Bikers for Trump

Overview

When you hear “Bikers for Trump,” you probably picture one roaring column of motorcycles rolling behind Donald Trump’s campaign from 2015 onward. The people who built it say that’s wrong. According to an account published in 2025 by the Pittman family — Casper “RC” Pittman and Bernadette “Bernie” Pittman — “Bikers for Trump” was never one organization but a cluster of rival networks, and in October 2024 the two most visible of them walked away from the name: Chris Cox’s operation became Bikers for America, and George Colella’s Bikers for 45 became Bikers for 47, leaving only the Pittmans’ own Boots on the Ground chapter still flying the original flag. (Bikers for Trump – Boots on the Ground)

That reshuffle barely registers in press coverage, and it complicates everything underneath it — including the founding story itself. Cox told a Gannett paper in September 2016 that he founded “this group” back in August 2015 in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, and drew between 50 and 70 people to its first rally. (The News Journal / Beacon Journal) The Pittmans date their Northwest Florida founding chapter to June 2015 and write that “in March 2016, Chris Cox formed his own network of Bikers for Trump.” (Bikers for Trump – Boots on the Ground) Meanwhile, Al Jazeera’s on-the-ground report from the 2017 inauguration described a single organization — Cox as founder, RC Pittman as vice president — which is how the group presented itself publicly at the time. (Al Jazeera) This profile doesn’t crown one origin story; the records themselves are the story.

The network everyone remembers — Cox’s — is the one that mattered most in press terms. Cox was a 48-year-old chainsaw wood carver from Virginia, per Al Jazeera, who had already made news in 2013 for cutting the lawn of the Lincoln Memorial during the federal government shutdown. (Al Jazeera) By his telling, the group started in mid-2015 with just over 100 people; by the January 2017 inauguration he described it as a 200,000-strong movement. (Al Jazeera)

From rallies to a “wall of meat”

The group’s signature posture was born out of the 2016 campaign’s clashes. Cox told NPR that his bikers had “served as human barriers, if you will” at Trump events, and that police had done a better job keeping order “since Chicago and Arizona — things got really out of hand,” referring to the Chicago rally that protesters forced the campaign to cancel. (NPR) When asked whether loud, leather-clad bikers might intimidate protesters and chill free speech, Cox pushed back: “We embrace the free speech. We have never done anything to intimidate anybody.” (NPR)

Cox laid out the group’s pitch in three parts, in his words: radical Islam (“who’s going to get behind and fight ISIS?”), illegal immigration (a border wall and vetting of Syrian refugees — “it doesn’t make us racists. It makes us patriots”), and backing American veterans. (NPR) He credited Trump with having “almost single-handedly untied the tongue of America,” arguing that political correctness had silenced ordinary people afraid of being called racist. (NPR)

That same month, May 2016, Trump addressed the Rolling Thunder rally in Washington — the annual Memorial Day weekend ride honoring POWs and MIAs — and took its endorsement, with Cox and his bikers in the crowd. (NPR) By September, at a rally at the Oasis Bar ‘N Grill in Whaleyville, Maryland, Cox said recent rallies were drawing up to 40,000 people and the group’s Facebook page had 117,818 likes — a long way from the 50-to-70-person start. (The News Journal / Beacon Journal)

The 2017 inauguration was the group’s high-water mark as street theater. Cox promised that “in the event that we are needed, we will certainly form a wall of meat. We’ll be shoulder-to-shoulder with our brothers. And we’ll be toe-to-toe with anyone who’s going to break through police barricades.” (Al Jazeera) Bikers for Trump was the only pro-Trump group granted a permit for inauguration day, providing the halftime entertainment at John Marshall Park along the parade route on Pennsylvania Avenue, with about 5,000 riders expected to roll through the capital after the ceremony (bikes were not permitted in the city during the ceremony itself). (Al Jazeera)

The political machine that never quite was

After 2016, Cox tried to turn the movement into a real political operation. By August 2020 he had registered a political action committee, built a Facebook group past 350,000 followers, and collected 180,000 mailing-list signups. (Associated Press) The plan was to convert rally energy into votes: at the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally that month, Cox staged nightly “Trump rallies” atop bars, reciting the Pledge of Allegiance and the national anthem with the crowd, and named the six battleground states he said the campaign needed — Wisconsin, North Carolina, Arizona, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida. (Associated Press)

The AP dispatch captured the limits of that ambition in the same breath. Turning rally-goers into registered voters was proving hard, and Cox had felt it personally: his bid to represent South Carolina in Congress took under 10% of the vote in the 2020 Republican primary. (Associated Press) He had also been enlisting bikers to give Amish and Mennonite Trump supporters motorcycle rides to rallies in Pennsylvania — a small, odd, genuinely distinctive get-out-the-vote tactic. (Associated Press) The Trump campaign, for its part, treated Cox as an asset: political director Chris Carr told a rally crowd, “Chris Cox right here is a huge ally. The president loves this man.” (Associated Press)

The book deal: five dollars a copy

One of the group’s odder revenue streams came through a book. In October 2019, author Trisha Hope — a Trump rally regular who published Just the Tweets, a collection of the president’s posts — teamed up with Bikers for Trump on a fundraising deal announced live on The Sean Hannity Show from the Minnesota rally: $5.00 of the proceeds from each book sale would go to Bikers for Trump when buyers used the coupon code “bikers.” (Everand)

What this profile does not claim

It does not settle the founding-date dispute — the Pittmans’ June 2015, Cox’s August 2015, and the March 2016 “own network” account all come from the sources named, and the profile presents them as competing claims. It does not independently confirm the October 2024 renames to Bikers for America and Bikers for 47; that rests on the Pittmans’ first-party account alone. It does not assert the FEC-derived financial figures ($427,345.65 raised from January 2021 to December 2022, the $100,000 Save America disbursement, or the reported 2023 debt), which could not be verified from an independently fetched source. It does not assert the frequently repeated claims of 30,000 members in 2016 or a 70% military-background membership, which are self-reported and unverified here. And it does not repeat the allegation that a rival using the “Bikers4Trump” name defrauded Trump supporters — a claim made only by the group’s own side with no reliable independent reporting to support it.