Abstract
President Trump has long espoused “tough-on-crime” rhetoric, and many of his current policy initiatives risk exacerbating challenges faced by the nation’s most vulnerable citizens, including formerly incarcerated people. Against this backdrop, I ask: How do formerly incarcerated Americans perceive President Trump and his actions? Using 44 in-depth interviews with formerly incarcerated people in Florida and Virginia, I find that participants’ mixed evaluations of President Trump are tied to what he and his second presidency symbolize in participants’ own lives and for the nation more broadly. Specifically, I argue that formerly incarcerated Americans see President Trump, more so than previous presidents, as symbolic of what it means to be American. Furthermore, as the first president with felony convictions, President Trump symbolizes many formerly incarcerated Americans’ own quest for redemption and their hopes for what is possible in their own lives. These findings reveal that formerly incarcerated people are neither politically apathetic nor immune to nationalistic ideologies about America.
On March 4, 2025, President Donald Trump delivered a speech to Congress in which he declared that “America’s momentum is back, our spirit is back, our pride is back, our confidence is back, and the American dream is surging bigger and better than ever before” (Trump 2025). Although President Trump’s immigration and economic policies have garnered significant public attention, his “tough-on-crime” actions are also well established. In April 2025, he issued an executive order “strengthening and unleashing America’s law enforcement to pursue criminals and protect innocent citizens” (The White House 2025d). A few months later, he activated the National Guard in Los Angeles in response to protests against his administration’s aggressive push to deport undocumented immigrants (Rosenhall et al. 2025). Shortly thereafter, he deployed the National Guard to Washington, D.C., citing concerns about “out-of-control” crime (The White House 2025a), despite evidence showing an “unmistakable and large drop” in reported violence in the capital since 2023 (Council on Criminal Justice 2025a). In the ensuing days and weeks, President Trump turned his attention to other big cities, including Chicago and Portland (Rose et al. 2025).
President Trump’s comments about “out-of-control” crime are inconsistent with research showing that the U.S. crime rate in 2024 was at its lowest since 1961 (Sawyer and Wagner 2025). Setting this crucial fact aside, a fresh round of harsh crime control policies could seriously damage urban communities still reeling from the devastating consequences of mass incarceration (Clear 2009). Many are also concerned about the impact of the president’s social and economic policies on poor people, who are overrepresented in America’s jails and prisons (Travis, Western, and Redburn 2014). These critics point to, for example, the administration’s renewed efforts to slash funding for mental health and addiction services (Council on Criminal Justice 2025b) as well as potential restrictions to and/or funding cuts for welfare programs such as Medicare and Medicaid (federally funded health care programs) (Neuman et al. 2025) and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the nation’s primary food assistance program (U.S. Department of Agriculture 2025).
With so many looming initiatives that risk further weakening the most vulnerable Americans while also advancing a tough-on-crime agenda, what do formerly incarcerated people think about President Trump and his actions? Drawing on 44 in-depth interviews with formerly incarcerated people in Florida and Virginia, I argue that President Trump and his second presidency, more so than prior presidents’ periods of leadership, are emblematic of formerly incarcerated people’s own quest for redemption and their larger vision of what America is and should be. These findings dismantle misconceptions of system-impacted people as politically disengaged, and they shed light on the nuanced reasons for President Trump’s popularity even among Americans whose interests are harmed by his politics.
Incarceration and Political Engagement
The criminal legal system is a defining institution in the context of American civic life. Between 1974 and 2001, the number of people who had experienced incarceration grew by 3.8 million. By 2008, there were over 7 million people under correctional authority (U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics 2009). Many of the carceral population reductions achieved during the COVID pandemic are vanishing as the population of incarcerated people ticks upward once more (Vera Institute of Justice 2024). Although the total population of incarcerated people is still smaller than it was before the pandemic, these gains are likely to disappear if they are not bolstered by policies explicitly aimed at decarceration. Under the Trump administration, however, trends are likely to sway in the opposite direction. It is still too early to state what impact the Trump administration’s policies will have on overall incarceration rates, but early evidence is discouraging (Sawyer and Wagner 2025).
Behind these numbers lies a bleak story of American social inequality. As recently as 2022, the national incarceration rate for Black people was 6 times that of white people (Wang 2024), and the risk of incarceration is particularly acute for Black men with low levels of education (Pettit and Western 2004). Carceral contact is also spatially concentrated, with effects that reverberate in already-disadvantaged communities (Weaver and Lerman 2010). The specter of the criminal legal system has become so salient in the past few decades in America that impoverished, low-education Black Americans are more likely to be exposed to penal institutions than they are to other institutions such as higher education, the military, or the labor market (Western 2006).
