Despite advice from his own inner circle, Donald Trump launched an attack on Gov. Brian Kemp (R-GA) that has his campaign staffers and allies trying to repair the damage two weeks later over fears he may have irreparably crippled his re-election chances.
According to a report from Politico, Trump's fury over a report that the popular Kemp's wife said she would write in her husband's name on her November ballot set off a chain of events that led to what some staffers called a "nuclear explosion" by the former president.
Despite advice from his aides to let it pass, as well as appeals to Kemp himself to help calm the waters, the former president used a speech in battleground Georgia to attack the popular southern governor, calling him, among other things, " ... a bad guy. He’s a disloyal guy. And he’s a very average governor.”
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As Politico's Natalie Allison, Meridith McGraw and Brittany Gibson are rerporting, those comments could cost him the state that was pivotal to Joe Biden defeating Trump in 2020.
The report states, "Trump’s allies, worried that feuding with the popular swing state governor could hurt Trump’s prospects in the state, encouraged him not to give the comment oxygen. Republicans in Georgia at the time were scrambling to further ease tensions between Trump and Kemp ahead of the November election, including at the April fundraiser luncheon in Buckhead that Trump had just attended."
Since that time, "The eruption unnerved Trump’s Republican allies — and marked a potential turning point in his presidential campaign in a key state. Kemp not only controls a vaunted turnout operation in Georgia but also has a track record of assembling the kind of coalition of traditionalist Republicans and independents that Trump will be counting on to carry the swing state in November."
With the report noting Trump's allies believed he "went too far," a Georgia GOP operative revealed, "The Trump campaign was calling around to legislators … asking them to post positive things about the rally on social media and were being told, ‘No.'"
Another Georgia Republican contributed, "I think what it does is it puts more pressure on the Trump organization in the state when you’re essentially operating without any help from the incumbent governor. And so the Trump team’s going to have a lot of pressure in Georgia to get it right.”
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