOUR freedom…They want to silence me, because I will never let them silence you. In the end, they’re not after me, they’re after you—and I’m just standing in their way.” – President Donald J. Trump pic.twitter.com/VWaZoRC2jP
— RSBN 🇺🇸 (@RSBNetwork) August 5, 2023
“In the end, they’re not after me, they’re after you — and I’m just standing in their way,” Trump said.
He also joked that he needed “one more indictment” to secure the nomination and win the election.
TRUMP: ‘We need ONE MORE INDICTMENT to close out this election, one more indictment, and this election is CLOSED OUT. Nobody has even a chance.’ pic.twitter.com/ZaUQouj4d7
— RSBN 🇺🇸 (@RSBNetwork) August 5, 2023
“Any time they file an indictment, we go way up in the polls,” Trump told the audience. “We need one more indictment to close out this election. One more indictment, and this election is closed out.”
If the endorsements he picked up in Alabama are any indication, he might not need that. Not only did he secure the unanimous support of Alabama’s GOP caucus in the U.S. House of Representatives, Sen. Tommy Tuberville, Lt. Gov. Will Ainsworth, Agriculture Commissioner Rick Pate, and the entirety of the State Public Service Commission endorsed the former president, according to a news release from Trump’s campaign.
The same can be said about the polls. Not only is the former president well ahead of his competition for the GOP nomination, also neck-and-neck with President Joe Biden, should both candidates be renominated.
The fact that that’s true while Trump is being hounded by the Justice Department and the establishment media while Biden is being coddled and protected by both, speaks volumes about the American people, and their trust in once-respected institutions.
This isn’t to say that special counsel Jack Smith’s indictments aren’t serious trouble for the GOP front-runner, although the latest round of Jan. 6-related indictments has a distinct odor of unconstitutionality about them.
The timing of them — one after another, with the charges felicitously filed right as campaign season gets underway — also stinks to high heaven. It also doesn’t help that the most significant case Smith seems to have against the former president, on mishandling classified documents, underscores the other establishment politicians — including Joe Biden — who have done materially similar things and faced no legal repercussions.
Furthermore, if the administration’s idea is that the charges will bait Republicans into voting for Trump in the primaries and keep independents away in the general election, it should probably look at the polls. Biden is no slam-dunk against Trump in a rematch, particularly given the current president’s diminishing returns on mental faculties and his innumerable failings in almost every aspect of governance.
The fact that the evidence of corruption in the Biden family is growing beyond even the Justice Department and establishment media’s ability to control it isn’t helping either.
Add all that up and a Trump nomination doesn’t look like the worst thing that could happen for the Republican Party.
Given his political strength in the face of unprecedented battering by the Biden administration and its DOJ minions, it appears that if hurting Trump or the GOP’s chances in 2024 was the real goal indicting the 45th president over Jan. 6, it’s backfiring badly.
So, yeah — do your worst, Jack Smith. I don’t know what you have planned, but my guess is that we’ll certainly get to see in actual fact if all Trump needs to finish this one off is one more banana republic indictment on highly dubious charges.
From the looks of things in Alabama, he might not even need that.
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