Much of the literature on imprisonment and civic identity frames formerly incarcerated people as occupying an inferior social position vis-à-vis the state (Lerman and Weaver 2014; Sered 2021; Western 2006). Western (2006), for example, argued that incarceration weakens poor, Black Americans’ ties to the labor marker, forcing them into a diminished form of citizenship. Lerman and Weaver (2014) extended this research by introducing the notion of “custodial citizenship”: a second-class citizenship that transforms people into “custodial citizens” through their interactions with public institutions such as the police or court system. It is through these mostly negative interactions that custodial citizens learn what their “place” in society is. Upon internalizing the notion that they belong to an inferior citizenship group, custodial citizens withdraw from political life. Miller and Stuart (2017) later argued that when people are convicted of a crime, they are steered into “carceral citizenship,” which is an alternate, but not necessarily inferior, legal status that carries its own unique set of restrictions, obligations, and benefits.
Contact with the carceral state suppresses political engagement because it limits time, money, and opportunities to participate in the affairs of one’s community. Prior research has found that imprisonment impedes political efficacy, both because people in prison face barriers in accessing political representation and because they have more limited access to information (Calavita and Jenness 2015; Knight 2025). Once released from prison, formerly incarcerated people often encounter a wide range of legal restrictions that affect their political engagement, including (most obviously) the loss of the right to vote (Manza and Uggen 2008). Beyond legal disenfranchisement, many eligible voters are de facto disenfranchised because of the spillover effects of felony disenfranchisement laws, particularly in Black communities (McLeod, White, and Gavin 2013). Those formerly incarcerated Americans who can vote and wish to do so also face several informal obstacles, including misinformation about felony disenfranchisement laws (Drucker and Barreras 2005), confusion about the voting process, and a fear of rearrest if they vote while ineligible (Sugie et al. 2024). These formal and informal barriers are exacerbated by system-impacted people’s distrust for the government (Sugie et al. 2024) as well as their political apathy (Uggen and Manza 2004).
Despite such disheartening evidence, the impact of incarceration on political engagement should not be reduced to overly reductive stories about political apathy. We need only to look at the history of prison protests or the words of Malcolm X to recognize that, under specific circumstances, prison can be a powerful site for generating political consciousness (Uggen and Manza 2004). Indeed, more than two decades ago, Uggen and Manza (2004) found that incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people voiced sophisticated beliefs about the government, politics, and their relationship with the state. More recently, Knight (2025) argued that prisoner mobilization occurs when incarcerated people perceive embodied threats as shared problems, and Walker (2020) found that injustice through system contact can motivate political mobilization, even among those who only come into proximal contact with the criminal legal system (Walker 2014). Collectively, these findings reveal that the impact of incarceration on political engagement is more complicated than previously theorized.
Further empirical and theoretical exploration of issues related to politics and punishment is crucial as the American political landscape continues to shift in meaningful ways. For example, efforts to roll back felony disenfranchisement policies have been remarkably successful, with the number of Americans barred from voting because of a felony conviction dropping by 31 percent between 2016 and 2024 (Uggen, Stewart, and Lookner 2024). Scholars long assumed that many of these Americans would support Democratic and liberal agendas, but in a recent study, Stewart, Li, and Uggen (2025) found “varied and nuanced political views and orientations among people with felony records” (p. 3). Although people with felony convictions were more likely to identify as Democrats, partisan identification was moderated by race and local context. Moreover, there was less racial polarization among people with felony convictions than among those without, suggesting that felon status may neutralize partisan differences.
In sum, therefore, after many years of regarding incarcerated or formerly incarcerated people as disengaged and detached from their political worlds, we now know that this population does not speak with one voice. Unpacking the diversity in system-impacted Americans’ political views is particularly important in a socio-political climate mired in seemingly never-ending controversies about the meanings and markers of being American. Despite recent research demonstrating a surprising level of support for President Trump among incarcerated people (Lewis, Heffernan, and Flagg 2024), we do not fully understand the reasons for this support, especially given the extent to which President Trump’s initiatives stand to harm this population’s material and social conditions. This article takes a first step in unpacking the diverse views of formerly incarcerated Americans about President Trump.
