President Trump on Thursday held his first rally since Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that the House would launch an impeachment inquiry. The scene outside was raucous, and included a Trump supporter getting spit on during an interview with VICE News.
The scene inside was just as strange, as Trump went off script for pretty much the whole speech. All hour and forty minutes of it
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Though he might have sounded more than a little concerned about the prospect of impeachment, there is one way that the impeachment inquiry is not hurting him right now: fundraising. Campaign manager Brad Parscale told the Associated Press that in the 24 hours after the impeachment inquiry was announced, the campaign and the RNC raised $5 million online.
VICE News talked to a number of the president’s supporters outside the Target Center in downtown Minneapolis. Many of them were consistent donors to his re-election, and said that the impeachment inquiry has only motivated them to give more.
John Hakala lives in the northern part of the state where he works for U.S. Steel. He gives a few hundred dollars at a time to the president’s campaign.
“It motivated me huge to give him more money,” he said. “This country’s in a bad place right now, between the fighting and the controversy and everything else. We need to come together as a whole, and I think eventually he’s going to make that happen.”
Sarah Zuk, who lives in nearby Plymouth, Minnesota, said that those annoying campaign fundraising emails actually work for her.
“I donate every year when I register to vote and I also donate just online when I get email reminders throughout the year,” she said. That most recent fundraising email came the night before the rally, so she chipped in $50. But she said also gives around $25 to the campaign several times a year.
Despite the money piling up, the cracks are starting to show. A recent FOX poll shows 51 percent of Americans support impeachment and removal from office. But President Trump is banking on this to motivate his base, telling his supporters, “The Democrats’ attempt to overthrow the government will create backlash at the ballot box the likes of we have never seen before in the history of this country.”
