After four years as President Trump, Betsy Smith had no difficulty reciting many of his faults.
“He is inarticulate. He has a great personality. He uses the wrong words. He makes people angry, ”said Smith, who worked for 29 years as a police officer in the Chicago suburbs before moving to Tucson and starting a police training company.
But despite the many scandals, racist injuries, lies and violence that have left Trump with his lowest approval ratings, less allies than ever in Congress and an impending Senate trial as the only president to be impeached twice, Smith is not regrets voting for him.
“Trump has done a lot for this country and my family,” said Smith, 61. “I mean, this is the first time in years that we have a president who is so blatantly supporting the police. For us, this is huge. And that is just one thing. “
Tens of millions of voters like Smith remained loyal even after Trump incited the January 6 uprising on Capitol Hill, which left five people dead and will almost certainly be the turning point of his presidency. The crowd, which included factions of white supremacists, was only a small fraction of the 74 million people who voted for Trump in November.
In dozens of interviews, supporters across the country spoke of Trump in reverent terms as the only president in memory who defended the workers rather than the elite.
They said they never doubted their claims that he won the election – a fiction that echoed for weeks by the right-wing media and many Republican lawmakers. And they pointed to the economy before the COVID-19 pandemic to argue that it deserves a second term, even if it means waiting until the next election.
Boycotting Joe Biden’s inauguration on Wednesday, Trump will leave the White House with about a third of Americans approving his job performance, according to several surveys.
Just under half of Republicans told Pew Research Center polls that Trump shared no responsibility for the January 6 uprising, despite his caustic speech at the National Mall, just before the crowd infiltrated the Capitol.
The majority of Republicans – 64% – say that Trump won the election, despite the lack of evidence of significant fraud, dozens of unsuccessful legal challenges and guarantees from state electoral officials from both major parties.
“I respect and welcome Joe Biden as president,” said Smith, who blames Trump’s extremist supporters for giving people like her an ugly name. “But I never wanted it to be that way.”
Trump, she said, made her feel “more proud” of being an American.
Some supporters spoke warmly about Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris climate deal and the nuclear deal with Iran, his appointment of three conservatives to the Supreme Court or his firm support for Israel. But most of all, they talked about the economy before the pandemic.
“We had a great economy, the unemployment rate was low – that’s because of President Trump,” said Margaretrose Cox, 52, a lecturer in Tallahassee, Florida. “He never gets the credit he deserves.
“For the past four years, we have been ridiculed, we have been ridiculed, all because we support President Trump,” she said, calling him “a patriot”.
On January 6, Cox joined a peaceful demonstration outside the Florida Capitol, inspired by Trump’s false claim that he had won the election.
“I think the media has suppressed some information,” she said. “I have a right to my own beliefs and I want the legal votes to be counted.”
When Cox came home that day, she saw the violence on television.
“It was horrible what was going on in Washington, DC,” she said. “Anyone who violated the Capitol should be arrested.”
Janet Flanigan, a 58-year-old freelance writer from Newnan, Georgia, said the vast majority of Trump’s voters were people like her, who reject racism and violence.
She accuses Trump’s opponents of a double standard, arguing that during the racial justice protests in the summer, they were careful to distinguish protesters and vandals from peaceful protesters.
As for Trump’s role in the attack on the Capitol, she chooses to focus on a line in her speech in which he called for a “peaceful” march – not statements like, “If you don’t fight like hell, you won’t have a country ”, or their tweets condemning a“ stolen ”election that took place after the rebels were already violent in the building.
“I don’t believe President Trump has incited a riot,” said Flanigan. “He said, ‘We will march peacefully.’ March peacefully! This is not inciting a riot!
“All of this impeachment is a scam,” she added.
The crackdowns on Trump and his supporters on social media have aggravated her feeling that conservative voices are being suppressed, she said. “Democrats have once again alienated more than half of the country and don’t care,” she said. “They do not care.”
This feeling was common at small, uneventful rallies that took place over the weekend in several state capitals.
Michelle Brookshire, mother of four from Commerce, Texas, drove to Austin with her youngest daughter, Shalee, to attend one. Unlike other protesters, she was unarmed and did not come with posters or to sing.
“I just feel like life has been better for the past four years – the economy hasn’t been that hard,” said Brookshire, 51. “Day by day, I feel more secure.”
A medical billing worker, she worries about the economy under Biden.
“Trump is a businessman, not a politician – that’s a good thing,” said Brookshire. “Biden has always been a politician. He never ran a business. “
She is impressed by Trump’s wealth, focusing on his successful endeavors rather than the millions he initially received from his father and his multiple bankruptcies. “It has been a success,” she said. “This is a good thing.”
A conservative Christian, she says she forgave the president for his multiple marriages, foul language and temperament.
“The Bible, the things we care about – I care about that, when Trump is gone,” she said. “It is true that Trump was sometimes a little too much; he could have lowered the pitch. But it helped to make life better for us. “
John Hess, who spent 40 years with the Coast Guard before retiring and moving to Washington State, still lives in Trump’s world and has every intention of staying there.
Over the weekend, he held a one-man pro-Trump event at the state capitol in Olympia, flying a yellow Gadsden flag on his Ford pickup. He parked on a side street and got out of his truck, wearing a “Make America Great Again” cap.
“The threat to democracy did not happen on January 6,” he said. “The threat to democracy came on November 3, when the election was stolen.”
Hess, 66, said he plans to continue protesting against Biden after Wednesday: “I will do this once a week until I grow old and die or until Trump returns to office.
“You cannot silence 74 million people. I don’t think we want to start a civil war, but are we willing to say that our country is no longer governed by the people, but by the people who stole the elections?
“I think we are about five years away from a Lexington or Concord,” he added, referring to the early battles of the Revolutionary War.
Hess voted for Trump twice and liked him for building the partial border wall, withdrawing troops from abroad and reducing government regulations.
He also preferred Trump’s approach to the pandemic to Biden’s public health plans.
“People don’t realize that life is risky,” he said of the coronavirus, whose danger he sees as exaggerated, despite scientific evidence to the contrary and the death toll in the United States that has exceeded 400,000.
For Hess, America’s biggest problems are less political and more spiritual.
“People have forgotten that this is a Christian nation and we believe in God,” he said.
Many of Trump’s supporters want him to run again. Trump did not indicate his plans; he can run, unless he is convicted during an impeachment trial in the Senate and then barred from taking office again.
The impeachment and trial are “just a way to stop you running for president again,” said Jeff Koch, a 69-year-old retired sign painter from Federal Way, Wash., Who attended a two-person rally at the end in Olympia.
He suggested that the impeachment was revenge for Trump’s attacks on the “swamp” – as the president likes to call Washington lobbyists and other insiders, although they have been at least as present in his government as anyone else.
Koch long ago gave up his local newspaper and most of the mainstream media. He liked that the president could, until recently, share news on his own on his Twitter account. Twitter’s decision to ban Trump and measures by Facebook and other social media companies to remove materials that support false theories of electoral fraud only strengthen Koch’s belief that the president’s supporters are being gagged.
“Now people cannot speak for Trump in a meaningful way, and he cannot defend himself,” he said, although there are millions of social media users who have “MAGA” as part of his biography, and Trump has a wide range of ways to publicize their opinions.
Koch said he believed his news options were dwindling. At the rally, he carried a sign that said: “Boycott Amazon, Twitter, YouTube, Apple”.
Kaleem reported from Tucson, Lee from Tallahassee, Read from Olympia, Jarvie from Atlanta and McDonnell from Austin.
This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.