PELLA, Iowa — Kathleen Evenhouse took a break from her work in the corner of an Iowa coffee shop to slam the federal criminal indictment of Donald Trump as 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 Trump’s 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.
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“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.”
Maintaining Trump was unfairly targeted while other people found to have classified documents in their possession were treated differently requires the dismissal of key differences. Most notably, President Joe Biden, former Vice President Mike Pence and others cooperated with federal officials once documents were discovered in their possession. Trump, according to the 37-count indictment, ignored a federal subpoena and tried to deceive the Justice Department about what he had.
Resentment over his treatment has been nurtured not just by Trump but by some conservative commentators, Republicans in Congress and White House rivals. Republicans who acknowledge the different circumstances have kept a lower profile.
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 for Trump when voting begins next year. 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.”
This month marked a jarring point in the presidential campaign when the Justice Department moved forward with the indictment, a first for a former president, let alone one accused of mishandling top-secret information.
After entering his not guilty plea on June 13, Trump immediately returned to portraying himself as a victim of a politically driven department aimed at keeping him from returning to the presidency he wrongly claims was stolen from him in 2020.
Some of the roughly 20 early-state voters interviewed recently spent most of the time railing against what they see as that department’s political agenda.
Skepticism was pervasive among Republicans interviewed after Trump appeared in federal court and, through his lawyers, entered not guilty pleas to all charges.
A recent ABC News/Ipsos poll found that Americans were more likely to say Trump should be charged in the documents case than those who say he should not, 48% to 35%. At the same time, 47% of adults believe the charges are politically motivated, compared with 37% who say they are not.
Most Republicans, however, said he should not be charged, and 80% of them believe the charges are politically motivated, according to the ABC poll.
Biden said he communicated with neither the Justice Department nor the special prosecutor on any aspect of the investigation before the indictment was unsealed.
As for the election, polls conducted over the last few months have consistently found Trump as the early front-runner on the Republican side. 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 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.
The Justice Department didn’t pursue charges that she mishandled classified documents, 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 chatted with friends while 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.
