(CNN) -- In the beginning, they didn't care for Donald Trump.

"Trump's a buffoon," David Searles said before casting a vote for Marco Rubio in the New Hampshire primary.

"He scares me," Rebecca Meyer said before settling on Ben Carson in South Carolina's primary.

"He's not presidential," Gail Francioli said after backing Ohio Gov. John Kasich in that state's primary.

Yet like nearly nine out of 10 Republicans nationwide, Searles, Meyer and Francioli supported Trump in the general election. And like the vast majority of Republicans, they support him still.

In fact, these one-time-skeptics are part of the bulwark that is bolstering a President whose first month in office roiled the nation.

Consider Wendy Housel of Summerville, South Carolina. She was so distraught by her party's nominee that she cried in the voting booth. She cast a ballot for Trump anyway, and prayed it was the right thing to do.

Now? "So far, I've liked what I've seen," Housel said.

While reporting on the presidential campaign for CNN's book, "Unprecedented: The Election That Changed Everything," I interviewed voters in disparate regions of America. I attended rallies for all the major candidates, as well as both parties' conventions. Perhaps not surprisingly, given the size of the GOP field, most Republicans told me they didn't initially back Trump. Even some people who voted for him in the primaries did so only because their first and, at times, second choices had dropped out.

Trump's provocative comments about women and minorities -- including assertions that Mexican immigrants were "rapists," that he could grab women's genitals with impunity and that African Americans had never been worse off than they were last year -- along with his misrepresentation of facts and tendency to boast gave Democrats hope that significant numbers of Republicans, particularly women, would cross party lines and vote for Hillary Clinton. They did not.

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