IT’S GRATUITOUS TO LIGHT YOURSELF on fire twice in one week—even if you’re Donald Trump. But following his epic turn at the National Association of Black Journalists conference three days before, the former president had another mega-tantrum Saturday night, this time in a key swing state.
The most bizarre moment at the Atlanta rally came when Trump congratulated Vladimir Putin “for having made another great deal”—his awkward and grossly un-American attempt to criticize the extraordinary images of political prisoners returning safely home from Russia and being greeted on the tarmac by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
But the main focus of Trump’s rage was Georgia’s popular governor, Brian Kemp, who refused to steal the election for Trump in 2020 and who didn’t attend his rally. Trump launched his attack before even landing in the state, blasting Kemp that morning on Truth Social and then continuing it throughout a lengthy grievance-fest that night, saying “He’s a bad guy, he’s a disloyal guy, and he’s a very average governor.”
Share
Trump also blasted the governor’s wife, who said she wrote her husband’s name on her presidential primary ballot. And he took a whack at Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who famously turned down Trump’s request to find him 11,780 votes in December 2020. Trump, indicted in Georgia for his efforts to overturn the results there in 2020, blamed both Kemp and Raffensperger for the charges and lied again about 2020, telling the crowd “I won this state twice.”
He didn’t stop there: Trump accused the two officials of sabotaging their own party. “They’re doing everything possible to make 2024 difficult for Republicans to win” in Georgia, he said. “In my opinion, they want us to lose.”
Trump was really only sabotaging his own campaign with those remarks. Kemp enjoys broad support in the Georgia GOP. He fended off a Trump-driven effort to block his re-election in 2022. After Trump helped Democrats defeat both of Georgia’s GOP senators, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, in the January 2021 runoffs—by saying the state’s elections were rigged—he convinced Perdue to challenge Kemp in the gubernatorial primary the following year. Despite Trump’s backing, Perdue lost to Kemp by 52 points and Kemp went on to easily beat Stacey Abrams that fall, 53–46.
Kemp has built a formidable political network, and Republicans believe Trump needs that network to turn the Peach State red this fall. For his part, Kemp has said he plans to vote for Trump in November, and he responded to Trump’s antagonism in a statement on Saturday evening saying his focus remained “winning this November and saving our country from Kamala Harris and the Democrats—not engaging in petty personal insults, attacking fellow Republicans, or dwelling on the past. You should do the same, Mr. President, and leave my family out of it.”
PEACH STATE REPUBLICANS are despairing over Trump’s performance, and have rallied behind Kemp.
“A lot of Republicans like me might just decide not to vote at all in the presidential election because of stupid antics like tonight,” Allen Peake, a former GOP state legislator, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “Trump may have just lost Georgia.”
“Over 30,000 people refused to vote for [Trump] in 2020 and he lost by about 12,000 votes,” Erick Erickson, the conservative radio host from Georgia, told Politico. “All he’s doing is reminding everyone why they don’t like him. And he has no Georgia ground game and will have to rely on Kemp. It’s going to hurt him.”
Not long ago Trump was credited, after he cruised through a nearly effortless primary, with a new “discipline” he hadn’t demonstrated as a candidate in 2020 or 2016. Some believed that it came from his fear of incarceration—that winning is even more important to him now that he is trying to avoid being convicted in two federal criminal cases. But it turns out that Trump’s willingness to behave as a quasi-disciplined candidate resulted from confidence, not fear. He has been beating Joe Biden in general election polling—including in the battleground states—for a year.
Get 20% off for 1 year
Then there was transcendent Trump, who, having almost been assassinated, was grateful for his life and acted like it for a few days. He sat in the front row every night at the GOP’s kumbaya convention in Milwaukee, where Republicans marveled at their level of party “unity.”
Now his trajectory to victory has been knocked off course by Harris’s candidacy—and the surprising energy it has inspired. The polls are tightening, and in many she is ahead now, so Trump is terrified and self-destructing.
A new CBS News poll out Sunday showed Trump is up over Harris in Georgia 50–47, as she improves over President Joe Biden’s polling position. She is up 50–49 over Trump nationally, and they are tied 50–50 in the battlegrounds on average. The increased enthusiasm among black registered voters—16 percent more say they will now definitely vote than would for Biden—is a threat to Trump in Sun Belt states that are more diverse than the Midwest battlegrounds. More than 30 percent of Georgia’s electorate is made up of black voters. And a Harris campaign official told the Washington Post that 1,000 voters signed up to volunteer in Georgia after her Atlanta rally last week.
Share The Bulwark
TRUMP NEEDS GEORGIA far more than he did a month ago when he was threatening Biden’s hold in blue states like Virginia, New Hampshire, Minnesota, and New Mexico. Certainly he wants to win Georgia. But he demands bent knees, and prizes dominance above all else. His pathologies subsume his ambition and fear makes him fight. He doesn’t exactly know how to campaign against Harris so he’s resorting to campaigning against Republicans—it’s what he does when he’s down. That’s what he was doing in January 2021 when he tanked Loeffler’s and Perdue’s Senate bids. He spewed his Big Lie at the infamous airport hangar rally in Dalton, Georgia on January 4; the next day, the GOP lost both Senate seats. Congress convened with a Democratic Senate majority the morning of January 6. The GOP cave to Trump—in the face of that defeat and that day’s insurrection—has brought the party to where it is now.
This is epitomized by Sen. Lindsey Graham, who tried to break from Trump that fateful day but couldn’t stomach it. There he was Sunday morning, back on television repeating his pathetic routine where he gently attempts to cajole Trump to return to good behavior, saying “let’s win an election we can’t afford to lose.”
Democrats forced Biden from the ticket because their party wants to win elections. Republicans soothe the fragile emotions of a monstrous person while placing the entire party at risk down ballot. It helped them lose elections in 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023—and even 2024 when Rep. Tom Suozzi won former Rep. George Santos’s old seat by campaigning on how Trump sank the immigration deal just to hurt Biden and the Democrats.
It must be fun.
Brighten someone’s inbox or social-media feed—send them this article:
Share
