The Orange County Register
Anaheim, California (TNS)
Over the weekend while visiting the key state of Georgia, former president Donald Trump decided it was a good idea to attack the state’s popular Republican governor, Brian Kemp.
“If it wasn’t for me, he wouldn’t be your governor,” Trump told a crowd in Atlanta on Saturday. “I think everybody knows that. He’s a very disloyal person — very disloyal.”
Trump went on to call Kemp “Little Brian” and described him as a “very average governor.”
Trump’s hostility toward Kemp traces back to the 2020 presidential election. Trump lost Georgia by about 12,000 votes, earning 49.24% of the vote compared to 49.47% of the vote received by Joe Biden.
While a manual recount confirmed that Biden won, Trump at the time sought to pressure Kemp and Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to somehow find that he was the rightful winner.
Trump even took to Twitter on December 30, 2020, to call on Kemp to resign, calling him an “obstructionist who refuses to admit that we won Georgia.”
Just days later, Trump talked to Raffensperger in a lengthy phone call that was recorded. Trump insisted in that call that he had actually won Georgia by thousands of votes. This is when Trump said, “I just want to find 11,780 votes.”
He repeated this appeal, saying, “So what are we going to do here folks? I only need 11,000 votes. Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break.”
And then Trump escalated this with threats toward Raffensperger. “You know what they did and you’re not reporting it,” Trump said. “You know, that’s a criminal offence. And you know, you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan [Germany], your lawyer. That’s a big risk.”
Luckily, neither Kemp nor Raffensperger allowed themselves to be bullied by Trump and refused to go along with his anti-democratic scheme to conjure up votes which didn’t exist.
In 2022, Trump backed a primary challenge against Kemp, who successfully fended that off and went on to easily be re-elected with 53.41% of the vote compared to 45.88% of the vote for Democrat Stacey Abrams. Raffensperger likewise fended off a primary challenge and was re-elected with a 10-percentage point lead over his Democratic challenger.
And so, it is in this context that Trump decided to rehash an old dispute in which Trump was obviously in the wrong. And not only in the wrong, but at odds with an electorate in Georgia that has proven fully willing to vote Republican.
With recent polling showing that Vice President Kamala Harris is narrowing the gap with Trump by the day, it is absurd for Trump to bring back to mind his worst moments as president. It won’t do him or downballot Republicans any good.
