In one of his first big battleground-state rallies after Kamala Harris replaced Joe Biden as his opponent, Donald Trump went off the rails on Saturday in Atlanta with unprovoked attacks on Georgia’s Republican governor Brian Kemp and his wife. Kemp is the very popular chief executive with absolutely the best political organization in the state — you know, the organization on which Trump might rely for a crucial win in November. But the 45th president apparently could not help himself from making what some local Republicans called a “politically stupid” move.
There’s something about Georgia that seems to bring out the worst in Donald Trump. He did win the state by a comfortable margin in 2016, though he underperformed Mitt Romney’s percentage from 2012. During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, he got into an avoidable spat with Kemp, who annoyed him by reopening businesses at a faster pace than Trump recommended. Then he got into a much bigger fight with both Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger when these two Republicans certified Biden’s narrow Georgia win in 2020; Raffensperger then refused Trump’s possibly criminal demand that he “find” enough votes to reverse the outcome. Worse yet, by loudly and frequently claiming that Georgia’s election machinery was “rigged,” Trump likely discouraged enough Republicans from voting to cost his party two crucial U.S. Senate seats in a January 2021 runoff, giving Democrats trifecta control of Congress along with the White House.
In 2022, Trump instigated a spectacularly unsuccessful attempt to purge Kemp and Raffensperger, who both trounced Trump’s chosen candidates in the GOP primary. In November, the statewide candidate closest to Trump, Herschel Walker, proceeded to lose a winnable Senate race in what was otherwise a very good Republican year in Georgia.
2024 initially looked like the year Trump might get the loser label off his back in Georgia; he easily won the state’s presidential primary, and he led Biden there in every single public poll of the general-election race, often by robust margins (e.g., by nine points in a gold-standard New York Times–Siena survey in May). But now Trump seems determined to help put Georgia back on the table for Kamala Harris, even as the first few polls with her as the Democratic candidate show a tightened race (Emerson and Trafalgar Group–Insider Advantage have given Trump a two-point lead, while Bloomberg–Morning Consult shows the race tied in Georgia).
This is the moment when Trump decided to reignite his losing battle with Brian Kemp, as the local Fox News affiliate reported:
At Saturday’s rally, Trump assailed Kemp in a roughly 10-minute tirade, blaming him for his loss to Democratic President Joe Biden and for not stopping a local district attorney from prosecuting him and several associates for his efforts to overturn the results.
“He’s a bad guy. He’s a disloyal guy. And he’s a very average governor,” Trump said. “Little Brian, little Brian Kemp. Bad guy.”
As the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Greg Bluestein observed, Trump picked a weird time to call off the truce he’s had with Kemp since “little Brian” kicked his butt in 2022:
For months, Trump had refrained from publicly feuding with Kemp and other Republicans he wrongly blamed for his 2020 election defeat. And now, with the race in Georgia tighter than ever against Vice President Kamala Harris, he chose to reopen the raw rift? …
Martha Zoller, a conservative commentator, could only cringe at what she described as a massive miscalculation. Enthusiastic Democrats are closing ranks around Harris, and senior Republicans worry they need Kemp and his potent political network more than ever.
“Trump is under the misconception that MAGA Republicans are a majority of the electorate,” Zoller said. “And he is alienating people instead of bringing them together.”
Kemp, of course, is no stranger to the barrage of Trump insults. But dragging his wife Marty into the back-and-forth on the cusp of an election crossed a red line. Kemp made that clear in a scathing response that ended with six words.
“Leave my family out of it.”
Kemp, who might have aspirations for higher office when his second and final term ends in 2026, may begin to wonder if he really wants Trump back in the White House, burning with apparently inextinguishable wrath at the Georgia Republicans who refused to help him overturn the election results in 2020. Without question, the Harris campaign should take a serious look at Georgia and its 16 electoral votes.