Methods
This article stems from a broader study on formerly incarcerated people’s sense of belonging. I collected data through in-depth, remote interviews (on phone or via Zoom, depending on participants’ preferences) with 44 formerly incarcerated people in Florida and Virginia. The impact of being locked away for years on one’s sense of belonging may be obvious, but the “churn” associated with even short pre- or post-trial jail stays is also unequivocally disruptive and harmful (Eife 2025; Turney and Halpern-Meekin 2021; Umamaheswar et al. 2025). For all these reasons, I made every effort to ensure diversity in time served, resulting in a final sample in which 27 participants (61 percent) reported serving time in prison, while the rest reported only jail terms. 1 A majority of participants (86 percent) had experienced incarceration more than once, and many had such extensive histories of incarceration that they could not recall the precise number of times they had been incarcerated or the exact amount of time they served for each sentence.
I conducted interviews between December 2024 (weeks after President Trump was reelected in November) and April 2025. To contextualize my findings about participants’ views on American politics, it is important to consider their locations. There is massive state-level variation in the American political landscape, and it was thus particularly helpful to have participants from two states with very different politics. Florida surpasses every other state in the nation with the largest number of citizens who cannot vote because of a felony conviction (Napal and Budd 2025). A majority of Floridians voted “yes” to a 2018 ballot referendum that restored voting rights for many (but not all) people convicted of felonies. The Florida legislature, however, passed a bill undercutting the promise of this referendum by requiring full payment of restitution, fines, and fees resulting from a felony conviction before the right to vote could be restored. As a result, a large share of system-impacted Americans in Florida still cannot vote.
Whereas Florida is a very reliably Republican-leaning state, Virginia’s politics are more complicated. Virginia residents have voted for Democratic presidential nominees in the last few elections, but recent state governors have been both Democratic and Republican. Given the state’s mixed political history, its punitive felony disenfranchisement laws are somewhat surprising: people with felony convictions are permanently barred from voting unless a governor restores their individual right to vote (Brennan Center for Justice 2023).
I did not ask participants explicitly about their political affiliation (partly because it was quickly evident that, consistent with prior research [Uggen and Manza 2004], many eschewed such allegiances) but recruiting in both Florida and Virginia yielded a sample that was remarkably diverse in terms of substantive political views. For several reasons, I also did not directly ask participants about whether they had the right to vote. First, when the topic of voting rights came up organically, it was clear that many participants simply did not know or understand the laws and policies surrounding felony disenfranchisement and voting rights restoration. Furthermore, many could not remember if they had committed only misdemeanors, felonies, or both, and they therefore did not know whether they had ever lost the right to vote. Finally, even participants who explicitly told me that they had no interest whatsoever in voting had strong views about President Trump, suggesting that opinions about the president were surprisingly unrelated to participants’ ability to vote. Rather than pushing participants to elaborate on issues they did not fully understand and that they were not comfortable discussing, I opted to focus on their opinions and lived experiences.
I began recruitment by soliciting the help of reentry organizations, but with the help of early participants, my recruitment flier made its way through many different sites, including halfway houses, nursing homes, and community health centers. The formerly incarcerated Americans whose stories form the backbone of this article thus come from all walks of life. Some were gainfully employed and securely housed, while others worried about whether they would have a roof over their heads the next day. Some were young people who readily admitted that they were still actively involved in criminal activities, while others were senior citizens living in nursing homes after cycling in and out of the criminal legal system for decades. Generalizability is not the goal of qualitative scholarship, but researchers should have sufficient exposure to a range of perspectives to ensure that they have a deep understanding of the social phenomena being studied (Small and Calarco 2022). Because of the breadth of venues from which I was able to recruit participants, I am confident that my final sample does not reflect an unusually stable and well-supported swath of formerly incarcerated people, as would have been the case if I only interviewed people receiving services from reentry support organizations.
In addition to seeking diversity in incarceration histories, I also sought variation in time since participants’ release. I tried to ensure that a wide variety of perspectives were represented, including those of the so-called “success stories” who had been successfully desisting from crime for awhile as well as those of participants who were still confronting the tumultuous period of early reentry. Many participants could only estimate the date of their most recent release, but there was significant variation among those participants who were able to do so, with some participants reporting that they had not been incarcerated for 20 or more years and others stating that they had been released mere weeks before the interview.
