by John Solomon
Four indictments and one set of convictions later, a Democrat-led lawfare strategy has failed so far to derail Donald Trump’s bid to return to the White House, but it has triggered an avalanche of financial support as the former president hold leads in most battleground states that will decide the 2024 election.
No where was Trump’s resilience more obvious than his travels across the West Coast this weekend, where he collected $12 million at a Silicon Valley fund-raiser at the home of a Big Tech executive who used to support Hillary Clinton, scored millions more at events in blue southern California and then jetted off to Las Vegas for a boisterous rally in Nevada where a post-conviction poll showed him leading that once-Biden-friendly state by five points.
Experts say the narrative and imagery last month of a Democrat prosecutor in Manhattan securing a conviction against the opposition party leader just six months before Election Day galvanized support for Trump among the GOP base while motivating complacent independents and Never Trumpers to choose sides. This created a painful boomerang for Democrats who hoped the May 31 conviction would sink the 45th president’s election efforts.
“People are motivated,” former New York Rep. Lee Zeldin told Just the News. “They woke up the next day wanting to do something about it, realizing that they have to fight even harder […] They’ve turned their energy, their emotion into activity into wanting to make a difference. If someone goes out to the WinRed platform and donates $5, they might be willing to donate 25 more dollars. They may be willing to sign up to volunteer today, if you ask.”
“There are people who were on the sidelines altogether on President Trump,” he added. “I know of one person just a few weeks before the verdict came out. I called him up I tried to talk him into supporting President Trump. He had supported another candidate. He wasn’t yet ready. Right after the verdict came out, he wired in $800,000 to President Trump’s joint fundraising committee. I just learned that his mother matched him for another $800,000. This these are two people were actually on the sidelines before the verdict.”
The data confirms Zeldin’s anecdotes.
Trump campaign officials said the candidate raised more than $50 million in the first 36 hours after the verdict, much of it from first-time donors. Trump and the Republican National Committee reported their best fundraising month ever in May, with a $141 million haul. Officials said June could be on track for closer to $200 million, positioning Trump to be cash flush for a fall run after months of trailing Biden in the fundraising contest.
The former president has embraced the surge, repeatedly portraying himself as a persecuted political martyr while warning the Democrat strategy is backfiring. “Right after the announcement of this, more campaign funds were given to this campaign than any campaign they think in history, almost $400 million,” Trump boasted at a Turning Point Action event last week.
Polling has tracked alongside fund-raising: Trump’s support dipped for just a few days after the conviction before rebounding to pre-trial levels. An Emerson College national poll conducted June 4-5, also after Trump’s conviction, showed Trump has a one point lead over Biden, within the margin of error.
“Trump’s support in our polling remained the same before and after his conviction,” said Spencer Kimball, executive director of Emerson College Polling. “A majority of Democrats say it makes them less likely to support Trump (51 percent) and a majority of Republicans (55 percent) say it makes them more likely to support Trump. A plurality of independents say it makes no impact (41 percent), while 38 percent are less likely to vote for Trump and 21 percent more likely.”
A Fox News poll conducted from June 1 to June 4, after Trump’s conviction, put Trump up by 5 points in the swing states of Arizona and Nevada, two states won by Biden in 2020.
The same poll has Trump up by 4 points in Florida and tied in Virginia, and another post-conviction poll in North Carolina has Trump leading Biden by 5 points.
In Pennsylvania — one of the states Biden claims to be “a home state” — the FAU PolCom Lab/Mainstreet Research poll found Trump leading Biden 47 percent to 45 percent among likely voters.
While Trump has managed to hold firm in the polls, Democrats are beginning to fret about a different dynamic with Biden: voters who abandoning his winning 2020 coalition over frustration with his handling of the Israel-Hamas war.
The 46th president lost more than half a million voters to an “uncommitted” voter movement during this spring’s Democratic primaries, an effort that has netted 30 delegates across five states that has underscored frustration within his own party over his handling of the Israel-Hamas war. Many of the defectors were in key battlegrounds like Wisconsin and Michigan.
The organizers of that “Abandon Biden” movement vow to persist through the Chicago nominating convention for Democrats and the fall election, The Hill recently reported. That movement is largely dominated by pro-Palestinian protesters, and its website depicts members wearing the black and white “keffiyeh,” a headscarf long associated with Palestinian nationalism.
“Our mission is clear: Joe Biden must be defeated,” the group said. “We will not stand by. We are mobilized, we are furious, and we are committed to ensuring Joe Biden is defeated in the general election. The time for accountability is now.”
While Trump’s sentencing is set for next month in Manhattan, the other three criminal cases have been slowed to a crawl by legal issues and prosecutorial miscues, and are unlikely to result in trials before the election.
Veteran pollster Scott Rasmussen said he thinks the Democrat lawfare won’t have much impact on the race as voters look instead to policies, where Trump is winning the debate so far on the border, the economy, crime and national security.
“President Trump as the Republican presidential nominee is going to have a huge megaphone. And he starts with a couple of benefits. Number one, people didn’t think he was a saint beforehand. I mean, they didn’t think that before they voted for him in 2016, or 2020,” Rasmussen told the “Just the News, No Noise” TV show. “And in fact, just over half of voters think he’s less ethical than most politicians. So not a big shock here.”
“Another thing that we’re seeing is that only about half of voters believe this is a legitimate trial,” Rasmussen added. “The other half think it’s politically motivated. So at the end of the day, might it have an impact? The question is going to be the people we call irregular voters… they’re the ones who will be looking to see if there’s a real change.”
Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, a 2016 GOP presidential candidate, said Democrats may only heighten Trump’s standing with voters if Judge Juan Merchan in Manhattan decides to sentence the presumptive GOP nominee to incarceration next month, just four days before the GOP nominating convention in Milwaukee.
“I’ll tell you it would be the most outrageous insult to I think the justice system that we’ve seen,” Huckabee said on “Just the News, No Noise.” “But let’s remember Nelson Mandela was put in prison by his political enemies and he came out stronger than ever, and he was there for 27 years. Martin Luther King Jr. was put in jail by Democrats in the South, who didn’t want to see the Civil Rights Movement take footing. And it only made him stronger. So I mean, if the Democrats are stupid enough, they were stupid enough to do this case in New York and carry out these others.”
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John Solomon is an award-winning investigative journalist, author and digital media entrepreneur who serves as Chief Executive Officer and Editor in Chief of Just the News.
Photo “Donald Trump NYC” by Daniel Scavino Jr..
