Indictment makes Donald Trump the latest Florida man charged with leading Jan. 6 attack

One was a bail bondsman from Orange Park who said he had simply "documented history." Another was a Spring Hill singer who said she was there to join the people "making a declaration." Another was the Dunedin founder of a nutrition-based lifestyle and recipe blog and reportedly calls herself “America’s Gluten Free Voice.”

And yet another, now, is a Palm Beach resident who was the sitting president of the United States.

Donald J. Trump on Tuesday joined more than 100 other Florida men and women in the nation-leading group of defendants facing charges stemming from the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. The indictment against Trump is the third set of criminal charges against him this year.

In a post on his social media platform Tuesday afternoon, Trump again railed against special counsel Jack Smith and the "fake indictment" saying it was politically motivated. "Why did they wait so long? Because they wanted to put it right in the middle of my campaign," Trump wrote.

But, in fact, Trump and his actions have been under scrutiny almost from the moment violence broke out at the Capitol on that gray, blustery and frigid afternoon. The former president was impeached a second time after he left the White House, and appeared to escape conviction in the February 2021 U.S. Senate trial only because key GOP senators at the time said the matter should be dealt with by the justice system since Trump was no longer in office.

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The chairman of a congressional panel that investigated Trump and the Jan. 6 violence on Capitol Hill claimed in an 814-page report released in December 2022 that there had been a "multi-step effort devised by Donald Trump to overturn the 2020 election and block the transfer of power."

Earlier that month, the committee voted unanimously to recommend charges against Trump on conspiracy to defraud the United States, his role in obstructing an official proceeding of Congress, conspiracy to make a false statement, and aiding an insurrection.

Those accusations spotlighted a common denominator between Trump and many of the other Floridians arrested since January 2021, according to findings in a study released this month. Namely, some of those charged didn't just participate in the mayhem, protests and violent attack on the Capitol. They also served as leaders of the effort in what committee members and others have said was an attempted coup.

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Study shows initial, larger share of Floridians faced Jan. 6 conspiracy-related charges

Florida didn't just lead the country in initial arrests related to the riot in Washington. The Sunshine State, Trump's adopted home since 2019, also had a significantly higher share of those charged with more serious conspiracy offenses.

A report issued last month by Seton Hall University examined data on the original 716 people charged with Jan. 6-related offenses within the first 12 months of the insurrection. It found that Florida not only led the nation with 82 of those charged, or 11.5% of the total, but also, of the 60 people charged with conspiracy offenses, almost 50% were from the Sunshine State.

"It turns out that Florida had practically half of them," said Mark Denbeaux, a director of Seton Hall's Center for Policy & Research and a co-author of the report.

That was at least partly true because the state was home to leaders and members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers extremist groups. Florida Oath Keepers leader Kelly Meggs of Dunnellon was sentenced to 12 years in prison after being found guilty of seditious conspiracy. Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio of Miami and three other members of the group were convicted of seditious conspiracy in May.

The revelations in the Seton Hall study predated Trump joining — according to a USA Today database of Jan. 6 arrests, charges and convictions — another 112 people from Florida implicated for their roles in the violence. The USA Today database, as of July 21, listed just over 1,000 people from 48 states who face or have faced charges.

The university's report also said the bulk of the hundreds of people arrested and accused of Jan. 6 offenses represent a microcosm of America, except for their race and gender. Denbeaux, a professor at the university, said that other than the defendants' race and gender — the overwhelming majority are white males — they are a "perfect" profile of America.

"Everything else matched, really, the profile you get from the U.S. Census in terms of employment, jobs, education, criminal records, age, ethnicity, all of that was a perfect profile of America," he said. "Which is not what we began expecting."

The professors and students at the center, he said, began the project expecting the majority of those accused to have, perhaps, possessed criminal records or otherwise represent a sociological anomaly within U.S. society.

Instead, they found that almost a quarter of them, 24.7%, were successful small business owners. Another 18.5% had served in the armed forces or as police and law-enforcement agents. Even the number of unemployed defendants, 4%, tracked national labor statistics. The percentage of those with criminal records, 22%, is less than the U.S. national average.

"In the end, one of my students' conclusions is we thought it was going to be a revealing, identifying group of really bad people. And it turns out you can't really say that," said Denbeaux.

"Which is, my student said, kind of scary. You can't target who you should watch out for if it's everybody."

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Trump indictment aside, legacy of Jan. 6 violence continues unabated in Florida

Just last month, more Floridians pleaded guilty to Jan. 6 crimes.

They included a husband and wife from Ocala — the husband for "assaulting, resisting, or impeding" officers, a felony, and the wife for misdemeanors for "parading, demonstrating, or picketing" in the Capitol that day. A St. Augustine man also faces up to five years in prison after pleading guilty to a felony charge of civil disorder.