Finally, I sampled purposively to ensure diversity in race and gender, given public conversations about the Trump administration’s white nationalist agenda (Manza and Crowley 2018; Maskovsky 2021; Thompson 2021). For example, after interviewing mostly Black men, I recruited women by attending an in-person meeting at a local women’s reentry support organization. Many of the women who agreed to participate in an interview with me following this effort were also white, likely because this particular reentry organization served a predominantly white community, unlike most of my other recruitment sites. As a result of this purposive approach, the final sample was fairly evenly split between men (n = 21) and women (n = 23). Twenty-eight participants identified as Black, 10 as white, 5 as Hispanic, and 1 as Cherokee Indian. The larger number of Black participants in this sample is both appropriate and intentional, given Black Americans’ overrepresentation among incarcerated populations in the U.S. (Bureau of Prisons 2025) and the extent to which the incarceration has disproportionately harmed Black communities (Pettit and Western 2004). Participants ranged from 22 to 68 years of age, with an average age of 47 years. Table 1 contains additional details about the study sample.
Demographic Information.
On average, the interviews lasted approximately 75 minutes (with some extending to >2.5 hours), and they consisted of mostly open-ended questions related to participants’ early life-course years, their incarceration experiences, and their sense of civic identity and belonging. In the final segment of the interview, I asked participants questions about their feelings of belonging in the context of their family, community, and nation, and I also asked them about their perceptions of America. For example, I asked, “What do you think it means to be an American?” followed by “How connected do you feel to that idea of being American?” I adjusted the interview guide based on preliminary analysis of early interviews. Because participants repeatedly brought up the political context in early interviews without prompting, for instance, I added two questions to the interview guide: “How do you feel about what is happening in our country politically right now?” and “What are your thoughts on President Trump?” The data for this article thus stems from questions about American politics toward which participants independently veered.
Participants received a $50 e-gift card in recognition of their time and their willingness to share their stories. I informed participants that I would assign them pseudonyms to protect their identities, offering them the option to pick their own pseudonyms if they wished. My own identity as a relatively young, foreign-born woman of color may have facilitated participant’s comfort in sharing their stories with me (especially in the context of race- and immigration-related findings), but it was also clear that many participants simply appreciated the opportunity to talk with someone who occupied an “outsider” status in their lives.
Interviews were transcribed verbatim, and I used an inductive approach to data analysis (Charmaz 2017), which involved an iterative process of data collection and analysis in search of reappearing themes in the data until the point of saturation, when continued data collection was unlikely to yield new findings. Using Atlas.ti, a qualitative data analysis software package, I first read through the 1,518 pages of interview data and developed almost 350 initial codes while searching for emerging patterns in codes across interviews. At this stage, codes were both descriptive (e.g., “marital status,” “employment history”) and analytic (e.g., “stigma,” “desistance motivation”). Next, I performed focused coding, condensing the data by nesting codes within broader and more abstract categories. For example, the findings for this study emerged from codes such as “positive perceptions of President Trump,” which was nested within a broader code titled “perceptions of President Trump.” Other relevant analytic codes for this article included “meanings of being American,” “perception of American politics,” and “feeling American.”
Findings
Participants’ views about President Trump reflected the complexity and heterogeneity that other research on incarcerated and formerly incarcerated Americans has documented (Stewart et al. 2025; Uggen and Manza 2004). Some participants praised President Trump enthusiastically, whereas others became so enraged talking about him that they asked to move on to the next interview topic. Interestingly, participants’ views on President Trump did not vary meaningfully by race, age, gender, or state of residence. 2 The lack of racial variation was particularly surprising, given President Trump’s ethnonationalist agenda (Manza and Crowley 2018; Thompson 2021). Stewart et al. (2025) found that felon status may neutralize other important sources of variation in political preferences (such as race). My sample did not include only people with felonies, but it is possible that the experience of incarceration functions similarly, such that the status of being formerly incarcerated is more important in shaping people’s views on politics than factors such as race. Indeed, Lewis et al. (2024) reported that in a Marshall Project survey of incarcerated people, a majority of respondents said that they would vote for President Trump if given the chance. Although support was particularly strong among white men, a substantial minority of Black men also supported President Trump.
In the absence of patterns based on theoretically meaningful dimensions such as race or gender, I shifted my analysis to explore what a second Trump presidency seems to represent to formerly incarcerated Americans. Seemingly random differences in the data became more coherent as I found patterns in the meanings that participants attach to the second Trump administration. Whether they support or oppose him, formerly incarcerated people’s views on President Trump are shaped by what they believe he and his second presidency symbolize. President Trump, I argue, symbolizes both participants’ vision of America and their own social standing in the nation. More so than previous leaders, he is not simply a president; he is emblematic of America, and, by extension, participants’ own place in the country. For those who support him, President Trump is a maverick whose wealth and courage equip him to speak truth to power and to gatekeep the privilege of being American. For these participants, President Trump, as the first president with felony convictions, also represents the possibility of redemption and second chances in America. President Trump is an equally symbolic figure for his opponents, who view his second presidential term as a pivotal period in American history that threatens to be its downfall.
