The Republican Party’s primary donation platform, WinRed, collapsed under a surge of traffic Thursday shortly after a Manhattan jury found former President Donald Trump guilty on all 34 counts of falsifying business records. The Trump campaign attributed the website’s temporary unavailability to an overwhelming influx of donations from supporters.
“The American people see through Crooked Joe Biden’s rigged show trial,” the campaign posted on X, formerly known as Twitter. “So many Americans were moved to donate to President Trump’s campaign that the WinRed pages went down.”
The campaign assured supporters that they were “working on getting the website back online as quickly as possible” and urged them to “stay strong.”
Screenshots shared on social media confirmed the outage, with users encountering error messages when attempting to access the donation page. Approximately an hour later, reports emerged that the website had resumed normal operation.
Some, like Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO), saw clearly that the crash was a sign that the verdict had backfired on Democrats, galvanizing passionate support for Trump’s 2024 presidential bid. “The Democrats have NO IDEA what they’ve just started,” Boebert declared on X.
Others, however, noted the inopportune timing of the outage, which temporarily prevented the campaign from capitalizing on the moment to “haul in cash,” as journalist Yashar Ali observed.
In a defiant statement outside the courthouse, Trump echoed his campaign’s message, claiming that “the real verdict is going to be November 5 by the people.” He accused the Biden administration of orchestrating the trial to harm a political opponent and vowed to keep fighting.
“I’m fighting for our country. I’m fighting for our Constitution,” Trump said. “Our whole country is being rigged right now. And we’ll keep fighting; we’ll fight to the end, and we’ll win. Because our country has gone to hell.”
