The donation page for former President Donald Trump crashed shortly after he was convicted on all 34 counts in the Stormy Daniels hush-money trial. The surge in traffic to the WinRed platform, the GOP’s official donation site, caused it to fail to load or display error messages almost immediately after the verdict was announced.
Visitors to the site were greeted with a message: “Under Maintenance. Our engineers are working to provide you with a better experience. We will be back shortly.” The page’s crash was attributed to an overload of traffic from supporters eager to contribute to Trump’s campaign following the guilty verdict.
By around 6:30 EST, the page was restored and featured a defiant message from Trump: “The Left thinks that if they bury me with enough witch hunts and intimidate my family and associates that I’ll eventually throw up my hands and give up on our America First movement. Let me be clear as possible: I will never stop fighting for you!”
Trump’s team swiftly updated his website to reflect the court outcome, declaring: “I’M A POLITICAL PRISONER! I was just convicted in a RIGGED political Witch Hunt trial: I DID NOTHING WRONG! They’ve raided my home, arrested me, took my mugshot, AND NOW THEY’VE JUST CONVICTED ME! Crooked Joe Biden needs to get the message – right here, right now – that his chances of a 2nd term END TODAY!”
Chris LaCivita, Trump’s campaign manager, urged supporters who encountered errors to “log back on and try again.”
Last year, the Trump campaign garnered millions in donations following the release of his mugshot taken during his indictment in Georgia for election interference. On the same evening as Trump’s conviction, the Biden campaign also launched a fundraising appeal, reminding supporters that the best way to prevent Trump from returning to the Oval Office was through voting.
National Review explains that a New York jury convicted Trump on 34 felony charges for falsifying business records, making him the first former president in U.S. history to be convicted of a crime. The prosecution’s case, presented over the past six weeks at the state courthouse in lower Manhattan, argued that Trump, along with his former attorney Michael Cohen and National Enquirer publisher David Pecker, conspired to defraud voters in the 2016 election by paying off women to hide Trump’s extramarital affair with porn star Stormy Daniels. The payments were allegedly misrepresented as campaign-finance expenses.
Judge Juan Merchan has scheduled the sentencing hearing for July 11, just four days before the Republican National Convention.