I explore the deeper meanings formerly incarcerated people attach to President Trump in two sections. First, I describe how narratives of President Trump are connected to the very definition of being American. Here, I show how participants who support President Trump are willing to set aside their concerns about him because of what they believe he represents for the country and for their own identity as Americans. I further demonstrate that his critics view him as similarly symbolic of the meanings and markers of being American, but in ways that undermine their lofty vision of America. Next, I explore the symbolic significance of President Trump’s felony convictions in particular. I show that, for some formerly incarcerated people (many of whom have felony convictions themselves), President Trump symbolizes the elusive hope for a better life.
President Trump as a Symbol of What It Means to Be American
Participants’ narratives about President Trump were often internally incoherent, a fact that Rusty (43, Hispanic) jokingly acknowledged. Rusty was born in a South American country, and he fondly recalled falling in love with America when he moved here at the age of four. Being taken back to his birth country a few years later triggered the onset of mental health issues that plagued Rusty his whole life, resulting in cyclical periods of homelessness and incarceration. Amidst this tumult, one constant in Rusty’s life was his love for America. Rusty believed that President Trump “wants to make the United States a little bit stronger” and that he wants “America as a whole to be more respected.” Rusty worried, however, about the distasteful things that President Trump sometimes says. In his words, “certain things that he says and does, I say to myself, ‘How can this guy be saying this?’” Still, when asked explicitly how he felt about President Trump, Rusty stated that he was a “big Trump fan. Huge, huge, huge fan.”
Toward the end of his interview, Rusty independently returned to the topic of President Trump, acknowledging that his views may have seemed contradictory. He clarified,
We were talking about why I think Trump is doing some of the things he does, and I mentioned that United States can be a little bit chaotic. And that’s some of the reason. And it just so happens that him, himself, he’s a little bit chaotic.
The turmoil that defined the second Trump administration did not erode Rusty’s support for President Trump because he saw it as a reflection of the country itself. To Rusty, therefore, President Trump’s chaotic behavior perfectly captured the very essence of America.
Like Rusty, Steve (28, Black) worried about President Trump’s rashness, specifically expressing concerns that President Trump might declare martial law in America. Steve hoped that Americans would band together to resist any such efforts, especially considering “he’s already trying to break constitutional rights.” Despite these concerns, Steve proudly supported President Trump because he “knows how to play with money.” Janet (60, Black) joked that President Trump was “stupid as hell” but she still liked him because she “[sees] his vision.” Janet had founded three organizations herself, and she often spoke with other Black Americans who supported President Trump because they believed he would protect their interests as business owners. Entrepreneurship is often linked to the “American Dream,” which advances the neoliberal myth that even vulnerable Americans can enjoy a “rags to riches” story if they just work hard enough (Valdez 2015). For socioeconomically disadvantaged, system-impacted Americans, therefore, President Trump symbolized a uniquely American form of success premised on independent pursuit of wealth and social mobility (Valdez 2015).
Participants’ narratives about President Trump also revealed the identity work they performed to cast themselves as superior to other (non-American) people, despite challenges stemming from poverty, addiction, physical and sexual abuse, and homelessness. In the context of such persistent disadvantage, American birthright citizenship was an important axis of privilege that participants fiercely cherished. Some participants denigrated immigrants (often failing to distinguish between documented and undocumented ones), and they praised President Trump for gatekeeping the “American” identity through strict anti-immigrant policies. Franny (57, Black), for example, said that she was “not a Trump fan too much,” but that she appreciated his approach to immigration. She felt that curbing immigration was sensible because “a lot of the foreigners and stuff like that . . . because a lot of the cities are becoming overpopulated.”
In describing why she felt American, Brianna (60, white) expressed gratitude for her American birthright citizenship, explaining that she felt lucky that she could “get up and go” whenever she wished. She acknowledged the vulnerability that noncitizens were facing during the second Trump administration, stating,
All those people need green cards and stuff. You know, if you’re not a citizen of the United States, they sending them back. I’m glad that ain’t me. I was born in the United States. I don’t have to worry about that.