Other Sunshine State residents continue to contest charges. On July 25, an attorney for a Lakeland defendant filed a motion asking a federal judge to dismiss the felony and three misdemeanor counts against her client

Trump has been unabashed in demonstrating sympathy and support for Jan. 6 defendants.

During a May 10 town hall on CNN, Trump said he was inclined to pardon a large share of Jan. 6 defendants, should U.S. voters return him to the White Hose.

"I am inclined to pardon many of them. I can't say for every single one, because a couple of them probably they got out of control," he said. During his political rallies, Trump has played a video of men imprisoned for their Jan. 6 actions singing the national anthem interspersed with the former president reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.

An official with a civil-rights advocacy group said in June that it is "no coincidence" that Florida is home to a large share of Jan. 6 extremists at the same time it has led the country in legislation targeting the LGBTQ+ community, rules that curtail access to voting and even banning or removing books and curriculum from classrooms and school libraries.

Florida, said Maya Henson Carey, a research analyst with the Southern Poverty Law Centers' Intelligence Project, is a place where "a blurring of lines between extremism and mainstream politics" has taken place.

“Indeed, it is no coincidence that Florida has been subject to the targeting of LGBTQ+ people with laws that remove their rights, has a history of hard-right organizing as exemplified by leading the nation in defendants related to the Jan. 6 insurrection, and is home to extensive organizing by groups like Moms for Liberty to ban books and roll back equal access to public education," Carey said after the SPLC released its annual "The Year in Hate and Extremism" report.

But Florida Republicans, led by Gov. Ron DeSantis, hail those same measures as evidence the state is "where woke goes to die." The governor has pointed to his 19.4 percentage point re-election last November as testimony that he and the GOP supermajority in the Legislature are pursuing the will of Florida's electorate.

DeSantis also derided observances of this past January's two-year anniversary of the violence.

“This is their Christmas, January 6th,” DeSantis said of Democrats and others. “They are going to take this and milk this for anything they could to try to be able to smear anyone who ever supported Donald Trump​.”

Trump faces looming, complex political and legal calendar. Is it costing him support?

Iowa Republicans have already set Jan. 15 as the date for their primary season kickoff caucus. Super Tuesday follows on March 5. Many states will have concluded their GOP presidential nominee balloting before the handful of legal cases swirling around Trump is likely to be resolved.

That means most party voters will choose their candidate before they know conclusively whether Trump is indeed a victim of what Republicans say is "weaponized law enforcement" or a justly convicted felon.

The Trump family business enterprise, the Trump Organization, is set to go on trial in a civil lawsuit in October in New York state. But the Trumps' business also is to go on trial Jan. 29 in a civil class-action lawsuit accusing it of promoting a pyramid scheme.

Also in January, Trump is to be back in court for another round of litigation with writer E. Jean Carroll, who has accused Trump of sexual assault and defamation.

On March 25, a New York state judge has ruled, the criminal case against the former president stemming from an alleged hush-money payment to a porn star in the weeks before the 2016 presidential election is to begin.

And a federal judge in Fort Pierce set May 20, 2024 as the start date for the criminal case against Trump over his possession and alleged mishandling and obstructing the return of classified documents to the government. It's far from clear whether that trial will have concluded by the time Republicans gather in Milwaukee for their convention in mid-July.

Trump is the leading GOP presidential candidate and the former president has touted poll after poll showing him with wide, double-digit percentage-point leads over rivals like DeSantis.

But there are signs his support is stalling, if not ebbing.

A Pew Research Center survey released July 21 showed Trump with a concerning disapproval rating among all Americans, 63%, while a only little more than a third, 35%, see him favorably.

In the past year, as Trump's legal woes have mounted and the 2022 GOP midterm disappointment was pinned on him, his favorable standing among Republicans and GOP-leaning independents dropped 9 points to 66%.

A poll of New Hampshire Republican voters issued July 18 saw Trump lose 5 percentage points in his lead over his closest rival, DeSantis, though the former president still led comfortably by 37% to 23%. That followed a Florida Atlantic University Mainstreet PolCom Lab survey released July 10 that showed Trump's margin over DeSantis in Florida had eroded by 7 percentage points since April, though the former president still held a crushing 50% to 30% lead over his one-time Sunshine State political ally.

The political website FiveThirtyEight on Aug. 1 registered Trump with a 56.3% unfavorable rating against a 40.4% favorable rating. The 15.9 percentage point gap has widened since Trump was first charged in the hush-money case.

Antonio Fins is a politics and business editor at the Palm Beach Post, part of the USA TODAY Florida Network. You can reach him at afins@pbpost.com. Help support our journalism. Subscribe today.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Trump indicted, joins Florida residents charged in January 6 attack