There is no practical upside for either Trump or the party he leads in continuing to litigate his grievances with Georgia GOP leaders.
There is no practical upside for either Trump or the party he leads in continuing to litigate his grievances with Georgia GOP leaders.
B eyond the gratifying catharsis Donald Trump experiences when he allows himself to litigate his many grievances with his fellow Republicans — foremost among them, their refusal to support his efforts to prevent the certification of the 2020 election results — it’s not clear what tangible benefits the former president accrues from that exercise. But if the advantages are hard to discern, the downsides aren’t.
The most recent target of Trump’s ire is one of his favorites, Georgia governor Brian Kemp. In advance of one of his rallies in the Peach State, Trump took to his proprietary social-media platform to savage Kemp, Kemp’s wife, and Republican secretary of state Brad Raffensperger for letting him down after the 2020 race. “My focus is on 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,” Kemp replied. “You should do the same, Mr. President, and leave my family out of it.”
That was not the end of that. From the rally stage, Trump dwelled at length on his hostility toward the state’s popular Republican governor. Kemp is a “very disloyal person,” Trump said. “Atlanta is like a killing field, and your governor ought to get off his ass and do something about it,” he continued. Fulton County prosecutor “Fani Willis is a good friend of your governor,” Trump alleged to the boos of the Republicans in attendance. “He’s a bad guy, he’s a disloyal guy, and he’s a very average governor,” Trump claimed in one of the dozen or so attacks he directed toward Kemp. “I’m not a fan of your governor.”
Those in the former president’s fan base might approve of such outbursts, but all indications suggest they will not advance his political objectives. In fact, the evidence provided by the collective verdict of Georgia’s voters indicates that this sort of friendly fire actively harms down-ballot Republicans’ prospects.
Trump’s attacks on Kemp et al. reprise the talk in which he engaged in the runup to the certification of the 2020 election results, and the effect of that rhetoric was to depress Republican voters. Then as now, Trump vilified Georgia officials, including Kemp and Raffensperger, savaging them for refusing to echo his claims that electoral malfeasance robbed him of the 12,000 or so votes he needed to win the state.
Through it all, Republican strategists wrung their hands. As the New York Times reported in advance of two runoff elections for U.S. Senate in Georgia, “the concern all along has been that Mr. Trump’s effort to undermine the election process will depress turnout in the runoff, partly because he has stoked beliefs that the system itself is rigged and cannot be trusted.” In the end, that’s exactly what happened.
“Over 752,000 Georgia voters who cast ballots in the presidential election didn’t show up again for the runoffs just two months later,” an analysis published in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution found. “More than half of the no-shows were white, and many lived in rural areas, constituencies that lean toward Republican candidates.”
Trump’s supporters are quick to absolve the former president of any responsibility for the simultaneous defeat of both of Georgia’s Republican senators. After all, he did, albeit perfunctorily, urge Republicans in the state to get out and vote for Senators Kelly Loeffler and David Purdue. And the state’s GOP-leaning areas were wallpapered with billboards and flooded with advertising exhorting them to go to the polls and vote for the Republican ticket. Those whispered asides just did not persuade Republicans to ignore the stolen-election claims about which Trump was much more passionate.
As one Georgia Republican voter told National Review at the time, “If they can steal the other one, they can steal this one.” After all, “if it’s rigged,” another GOP voter said of the runoffs, “there’s no point in it.” These sentiments had broad purchase among the state’s Republicans. “I won’t [vote] next time unless they give us a clean election with paper ballots, IDs, and fingerprints,” one dispirited Republican told reporters. “I feel like they’re both part of the deep state,” another said of the GOP’s incumbent candidates. “I believe it’s a selection, not an election,” a third agreed.
Despite the efforts of those who insist they have a more sophisticated and nuanced understanding of Trump’s sophistry to soften his image, the former president’s grassroots supporters tend to take him both seriously and literally. Trump’s attacks on the Republicans overseeing the state’s elections had the foreseeable effect of discouraging the GOP rank and file. Even if that effect was only on the margins, the margins matter in close races.
One of the most obviously observable effects of Kamala Harris’s replacement of Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket has been to put Georgia back in play in November. At the moment, the race looks like it will be closely decided. Perhaps, unlike in January 2021, Donald Trump’s presence on the ballot will compel dispirited Georgia Republicans to turn out regardless of their misgivings about the state’s GOP. But maybe Trump’s bitterness will rub many of them raw enough that they wash their hands of participating in the political process entirely.
Either way, there is no practical upside for either Trump or the party he leads in continuing to litigate his grievances with the Georgia GOP. Except for the psychological satisfaction he derives from this exercise in spleen venting at a time when his campaign is experiencing a dearth of good news, it’s unclear what Trump gets out of these outbursts. We can say with certainty that attacks on the GOP from its leader only undermine the party’s position. Trump must know that by now. So why is he still picking at his old wounds?