Despite being thankful for her American citizenship, Brianna disliked President Trump and disagreed with his policies, especially as they related to welfare benefits. She explained,
You know, Medicaid, Medicare, stuff like that, that bothers me. Food stamps. Why would you take from the poor when the poor don’t have anything? You know what I mean? Why don’t you go after the billionaires like you. You’re rich, you know?
At the very end of our conversation, Brianna made a passing complaint about traffic in the city where she lived, casually stating that “they need to send some of these people back.” Curious about the potential contradiction in this seemingly anti-immigrant sentiment and Brianna’s earlier scorn for President Trump and his policies, I asked Brianna for clarification. In what followed, Brianna issued a scathing critique of previous leaders’ willingness to let immigrants into the United States, going so far as to say that she was “grateful” for President Trump’s approach to immigration, which represented the “only good thing he is doing.” She praised his effort to build a wall between Mexico and the United States during his first presidency, and she criticized President Biden for later “letting that shit go.” As a result of (what Brianna perceived as) President Biden’s failure to secure the border, she believed that Mexicans had innovated with “underground tunnels,” while Haitians “were coming in on boats.” There were now, in Brianna’s view, simply “too many people.” She elaborated,
They need to go back where they’re from, the countries they come back from. A lot of ’em came in on boats. They don’t even have identity, you know? They don’t even have identification. They don’t belong here. It forces us to have to take care of them. So they’re taking . . . they’re up[ping] the taxes. They’re taking from us, really. That’s how I feel. That has to stop.
Formerly incarcerated people’s biographies virtually precluded alignment with more privileged Americans, but, under President Trump, the mere fact of their shared birthright citizenship meant that they were, in some narrow sense, part of the “in group.” Beyond their support for specific anti-immigrant policies, participants saw President Trump as a guardian of one of the few sources of privileges they had. These findings reveal how people who are usually on the losing end of social stratification processes reproduce these same processes by leveraging whichever axes of privilege they can access. They moreover illuminate the pervasive reach and influence, including among the most marginalized Americans, of the xenophobic impulses that President Trump reaffirms and stokes.
Even participants who saw President Trump as a sinister harbinger of doom in America believed that he was unique in the extent to which he, as a sui generis politician and leader, represented something deeper and more profound about the American nation. Mark (66, Black), for example, did not support the Republican Party, but he drew a sharp distinction between President Trump and previous Republican presidential candidates such as John McCain. Even though he disagreed with these other Republicans’ views, Mark explained that he at least “understood what it meant to be an American, from their perspective.” In Mark’s view, President Trump had “muddied the water” in politics, stripping it of its “decorum” and “respect.” Mark was convinced that “it’s not gonna get better. The world’s gonna get worse under him.”
Tanya (57, Black) expressed similar anxieties about what was going to happen during the second Trump presidency. Tanya was disabled and receiving Social Security benefits at the time of the interview, and she worried about the president obliterating that income stream. Even more concerning was the fact that Tanya had “heard they wanna bring slavery back.” Tanya’s fears, like Mark’s, were existential: they transcended specific policies and instead centered on worries about the social, economic, and political regression that a second Trump presidency might entail. Taken together, these findings highlight that, whether they supported or opposed him, participants’ views on President Trump were deeply connected to broader understandings of America as a nation and the values it purported to uphold.
President Trump and the Changing Implications of Being a “Felon”
In May 2024, a few months before he won both the popular and electoral vote to become the U.S. president for the second time, President Trump was convicted of 34 felonies. He is the only president or former president to be found guilty of a crime. In this section, I unpack what that fact represents to formerly incarcerated people, many of whom themselves have felony convictions.
A few participants regarded President Trump’s conviction history as an unequivocally disheartening indicator of America’s deterioration. Isabel (38, Hispanic), for example, stated that America was “going to shit.” She laughed in disbelief about the fact that America has “a felon as a president,” stating that President Trump’s second term conveyed to the American public that “you can grab her by the pussy and it’s okay.” 3 For Isabel, President Trump’s comments and actions regarding women were decisively damning, and his felony convictions only intensified the contempt she felt toward him.
The picture was more complex for the majority of participants, whose own histories of crime and incarceration meant that the mere fact of President Trump’s convictions was not enough to condemn him. Kyle (40, Black), for example, was frustrated less by the fact that someone with felony convictions could become president and more by the apparent double standard in how society responded to his own felony conviction compared to President Trump’s. Kyle had been out of prison for more than 10 years, but he still could not shake off the yoke of his criminal record. He stated,
This man is the President of the United States. He’s liable for sexual abuse, and he’s a 34-time felon. I can’t get a job working at McDonald’s as a felon, but he could be the President of the United States. I can’t figure that out for the life of me.
