Donation Page for Convicted Reality TV Host Crashes Following Guilty Verdict
Rite of Passage
Yesterday, former president and current presidential candidate Donald Trump joined the storied ranks of the many reality TV stars — although, the first American commander-in-chief — to be convicted in a criminal court.
Though Trump being convicted on all 34 counts of falsifying business records to hide a hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels may have pushed some American voters further away from the Republican frontrunner, many Trump supporters were seemingly animated by it. According to Axios, Google searches for "Donald Trump donation" and "Donald Trump donation site" spiked. Within an hour of the verdict, Trump's campaign donation website, which is hosted on a platform called WinRed, crashed.
In a post on X-formerly-Twitter, the Trump campaign attributed the crash to traffic demands.
"So many Americans were moved to donate to President Trump's campaign that the WinRed pages went down," the campaign wrote in the post. "We are working on getting the website back online as quickly as possible."
"Stay strong," it added.
Leave Trump Alone
Per Axios, the site was working again in about an hour. That the site went down at all, though, underscores the reality that many MAGA faithfuls remain unswayed — and in fact, are even motivated — by Trump's legal battles.
The campaign, for its part, is celebrating the blip as a symbolic win.
“From just minutes after the verdict, the digital fundraising system has been hit with record numbers of supporters," Brian Hughes, a Trump Campaign spokesperson, told The Daily Beast in a statement. "The traffic is so large that it is causing intermittent delays."
All Caps
As the Daily Beast reported yesterday, a link to Trump's donation site was posted just minutes after the verdict was announced. Someone close to the Trump campaign also told the Daily Beast that Trump-endorsed members were asked to share links to the page. Roughly 30 minutes later, the page went down.
It's unclear how much cash the Trump team raked in since the verdict was handed down. Today, the site appears to be working just fine.
"I'M A POLITICAL PRISONER!" reads the page's bold, blocky text. "I was just convicted in a RIGGED political Witch Hunt trial: I DID NOTHING WRONG!"
The jury clearly thought otherwise.
More on the 2024 election: Trump Guilty Verdict Sends "Truth Social" Shares on a Rollercoaster Ride
