‘That 10 percent is important’: Trump forgoes moderates to juice the base

And Trump is doubling down on that idea, taking his stolen-election rhetoric from 2020 and recasting it onto the judicial system. He began arguing that “our whole country is being rigged” from the moment he stepped out of the Manhattan courtroom last week. And he has since refused to take the off ramps provided to him by friendly interviewers, countering Phil McGraw’s charge that he doesn’t “have time to get even” by saying that while “revenge does take time,” it can be “justified.”

It’s the kind of heated messaging that helped Trump juice his base in his previous presidential campaigns. And it seems to be having the same effect post-conviction, with his campaign raising enormous sums of money from online donors.

“Look at his fundraising,” Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.), a longtime friend of Haley who endorsed her in the GOP primary, told POLITICO. “People know what they’re doing to him is wrong. Let him keep doing that. Let him put him in jail. See how that works out.”

Rep. Kevin Hern (R-Okla.), chair of the Republican Study Committee, said he would not advise Trump to change his tone, arguing that independents and moderates “are concerned with the law — very concerned.”

“You have to state it as you see it,” Hern told POLITICO. “And he was the one sitting in the courtroom every single day for weeks, and had to be immensely frustrating.”

That frustration flared when Trump rallied Thursday in Arizona, a swing state he lost to Biden in 2020. Even there, he made little effort to expand beyond his fired-up base, instead demanding that an appeals court reverse his conviction.

“It is easy for Donald Trump to convince his most ardent supporters that first they stole the election and now they’re trying to put me away for good,” said Barrett Marson, a Republican strategist in the state.

But for the moderate, right-leaning independents Trump will need to win the general election, Marson said, “it’s incumbent on Trump to give them a bit more reason” to vote for him. “Talk to us about how you are going to bring down gas prices or bring down interest rates or bring down inflation.”