Kyle’s scorn for President Trump was partially rooted in the fact that, like Rusty and Steve, he did not see President Trump as just another president; Kyle saw him as emblematic of America. To Kyle, the message Americans sent the world about their country’s values when they voted for President Trump irreversibly undermined his feelings toward his nation. In his words,
I believe that when half of the nation voted for Donald Trump, it was the beginning of the end. I follow history very closely and every great nation fails, and I believe we’re at the tipping point right now. So to get back to your question about the being American, if you had asked me that prior to Trump, it would be a completely different answer than it is now. Like, I love America. I still love America. I love America to death, but I feel like we’re failing the rest of the world.
President Trump’s supporters regarded his felony convictions very differently. Where Kyle and other critics expressed disbelief that America had voted for President Trump after allegations of sexual assault and multiply felony convictions, supporters framed President Trump as a beacon of hope for people like them. Kaylin (46, Black), for example, said, “I hope with the first felon president, we’ll have big, you know, more opportunity.” She facetiously added, “I think now to be an American, I think I can set the bar a little bit higher and say, ‘Hey, I might wanna become president one day [laughs].’” Behind Kaylin’s jokes lay a more sincere and earnest hope: that having a president with multiple felony convictions might improve the lives of all people with felony convictions. As Kaylin explained,
I hope they . . . there’s somebody in his camp who will be like, “look, you are a felon, dah, dah, dah. You became president. There needs to be more opportunity.” I’m not saying to just sit up there and give us, you know what I mean? Like, we got to work. Yeah, but don’t just write us off. They didn’t write you off. You know what I mean?
At the time of the interview, Calvin (44, Black) had been incarcerated 12 or 13 times, but he had been out of prison for three years. Calvin was very proud to be American, and he saw President Trump’s election as epitomizing the opportunity that he believed was a defining feature of America. He explained,
(...) we just elected a man to be our president, and he had 21 felonies. He got more felonies than I do! [Laughter] I can do anything right now. I’ll try to buy me a business and put my name on it.
For participants like Calvin and Kaylin, having a president with felony convictions was meaningful because it symbolized the possibility of a second chance for everyone with a criminal record.
In conclusion, both supporters and opponents of President Trump recognized that his second presidency had brought America to a crucial crossroads. President Trump’s fans and critics alike were now waiting with bated breath to learn whether having a president with a criminal record would lead to genuine and meaningful progress for people like them or if it would instead permanently destroy America’s standing in the world.
Conclusion
Regardless of age, gender, race, and incarceration history, formerly incarcerated people’s mixed perceptions of President Trump reveal that they regard his presidency as distinctively tied to the meanings and markers of being American. To his supporters, President Trump represents opportunity, material success, and hope for redemption. For formerly incarcerated critics, on the other hand, President Trump is rash, prejudiced, and immoral. Even these critics, however, frame President Trump as more than just another name in the long list of American presidents. He represents a meaningful turning point in American history, a social and political regression, and a permanent stain on America’s legacy. Where supporters of President Trump paint him as America’s savior, opponents portray him as America’s doom. In both cases, President Trump symbolizes what America purports to stand for.
Evidence suggests that the hopes of participants like Kaylin and Calvin that having a leader with a criminal record might help all system-impacted people are misplaced. Far from offering people with criminal records more opportunities, President Trump has ended the moratorium on the federal death penalty (The White House 2025c), taken steps to undo bail reform (The White House 2025e), cut funding for projects aimed at improving prison conditions (Vera Institute of Justice 2025), and sought to criminalize homelessness (The White House 2025b). The misalignment between these policies and formerly incarcerated Americans’ hopes again suggests that President Trump’s allure lies partially in what he symbolizes for America, especially as the first president with felony convictions.
These findings have important and urgent implications. Most importantly, they offer us a glimpse into the minds of the Americans who may be most harmed by the Trump administration’s policies related to crime control, punishment, and welfare. Given the uniformly bleak picture that social scientists have painted about the likely impact of these policies on vulnerable Americans, acknowledging that there is a great deal of support for President Trump among formerly incarcerated people despite the risks his policies pose to their lives is paramount. We must moreover recognize that these Americans are not politically apathetic (even if they are politically alienated), and they do have strong opinions on political affairs in America. Accepting these basic facts is the first step in coordinating efforts to educate and empower formerly incarcerated people to take a stand in political matters that may have immense consequences on their lives.
