Last Thursday, Donald Trump became the first president in U.S. history to be
convicted of a felony.
As the news broke, cheers
reportedly erupted in President Joe Biden’s campaign headquarters. Within minutes, Biden had swooped in for donations on social media: “There’s only one way to keep Donald Trump out of the Oval Office: At the ballot box,” he wrote
on X. “Donate to our campaign today.”
But many Americans had a different impression of the Trump verdict: that his conviction was proof of corruption, not justice. And while a snap poll
showed that 54 percent of registered voters “strongly” or “somewhat” approved of the guilty verdict, more than a third of voters said they “strongly” or “somewhat” disapproved.
Meanwhile, as media analysts were busy
celebrating the verdict, with ABC’s chief White House correspondent
calling it a “political gift to Democrats,” searches for “donate to Trump”
spiked on Google. So many people were rushing to Trump’s fundraising page that the site temporarily
crashed. By the next morning, his campaign announced that nearly $35 million had poured in overnight—
almost 30 percent of which appeared to come from first-time Trump donors. By late Friday, the campaign stated that the total had climbed to
nearly $53 million.
Who are these sudden supporters? We wanted to find out. Here, seven people tell us how they made the journey from Never Trump to Trump Now.
Shaun Maguire: “The Republican Party is less of a danger to democracy than the Democratic Party right now.”
Maguire, 38, is a Los Angeles–based partner at Sequoia, one of the most well-known venture capital firms in the country. He previously worked at Google, but left in 2019 when
he says the company became too “woke.” The married father of two says he’s never voted for a Republican presidential candidate before. In 2016, he donated to Hillary Clinton’s campaign. But within an hour after Thursday’s news, Maguire
posted on X that he’d donated $300,000 to Trump—a candidate he says once made him feel “deathly afraid.”...
Kate Nitti: “I feel the need to send a message to the Democrats.”
Kate Nitti, 40, is a marketing consultant and a married mother of two now living in New Jersey. A lifelong Democrat, she said she voted solely for her party’s representatives for more than twenty years when she still lived in Brooklyn. But then, in 2021, she marked her ballot for a Republican for the first time—Curtis Sliwa, the GOP candidate for NYC mayor—to protest how Democrats had “abused their power” during Covid with school lockdowns, and vaccine and mask mandates for kids. ....
Jack MacGuire: “I’m all in with the MAGA people, because this has to end.”
MacGuire, 48, a travel consultant in Houston, Texas, “couldn’t stand Trump” so much that he actually changed his voter registration from Republican to independent in 2016. He voted for Hillary Clinton that year, who he picked because he felt she would bring “continuity and competence” to the country and because she was “the lesser of two evils.” In 2020, MacGuire didn’t vote at all because he felt “disillusioned.” ...
Emery Barter: “Trump doesn’t scare me.”
Barter, 40, a guitar instructor and recording engineer in Oakland, California, is a lifelong Democrat, having canvassed for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and cast his ballot for Biden last time around. But he started questioning his allegiance to the Democratic Party when he said “hyper-progressive policies” encouraged by left-wing District Attorney Pamela Price—including defunding the city’s police force—actually led to
a crime wave in Oakland. “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” he said, has made people blind to threats within their own camps. The last five years have also made him question the media narrative on various issues....
Adam Mortara: “It’s a danger to America if Joe Biden wins the election.”
Back in 2016, Mortara,
a lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, was more of a Rubio or Cruz guy. “I thought Trump was a wild card, not all that conservative,” said Mortara, 49, who lives in Nashville, Tennessee, with his family. During Trump’s term, he found himself “pretty pleased” with the then-president’s isolationist politics and economic performance, but even so, in 2020, he decided not to vote because he felt his vote wouldn’t matter. Now, he tells
The Free Press, the recent verdict has pushed him to not just vote for Trump this November, but to donate $3,300 to his campaign....
Daniel Kotzin: “I don’t want better experts. I want no experts.”
Kotzin, 54, lives in Denver, Colorado, with his wife
Jennifer Sey, the former brand president at Levi Strauss, and their two kids. A stay-at-home dad and a former attorney, he’s a lifelong Democrat who voted for Obama twice and also worked for his campaign. In 2016, he also voted for Hillary Clinton. But during the pandemic, he became adamantly opposed to the lockdowns and considered voting for Trump in 2020, but instead went with the Libertarian Party due to the then-president’s vaccine push. But after the verdict came through Thursday, he has no doubt: he’ll be voting for Trump come November.....
Eric Brakey: “Democrats don’t preserve democracy.”
Brakey, 35, is a
state senator in Maine who calls himself a “Ron Paul Republican” and has voted for the Libertarian candidate in both of the last presidential elections. Until Trump’s conviction, he says he was “undecided,” flirting with a vote for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. this November. But after a colleague blurted out news of the verdict in the middle of a conference call, he said it hit him that “a clear principle” was at stake: “The principle is that the people get to choose our president.”
On Friday morning, he donated to Trump’s campaign.
On the campaign trail, Biden has
often warned voters that “democracy is on the line.” But Brakey told
The Free Press that the recent verdict is “a very blatant attack on democracy itself.”
“Democrats don’t preserve democracy,” said Brakey. “They’re afraid that the people, when presented a democratic choice, will not vote for them.”
He added: “Democracy is when the people decide.”
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This corruption of our legal system was a HUGE mistake for the Democrats. It is blowing back on the Democrats in increased donations and voters to the Republican party. My older brother is a never Trumper he has voted Libertarian in 2016 and 2020. He knew it was a protest vote but this year he thinks his vote will make a bigger protest by voting for Trump. He HATES what the Democrats did by using a corrupt judge.
