PELLA, Iowa — Kathleen Evenhouse took a break from her work in the corner of a small-town Iowa coffee shop to slam the federal criminal indictment of Donald Trump as patently political, the work of a U.S. Justice Department she says is awash in hypocrisy.
“I think we’re playing a game as a country,” the 72-year-old author from Pella said in an interview, expressing a sentiment widely shared among conservatives since the former president was charged. “I think that damages any sense of justice or any sense of — should I even bother to vote? Why should I listen to the news? Or why should I care?”
Evenhouse does plan to vote in Iowa’s first-in-the-nation Republican presidential caucuses next year. Despite her anger about Trump’s plight, he will not win her support.
Many voters in early states who will play an outsize role in deciding his political fate agree that he is being treated unfairly. While there is widespread distrust of the Justice Department and its pursuit of him on charges that he illegally stored classified documents and tried to hide them from federal officials, some voters in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina say Trump has become too damaged to be nominated by his party a third time.
“If you dig a hole and then you have to climb out, it’s going to be harder to do,” Evenhouse said. “And that’s where I think he is.”
While the double-standard theory may have taken hold among GOP voters in the early states, it’s not clear that such outrage will translate into ballots 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 heavy a burden for some of them to feel he can win.
“Right now I am a Trump supporter,” said 76-year-old Karen Szelest of Indian Land, South Carolina. “However, I think they’re doing everything they can to have him not run for president of the United States. And I think perhaps, for the betterment of the country, I may vote for somebody else because they keep going after Trump, going after Trump, going after Trump.”
Trump’s challenge will be maintaining that advantage as the legal cases against him proceed. His hope that they will work in his favor is bolstered by Republican-leaning voters such as Kelly White of Indian Land.
“It kind of makes me want to support him more,” she said.
Among the most common counterarguments, there are those people who play down the allegations Trump faces while also pointing to what they see as a double standard — one that has excused, for instance, the email server that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a Democrat, kept in the basement of her private residence in New York.
Charges that she mishandled classified documents weren’t pursued by the Justice Department, in part because relevant Espionage Act cases brought over the past century involved alleged efforts to obstruct justice and willful mishandling of classified information. Those factors were not at play in her case, investigators concluded.
At a farmer’s market in Bedford, New Hampshire, Tom Zapora was chatting with friends and snacking on a “tornado potato,” a spiraled, fried potato on a skewer, shortly after Trump’s appearance in court.
“There’s a lot of things going on there, and in my humble opinion, the current president, past presidents, have done as much if not more wrong than he has and they’ve kind of slid under the radar,” said Zapora, a Republican who owns a moving company.
In Pella, a Dutch-themed community of about 10,000 people in Iowa’s Republican-heavy Marion County where Trump received two-thirds of the vote in 2020, the investigation was hardly the most pressing issue on the minds of voters at a campaign event for 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 indictment to come up.
When it did, the questioner ignored the charges against Trump, asking instead about the fairness of the Justice Department.
Standing in the audience of about 200, 58-year-old engineer Gina Singer, who has been a devoted Trump supporter, said the indictment had become a distraction from the serious business of choosing a presidential nominee who can beat Biden next year.
Though she’s bothered by what she sees as a double standard, she is uncertain about whether Trump will be saddled with so much suspicion that she thinks a next-generation candidate may be what’s best for the party.
“I love everything he stands for and I want his policies to be enacted,” Singer said. “But they’ll just keep on going after him. So, I’m looking for someone else. Both things can be true.”
