Despite woes, Trump still strong frontrunner
Followers shore up his return bid for White House
WACO, Texas — In the last 28 months, former President Donald Trump has been voted out of the White House, impeached for his role in the Capitol riot and criticized for marching many of his fellow Republicans off an electoral cliff in the 2022 midterms with his drumbeat of election fraud lies.
He dined at home with a white supremacist in November. He called for the termination of the Constitution in December. He declared himself “more angry” than ever in January. He vowed to make retribution a hallmark of a second term in the White House in March.
He has embraced the QAnon conspiracy theory movement, described President Vladimir Putin of Russia as a genius and used a gay joke to mock a fellow Republican. He has become the target of four criminal investigations, including one in New York that he warned might result in “potential death & destruction.”
Still, Trump remains a strong front-runner for the Republican Party’s 2024 presidential nomination. At least one reason for this political durability was assembled Saturday morning outside the airport in the central Texas city of Waco in various combinations of red caps, antagonistic T-shirts and MAGA-button flair: the Trump diehards.
Starting before 8 a.m.,
more than nine hours before the former president was set to take the stage at the first rally of his 2024 campaign, his supporters streamed across dirt roads and formed an ever-growing line that zigzagged across the grass and bluebonnets, with a forest of Trump flags flying nearby.
It is this base of hardcore followers, who show up to his rallies in force, that has allowed him to maintain his grip on the party despite a pattern of dangerous, discordant behavior that would have sunk most traditional politicians.
Whether Trump can expand his support beyond his loyalists, as he must do to win a general election, remains an open question for Republican primary voters. But the loyalty of his superfans remains as strong as ever.
They fly “Trump or Death” flags from Jeep
Wranglers outside Mar-aLago. Many have fallen out with family and friends over their devotion to the former president. They view themselves as mistreated and unappreciated and view Trump as not so much a man but a cause. “Jesus, Freedom & Trump” read the T-shirt worn by one woman who went to see the former president in Iowa recently.
Amid overlapping investigations and the looming possibility of arrest, the ardor of these supporters has not faded but, many said, has grown only stronger.
“I think it’s really disgusting,” said Leslie Splendoria, 71, who arrived early in Waco and said she had supported Trump since his first presidential run. “They’re trying to do anything they can to get rid of him.” She came to the event from Hutto, Texas, north of
Austin, with her ex-husband, her daughter, her 3-year-old granddaughter and a small wagon of supplies for the long wait in line.
“No one is safe,” said her daughter, Kimberly Splendoria, 38, wearing a red MAGA sweatshirt, a Trump hat and holding her daughter, Gigi. “They can just throw you in jail, indict you.”
“Look at what happened on Jan. 6,” said Bob Splendoria, Leslie’s exhusband. “You happened to be there, and they arrest you.” He and Leslie Splendoria said they had wanted to attend the protest in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, but could not make it. Both said they would not have entered the Capitol.
Trump’s political strength has long proved difficult to fully measure. While polls show that he enjoys a commanding advantage in a Republican primary field, most surveys also show that about half of the party’s voters would prefer another nominee at this early phase in the 2024 contest.
And while the size of his rally crowds remains the envy of politicians in both parties, the events are not the draws they once were. The ceremonial kickoff rally for Trump’s 2020 campaign at an Orlando, Fla., basketball arena drew a capacity crowd of 20,000 people, many of whom waited in line during a pounding rain to get a seat. On Saturday, Trump’s first rally was set for a regional airport hangar in Waco, the 24thmost populous city in Texas.
A recent call by Trump for his supporters to protest a potential indictment from the Manhattan district attorney received a tepid response and, in some cases, was met with pushback from other Republican leaders.
Still, the support that Trump has coalesced has given him the luster of an incumbent in the primary contest. That means to overtake the former president, other Republican contenders face the difficult task of first peeling support away from Trump before they can persuade those same voters to back their own bid for the nomination.
In Waco, some rallygoers were skeptical of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Trump’s chief potential rival.
“I like DeSantis, I do, but the ground that needs to be covered is going to take Trump to get it done,” said Jeff Fiebert, 69, a farmer who described himself as a diehard Trump supporter and who moved to Waco from California during the pandemic, a move he said was motivated almost entirely by politics.
Asked what Trump could do that DeSantis could not, he said the former president was the kind of person “who goes into the bar and knocks all the bottles off the shelf just to see where they land.” DeSantis, he added, does not do that sort of thing.
While the field of official Republican challengers remains small — DeSantis, for example, is still months away from an expected formal announcement — Trump has continued to tend to his die-hard supporters. He invited a handful of his most devoted rallygoers to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida in November for his official campaign announcement and delivered private remarks to many of them in a small ballroom before his public speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference three weeks ago.