The findings in this study echo Stewart et al.’s (2025) recent argument that we should not simply assume that system-impacted, disenfranchised Americans “uniformly support left-leaning candidates or causes” (p. 23) In fact, Martinez (2024) found that incarcerated people of color who identify as Republican were more likely to have changed their political beliefs since becoming incarcerated, challenging the widespread assumption of liberalism among system-impacted people. Although Stewart et al. found that people with felony convictions were modestly Democrat leaning, my findings, along with other early research on system-impacted Americans’ political preferences (Lewis et al. 2024), suggest that formerly incarcerated Americans have stronger feelings about President Trump than they do about political parties more generally. As we continue to make progress on rolling back felony disenfranchisement laws and granting more system-impacted Americans the right to vote, we must not take for granted that we know how these Americans will vote—if they vote at all (Hjalmarsson and Lopez 2010; White and Nguyen 2022).
We should also be careful not to assume that formerly incarcerated Americans support criminal legal reforms focused on rehabilitation and reintegration instead of punishment simply because of their incarceration histories. Given participants’ approval of punitive anti-immigration policies and the diverse political views they expressed more generally, it is entirely possible that a substantial number of formerly incarcerated Americans support tough-on-crime policies despite their own struggles during and after their incarceration. In exploring why incarcerated Americans may support such conservative political agendas, Martinez (2024) recently argued that the disproportionate violence and abuse that vulnerable people in prison experience may trigger feelings of shame and undermine their self-esteem. In turn, these incarcerated people may reject policies that would benefit them and others like them, instead aligning themselves politically with the interests of dominant (white) America. The damaging impact that forced confinement has on people’s sense of self may thus result in incarcerated people feeling they are unworthy of political engagement and undeserving of support, making them both less likely to vote and more likely to support conservative policies (such as tough-on-crime laws) (Martinez 2024).
Theorizing about the relationship between Black and white men, Fanon ([1952] 1986) argued that social and economic inequalities produce an internalized inferiority whereby “the black man wants to be white” (p. 11). A similar phenomenon may be at play among system-impacted Americans, many of whom face a damning intersection of racial disadvantage and poverty in addition to their system contact, yet still align themselves with conservative political agendas. 4 As Lewis et al. (2024) found, for example, even Black incarcerated men insisted that Democratic welfare policies amounted to inappropriate “spoon-feeding,” while claiming that Republican policies centered on bootstrapping individualism were helpful in weaning people off state support. In disentangling system-impacted Americans’ political views, we should avoid simplistic thinking that reduces these Americans’ rich lives and identities to their marginalization.
Any effort to mobilize formerly incarcerated Americans must attend to the alarming disconnect between formerly incarcerated Americans’ hopes regarding a second Trump presidency and the reality of what is occurring. In doing so, we must be careful not to simply dismiss the views of supporters of President Trump as misguided and naïve. To the contrary, my findings suggest that formerly incarcerated Americans’ support is connected to deeper ideas about what it means to be an American and the privileges that accompany that label. Acknowledging the ways in which being American by birth functions as an axis of privilege among otherwise-disadvantaged populations also highlights the pervasive reach of nationalistic ideologies about America to which even the most vulnerable Americans seem to adhere. These ideologies were at the heart of President Trump’s campaign (Sinha 2025), and they continue to define the current American landscape. Alongside considerations of race, class, and gender, therefore, social scientists should also explore how citizenship shapes experiences of crime, victimization, and punishment at this juncture in American political history.
Above all, I join other scholars in highlighting that formerly incarcerated people are not a politically homogenous group (Stewart et al. 2025). Amidst the ever changing tumult of headlines about the state of American politics, social scientists, civil society groups, and grassroots political organizations must pay greater attention to how system-impacted people think about their own stake in the political system. My findings show that formerly incarcerated people have much to say about what is happening in their country. Failure to listen to their voices risks erasing some of the most marginalized Americans’ perspectives from the story we will ultimately recount about one of the most turbulent periods in American history.
Footnotes
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was funded with support from the Institute for Humane Studies under grant number IHS018180.
1
One participant who reported being incarcerated more times than she could count was not clear about whether she served her longest sentence of one year in jail or prison. As she did not explicitly note that she served time in prison, and as the majority of her time was served in a jail, I did not count her as one of the participants who served a prison sentence.
2
One exception was the finding that women (unsurprisingly) cited President Trump’s history of sexual assault and the Republican party’s curtailing of reproductive rights as sources of their disdain, whereas this theme was entirely absent from men’s narratives.