From his corner of rural Iowa, Neil Shaffer did more than his fair share to put Donald Trump in the White House and to try to keep him there.
Shaffer oversaw the biggest swing of any county in the US from Barack Obama to Trump in 2016, and increased the then president's share of the vote four years later. But the chair of the Howard county Republican party is not enthusiastic at the prospect of yet another Trump presidential campaign, and he blames the Democrats for driving it.
"Honestly, the Democrats are shooting themselves in the foot with these prosecutions," he said. "Why is Trump doing so well? Because people feel like they are piling on him. If this is the Democrats' effort to make him look bad, it hasn't. It's probably going to make him the [Republican] nominee and, honestly, he may win the general election again. And then whose fault would it be?"
After pleading not guilty last Thursday to federal charges over his attempts to steal the 2020 presidential election, Trump denounced the indictment as "a persecution of a political opponent".
With Trump likely to spend a good part of the next year in one courtroom or another, after being indicted in New York, Florida and Washington on an array of charges and with more expected in Georgia before long, his supporters believe it is a plot to keep their man out of the White House.
One of them is Tom Schatz, a Howard county farmer on Iowa's border with Minnesota.
"They're bringing the charges against Trump so he can't run against Biden. Biden is so damn crooked. We've never had this kind of shit in this United States, ever," he said. "Democrats are gonna keep riding [Trump's] ass and bringing shit up against him. They don't quit. They just don't like him because he's draining the swamp, and they don't like that."
This story is from the August 11, 2023 edition of The Guardian Weekly.
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This story is from the August 11, 2023 edition of The Guardian Weekly.
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