© Cheney Orr/for The Washington Post
An attendee wears buttons in support of former president Donald Trump at the Georgia Republican Party’s state convention Friday in Columbus, Ga.

COLUMBUS, Ga. — Laurie Wood was in the hotel elevator when she saw the text alert on her phone: Donald Trump had been indicted. “Here we go again,” she thought.

In town as a first-time delegate to the Georgia GOP convention here, Wood stepped out onto a terrace for a cigar party grateful to be spending this historic night with fellow conservatives. State committee members gathered amid the smoke and mosquitoes were already anticipating Trump’s speech to the convention on Saturday, and now many were just finding out and beginning to reckon with the latest political earthquake.

“Game on,” said John Fredericks, a pro-Trump talk radio host popular in Georgia and Virginia, when a reporter read him Trump’s social media posts announcing the charges. “Indict away. Every indictment we get more emboldened, we get stronger, we get more votes, because working people in this country are on to their game. Trump will be the nominee, and he will win an overwhelming victory regardless of the number of witch-hunt indictments that the communists and the liberals try to push on him.”

The cigar party’s host, Republican National Committee member Jason Thompson, was quick to dismiss the indictment, which remains sealed but is said to arise from Trump’s handling of classified materials after leaving the White House. “Honestly that’s probably the weakest case — I’m a lawyer, I would know,” Thompson said between puffs. “All the presidents take documents with them, and they’re trying to make something out of it because it’s Trump.”

But even as many of the Trump fans in attendance attacked the case as politically motivated, predicted it would strengthen Trump’s support and changed the subject to accusations against President Biden, some acknowledged that Trump’s mounting legal challenges — an earlier indictment in New York, where Trump plead not guilty to felony counts related to payments intended to silence an adult-film actress during his 2016 campaign, and ongoing federal and state probes into his efforts to overturn the 2020 election — could weaken his candidacy in the general election.

“We don’t know what’s next with Trump,” said Randy Pittman, a welder and a member of the state GOP committee from Walker County, in Northwest Georgia, who voted for Trump twice and liked many of the policies he implemented as president. Pittman said he doesn’t think Trump attracts votes from across the political spectrum when he talks about the 2020 election rather than the policies he plans to pursue if he’s elected again, and news of the indictments would add to the uncertainty about the former president’s electability.

“He is going to have to have the middle,” he said. “I don’t see how Trump wins the presidency.”

Dean Cromlish, a state GOP delegate from Gwinnett County in the Atlanta metro region, said he will vote for Trump in the primary, but acknowledged that the legal battles have hurt him. “They are doing everything they can to keep his name negatively in the press,” he said. “They’re trying to keep people from remembering his accomplishments.”

Between drinks at the cigar party, committee members shared reactions from other Republicans crisscrossing social media, with even Trump’s 2024 rivals mostly rushing to his defense. One exception was former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson, who is scheduled to speak here on Saturday and on Thursday night called on Trump to quit the race.

“I think Asa should end his campaign, because the biggest crowd he will be around will be here at the convention,” said Salleigh Grubbs, the party chair from Cobb County, northwest of Atlanta.

Kari Lake, the Trump-endorsed Arizona Republican who lost her 2022 bid for governor, was on her way here for a Friday night keynote speech. She logged on to a Twitter chatroom where she said she’d spoken with Trump earlier on Thursday night. “And he just said, ‘Kari, I never thought this is what my future would look like,” Lake recalled. “But, but he’s OK with it. He’s OK with taking these hits for us.”

She arrived later at the cigar party wearing a T-shirt with the face of Andrew Breitbart, the late right-wing website founder, and the word “WAR.”




© Cheney Orr/for The Washington Post
Attendees recite the Pledge of Allegiance on Friday.

Lake’s keynote replaced former vice president Mike Pence, who withdrew to launch his presidential campaign with his sharpest-yet rebuke of his former running mate, suggesting that Trump’s conduct on Jan. 6, 2021, the day a pro-mob stormed the U.S. Capitol, made him unfit to serve. The home-state governor, Brian Kemp, and secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, who famously refused Trump’s demands to overturn the 2020 results, will be skipping the convention here.

Instead it will feature long-shot presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who on Thursday night pledged that if elected he would pardon Trump. Trump’s speech on Saturday will be his first since the indictment, and advisers said he’ll use the occasion to aggressively attack the prosecutors.

“It never hurts him when this kind of thing happens to him because everybody knows it’s politically motivated and not real. It makes him a martyr,” said Jackie Harling, the new party chair in Walker County, in the northwest corner of the state. “He was our voice. Sometimes he was not polished or polite. But he’s actually speaking for us.”

The anger she described was close to the surface for some party activists as they heard the news for the first time.

“Get in line,” Jim Tully, the Paulding County chairman, said when told there was another indictment. “I’m not surprised. Fulton County’s coming next and that’s a sham,” he added, meaning the Atlanta-area district attorney’s investigation into Trump’s pressure on state officials over the 2020 election.

“Don’t start me with that,” said Orien Roy, a Georgia field representative with the right-wing youth group Turning Point Action. “I was just at the county commissioners’ meeting yesterday,” he said, referring to county officials’ rejection of a Republican nominee for the election board who had challenged the eligibility of thousands of voters.

“The American conservative is about to erupt,” Tully said. “We have had enough of being bowled over in our lifestyle, our religious beliefs, our work ethic and our responsibility. This is an attempt to intimidate us.”

Others sounded more sanguine about the potential political fallout for Trump, or lack thereof.

“They keep going after him, it doesn’t change any opinions — good bad or indifferent,” said Mark Williams from Duluth. He was handing out stickers for Ultra Right, a new “100% woke-free American beer” about to ship its first brew in response to conservative backlash against Bud Light’s sponsorship of a transgender TikTok star.

“I think he’s paying people to sue him,” Williams said of Trump. “Every time he’s indicted he goes up in the polls.”

Yvonne Wingett-Sanchez and Josh Dawsey contributed to this report.