In a swing county, Trump’s faithful are angry. But they believe he’ll get even.

SAGINAW, Mich. — Hard-right commentators on Real America’s Voice were talking about “the death of America” on the TV in the corner. But Wally Ribble was calm as he walked in, saw the news ticker and learned that Donald Trump was now a felon.

Ribble laughed. “Guilty of 34 counts of nothing,” said Ribble, 65, a retired factory worker who now spends many days here at the Trump Shoppe, a strip mall headquarters for local Republicans that doubles as a gift shop. “Tomorrow we’ll go on. It’s not the end of the world.” The system was unfair, he thought, but Trump would still win in November.

Down the road, Democrat Jessie Dawkins, 67, was shocked to see what she considered justice served. She starts every day reading Scripture, and she said she might pray that “Trump’s people” didn’t get violent, as some did on Jan. 6, 2021. She was thrilled to see Trump punished for his actions but figured Trump’s passionate followers would just say the trial was rigged.

She never watches Fox News. “I can only imagine what they’re talking about …” she said, trailing off.

For weeks, Ribble and Dawkins had been hearing radically different stories about the first criminal trial of a U.S. president from radically different news sources. Now — in one of the most hotly contested counties in a pivotal swing state — they seemed to embody Americans’ sharply divided response to the result.

To Trump’s MAGA base, the trial was only the latest underhanded effort to sideline their champion. At the Saginaw Trump Shoppe, the president’s supporters expressed outrage, but little panic. Trump was sure to win in November and set things right.

To most Democrats, the verdict represented a small measure of accountability for a man used to acting with impunity. But many were nervous that even a criminal conviction could not keep Trump from retaking the White House. They bet many voters would continue to excuse behavior by Trump that they would not tolerate from any other politicians. Black voters like Dawkins — a crucial part of Democrats’ coalition here and nationwide — sometimes asked, “Can you imagine if it happened to Barack Obama?”

The public “would have hung him out to dry already,” scoffed Sam Harrold, a 78-year-old Black retiree from the city of Saginaw.

Saginaw County, which narrowly backed Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020, is a diverse community but also a siloed one, residents say, with urban areas where Democrats need to run up the margins and rural towns that have embraced Trump.

Trump’s performance this fall will hinge in part on his ability to mobilize base voters like Ribble, who volunteers with the America First Saginaw County Republicans. The bedrock of Biden’s support is voters like Dawkins, a longtime stay-at-home mom and local volunteer, who said she believes in voting in every election, no matter who’s running, because she remembers segregation and the routine disenfranchisement of Black people.

Both voters’ politics are informed by their Christian faith: Ribble sometimes wears a T-shirt that says “Jesus is my savior, Trump is my president,” while Dawkins drives a red Hyundai with a NOWLORD license plate and a sticker asking the cars behind her, “Do you follow Jesus this close?” Both are heavily involved in their community: Ribble and his wife volunteer at food giveaways, while Dawkins serves as a chaplain for one of the school districts, coming in to comfort people when a student or staff member dies.

Dawkins hadn’t realized the verdict was in when a reporter called her Thursday night to say Trump had been convicted.

“Shut up!” she said.

She had listened to a bit of the news on NBC that morning while getting dressed. But mostly she had just gone about her day, picking up her 8-year-old grandson from school. He went home with her and used her TV to play Xbox.

“I didn’t watch TV because I just didn’t believe that they would find him guilty,” she said. “It’s almost hard to watch when you see somebody keep getting away with stuff and keep getting away with stuff, and I didn’t want to just sit and watch and say, ‘I’m not surprised’ and get up and walk away.”

Dawkins’s home looks strikingly different from Republicans’ spot in the strip mall. The Trump Shoppe is decorated with life-size cutouts of Trump and other presidents including George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. One wall features a portrait of Dwight D. Eisenhower. Ike earned the place of honor, party official Debra Ell said, because his deportation operation was a model for Trump’s promised crackdown on illegal crossings at the southern border.

Dawkins’s duplex has pictures of Barack Obama and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. And while Wally Ribble and other Trump Shoppe volunteers spoke derisively about “DEI” (diversity, equity and inclusion) and affirmative action, and said the country had moved on from its racist past, Dawkins felt many Americans just didn’t want to hear about bigotry. She keeps an old “Colored Entrance Only” sign in displayed in her living room. Asked if she sees racial prejudice here in Saginaw, she gave a sharp laugh.

The city is split by a river, with the well-developed west side quickly giving way to a rundown east side with half-burnt houses, abandoned storefronts and no grocery store — a disparity that residents trace in part to redlining that once discouraged investments in areas with Black “encroachment.”

“There is a divide in Saginaw,” she said, and “all over the country, as far as Black and White is concerned.”

Dawkins’s main reaction to Trump’s trial was visceral — and personal: “If it was my son, and if it was my husband, my cousin, my brother, they would be in jail by now,” she said. She didn’t understood how Trump’s criminal cases could drag out to the point that Trump might get reelected before the other ones are heard, and she marveled at Trump’s repeated violations of the gag order that bars him from commenting on witnesses and jurors.

Before the verdict arrived, she said the justice system should “do what they would do for people that look like me.”

Now, she and other Democrats across the city — with varied backgrounds and feelings about President Biden — were unified in celebrating.

Dawkins had not prayed for Trump’s conviction. (“I don’t pray any harm to nobody,” she said.) She sometimes prayed that “this divide between everybody, this hateful divide … would just be removed from this Earth,” she said. But she viewed Trump as a major cause of that divide.

Ribble was out on errands Thursday afternoon when his wife, 65-year-old Colleen, called from the Trump Shoppe: The verdict was coming, any moment.

At the store, Colleen and 83-year-old Erma Sell had scrambled to turn on the TV.

“I’ve been praying and praying every day for him,” said Sell, a retired teacher, standing in front of the monitor with her hands clasped. She made a guttural sound of distress. “I just think it’s so pitiful what’s been happening in our country.”

“I can tell everybody has a sinking feeling right now,” Colleen said from the table, where she was attaching pieces of advertising for the Trump Shoppe to tiny Trump 2024 flags. Volunteers planned to hand them out to children this summer on Flag Day, which also happens to be Trump’s birthday.

Colleen figured that a jury with a pro-Trump holdout wouldn’t have come back this soon. But she focused on the positive: “Whatever happens,” she told Sell, “it’ll be taken to the Supreme Court.”

When the guilty verdict came, Sell groaned. “Oh no. Oh, that’s so pitiful …”

“Wow,” said Colleen.

“I’m sick,” Sell said.

But by the time Wally Ribble arrived a few minutes later, Colleen was busy taking a phone call. Sell was already back to work with a stapler.

When Wally said Trump’s conviction wasn’t the end of the world, Sell agreed.

“We know that God’s in charge,” she said.

“Well, yeah,” Wally said. “But he’s also going to make this right.”

“Nobody in this room is going to do anything different tomorrow than they did today,” he said.

Soon, from the TV, former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon, the host of “War Room,” was urging “Action, action, action.” A pounding musical interlude began. The Ribbles went about their work, selling two “Jesus is my savior, Trump is my president” yard signs just before closing up for the evening.

“Tomorrow’s going to be a busy day,” Colleen said.