Following the unprecedented “guilty” verdict for former President Donald Trump in his New York criminal trial, the donation page for his campaign’s website crashed due to a flood of donations from his supporters.
According to the Daily Caller, the donation page on the website DonaldJTrump.com displayed a 500 error, simply reading “something went wrong,” in the immediate aftermath of the verdict, which was read at about 5:00 PM EST on Thursday.
In addition to the tsunami of small-dollar donors via his website, Trump also received donations from deep-pocketed donors following the controversial conviction. Shaun Maguire, a partner at Sequoia Capital, announced that he had donated $300,000 to Trump’s campaign that same day.
“The timing isn’t a coincidence,” Maguire confirmed in a post on X. Sequoia Capital had previously donated to Democrats, as well as the far-left anti-Trump group The Lincoln Project, thus demonstrating what a significant shift Maguire’s donation represents.
Lee Zeldin, the former congressman and New York gubernatorial nominee, also announced that he had just “secured a $800k donation from someone for President Trump’s Joint Fundraising Committee.” He commented that he had “never experienced a massive ask that easy.”
“The American people see through Crooked Joe Biden’s rigged show trial,” Trump’s campaign declared in a statement on X. “So many Americans were moved to donate to President Trump’s campaign that the WinRed pages went down.”
The campaign is expected to raise tens of millions in the first 24 hours following the verdict, which could amount to a record-breaking total.
A New York jury found President Trump guilty on all 34 counts of “falsifying business records” in the case of a non-disclosure agreement signed by former porn actress Stormy Daniels in 2016. The prosecution’s case was always on shaky ground, as it was based almost entirely on the testimonies of Daniels, who once claimed that she was a “medium” who could speak to the dead, and Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen, who had previously been convicted of perjury.
The conduct of Judge Juan Merchan was also highly unprecedented in terms of his disregard for traditional norms in the American judicial system. He refused to recuse himself despite his daughter Loren being directly connected to the case, as she works as a fundraiser for Democratic candidates who raised millions off of the very case that her father was presiding over. He also broke legal precedent by instructing the 12-member jury that they did not have to be unanimous to find Trump guilty of any of the charges, and that even a 4-4-4 split would amount to a “guilty” verdict.