PELLA, Iowa (AP) – Kathleen Evenhouse took a break from her work in the corner of a small-town Iowa coffee shop to hit the federal criminal prosecution of Donald Trump as obviously political, work of a US Department of Justice she says she is awash in hypocrisy.
“I think we’re playing a game as a country,” the 72-year-old Pella author said in an interview, expressing a sentiment widely shared among conservatives since the former president. was loaded. “I think that hurts any sense of justice or any sense of: Should I even bother voting? Why should I listen to the news? Or why should I care?”
Evenhouse plans to vote in Iowa’s first Republican presidential caucuses next year. Despite her anger at Trump’s plight, she won’t win his support.
Many early-state voters who will play an outsized role in deciding his political fate agree he is being treated unfairly. While there is widespread mistrust of the Justice Department and its prosecution for allegedly illegally storing classified documents and trying to hide them from federal officials, some voters in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina they say Trump has damaged himself too much to be nominated. for the third time for his party.
“If you dig a hole and then you have to get out, it’s going to be harder to do,” Evenhouse said. “And that’s where I think it is.”
To maintain that Trump was unfairly targeted while others found to have classified documents in their possession were treated differently requires dismissing key differences. Most prominently, President Joe Biden, former Vice President Mike Pence and others cooperated with federal officials once documents in their possession were discovered. Trump, according to the 37-count indictment filed in federal court in Miami, ignored a federal subpoena and tried to mislead the Justice Department about what he had.
Resentment over his treatment has been fueled not only by Trump, but also by some conservative commentators, Republicans in Congress and White House rivals. Republicans who recognize the different circumstances have kept a lower profile.
While the theory of the double standard may have taken hold among Republican voters in early states, it’s not clear that this outrage will translate into votes cast for Trump when voting for president begins next year. It’s not so much that voters have lost affection for Trump, but that the turmoil has become too much of a burden for some of them to feel he can win.
“I’m a Trump supporter right now,” said Karen Szelest, 76, of Indian Land, South Carolina. “However, I think they’re doing everything they can to keep him from running for president of the United States. And I think maybe, for the betterment of the country, I can vote for somebody else because they’re still after Trump, they’re after Trump, they’re after Trump.”
Last week marked a watershed moment in the presidential campaign when the Justice Department moved forward with indictments, the first for a former president, let alone one accused of mishandling top-secret information.
The indictment unsealed last week charged Trump with 37 counts, many under the Espionage Act, accusing him of illegally storing classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida and of trying to hide them from the investigators who asked for them back.
After entering his not guilty plea on Tuesday, Trump immediately cast himself again as the victim of a politically driven department bent on preventing him from returning to the presidency he wrongly claims was stolen from him in 2020.
Some of the roughly 20 early-state voters interviewed last week spent most of their time criticizing what they see as the department’s political agenda.
“It hurts me that there seems to be a completely different criteria for a conservative, and especially for Donald Trump,” said Sue VanEe, a 68-year-old retired farmer who was waiting for a friend at the same coffee shop where Evenhouse was writing. “Completely different. Like the opposite.”
Biden has said he did not communicate with either the Justice Department or the special counsel about any aspect of the investigation before the indictment was dropped.
Skepticism was widespread among Republicans interviewed by The Associated Press after Trump appeared in federal court and, through his lawyers, pleaded not guilty to all charges.
This reflects a persistent divide across party lines in how the case is viewed. An ABC News/Ipsos poll conducted last weekend found that Americans were more likely to say Trump should be indicted in the documents case than those who say he should not, 48 percent to 35% At the same time, 47% of adults believe the charges are politically motivated, compared to 37% who say they don’t.
Most Republicans, however, said he should not be indicted, and 80% of them believe the charges are politically motivated, according to the ABC poll.
Regarding the choicepolls conducted over the past few months have consistently found Trump as the front-runner on the Republican side.
Trump’s challenge will be to maintain that advantage as the legal cases against him move forward. His hope that they will work in his favor is bolstered by Republican-leaning voters like Kelly White of Indian Land.
“It makes me want to support him more,” he said.
Among the most common counterarguments are those who downplay the allegations Trump faces while pointing to what they see as a double standard, one that has excused, for example, the email server that former Secretary of State Hillary ClintonDemocrat, kept in the basement of his private residence in New York.
The Justice Department did not pursue charges of mishandling classified documents, in part because relevant Espionage Act cases filed over the past century involved alleged efforts to obstruct justice and deliberate mishandling of information classified Those factors were not at play in his case, the researchers concluded.
At the farmers market in Bedford, New Hampshire, Tom Zapora was chatting with friends and snacking on a “turned potato,” a fried potato spiraled on a skewer, shortly after Trump’s court appearance.
“There’s a lot going on there, and in my humble opinion, the current president, the past presidents, have done as much, if not more, wrong than he has and they’ve flown under the radar,” said Zapora, a Republican. owner of a moving company.
In Pella, a Dutch-themed community of about 10,000 people in Iowa’s Marion County, where Trump received two-thirds of the vote in 2020, the investigation was not the most pressing issue on the minds of voters at one event campaign on Wednesday by one of Trump’s challengers, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott. During a question-and-answer session, it took 40 minutes for the subject of the impeachment to come up.
When he did, the questioner ignored the charges against Trump and questioned the fairness of the Justice Department.
In the audience of about 200, engineer Gina Singer, 58, who has been a staunch Trump supporter, said the indictment had become a distraction from the serious business of choosing a presidential nominee that he can beat Biden next year.
While she resents what she sees as a double standard, she’s not sure if Trump will be so suspicious that he thinks a next-generation candidate might be the best for the party.
“I love everything he stands for and I want to see his policies enacted,” Singer said. “But they’ll just keep chasing him. So, I’m looking for someone else. Both can be true.”
__
Associated Press writer Holly Ramer in Bedford, New Hampshire, and video reporter Erik Verduzco in Indian Land, South Carolina, contributed to this report.
