Trump’s Popularity Over Republican Party Soars in Wake of FBI’s Mar-a-Lago Raid

President Trump received such a tremendous boost of his popularity after he was targeted in the ransacking of his Mar-a-Lago home by the FBI earlier this month.

The number of Republican voters putting him ahead of the GOP has grown substantially.

Feds Making Trump Increasingly More Popular Than His Party

In early August, Trump’s mansion in Palm Springs, Florida was raided by more than 30 federal agents as part of a Department of Justice investigation into him allegedly holding government documents after leaving the White House.

There have been speculations that Trump could be found guilty of mishandling government papers. This would result in banning him from holding any public office ever again.

Because of the FBI raid, however, which utterly infuriated many Republicans, as well as many Independents, Trump’s popularity spiked.

The number of Republican voters who say they support Trump more than they do the GOP increased to 41%, according to a new NBC News poll.

That is a 7% increase compared to May 2022 when the pollster asked the same question.

At the same time, in the wake of the FBI raid on Trump’s home, the number of Republican voters who put the party before Trump declined from 58% in May to 50% now.

In a post on his social media, Truth Social, last week, Trump argued the “strong backlash” from the FBI raid is going to help the Republican Party win seats in the November elections.

A report by The Daily Mail, however, cited “key donors and strategists” of the GOP as saying the former president led the party to have “weak candidates” in the midterms.

They also argued his “hold” on the Republican Party isn’t going to last “much longer.”

FBI Boosted Both Trump and Truth Social

President Trump’s popularity has been boosted by the FBI’s ransacking of Mar-a-Lago in a different way, namely, by spiking the popularity of his social media platform, Truth Social.

Data AI figures show in the week after the raid, Truth Social got a 550% increase in app downloads.

So far, the app for the platform has been downloaded about three million times. Truth Social imitates Twitter. It was developed after Trump got banned from Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube over the January 6, 2021 breach of the US Capitol.

Back in April, the Truth Social app topped the rankings of the Apple App Store. That was the first big spike in its popularity after its launch in February of this year; it came after many of its technical difficulties got resolved.

For the time being, however, Truth Social remains far behind in user numbers compared with Twitter and Facebook. Even Gab, which is described as a “far-right site,” boasts dozens of millions of users monthly.

At present, Trump has close to four million followers on Truth Social. This is far fewer than the almost 80 million he had on Twitter. At the time of his banning, Trump was Twitter’s most popular user, with the highest number of followers.

This article appeared in MorningPress and has been published here with permission.