ICYMI, reads the introduction to the email in the inbox. In Case You Missed It: If You Missed It.
It’s a statement from former President Donald Trump’s Political Committee Save America. The trump camp thinks I should read a text by right-wing writer Emerald Robinson. It is about the primary election in Georgia which was decided at the end of May. I was there, but it was certainly something I overlooked.
Something stinks, says Emerald Robinson. She is outraged that incumbent Gov. Brian Kemp won a landslide victory over Trump’s candidate David Perdue in the Republican Party’s internal power struggle.
Kemp won with the numbers 74-22. That is not possible, no one gets 74 percent in any single election in the United States. Robinson claims.
Do you recognize the tones?
When things go wrong for Trump spreads Trump camp conspiracy theories about cheating. Just like after the presidential election in 2020. Then the then president refused to accept that he lost by a narrow margin in Georgia. He was particularly upset when the Republicans in the state, led by Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, testified that the election went right.
In the New Year of 2021, he made the phone call that can not be described as anything other than a political scandal: a sitting president urged a politician in a significant wave-master state to simply find enough votes to change the election result. But Raffensperger, who got Trump on the phone, refused.
The primary election – where the parties nominate the candidates for the midterm elections in November – would be Trump’s great revenge. But it did not go at all as planned in Georgia. Both Kemp and Raffensperger actually won with much larger margins of victory than the opinion polls predicted.
In the letter from Save America Emerald Robinson portrays Trump’s support as the strongest force in American politics. This is not without reason, because before Georgia, the primary election seemed to consolidate the image of Trump as the Republican Party’s kingmaker or godfather. Many of his candidates have been knocked out.
Senator Rand Paul received over 86 percent in Kentucky. Sarah Huckabee Sanders was supported by over 83 percent in the primary election in her campaign to become governor of Arkansas. To take a few examples of politicians who won elections this spring with significantly larger margins of victory than the one that Emerald Robinson incorrectly described as impossible.
She’s a journalist who was allowed to leave the right-wing channel Newsmax after spreading lies about the covid-19 vaccine.
But she’s not alone in speculating about what really happened in Georgia, and what happened to Trump’s grip on the Republican Party.
Have the core voters tired, in the end?
Maybe it’s more about even loyal support troops starting to feel that the kneading is – a little sad.
The night before the primary election in Georgia Brian Kemp campaigned with former Vice President Mike Pence on an airstrip northwest of Atlanta. Then I met – as so many times before – some Republicans who were leading Trump. They were the kind of Americans who feel 100 percent at home on the right, who like guns, fight abortions, want to keep taxes down and think that the left’s fight against racism has derailed. But they detest Trump’s tone and snort at the conspiracy theories about the rigged election.
But I also talked to voters who said they loved Donald Trump. They just happened to like the governor too, and thought it was most important right now.
A man told me that he lost patience with Trump ahead of the Senate re-election in January last year. While Trump and his associates fought by all means to reverse the election loss, Georgia had to go to the polls again, to appoint the state’s two senators. The majority in the important Senate was at stake.
But Trump’s campaign efforts were only about how he was robbed of the election victory. If anything, it was a rhetoric that discouraged right-wing voters from engaging in more allegedly rigged elections. Democratic candidates secured both seats.
Trump did nothing for Georgia, the man thought.
During his years as a presidential candidate and President Trump never ceased to surprise. Today, his performances are based on pure reruns. The media that are “fake news”, Fake News. Right-wing politicians who are Rinos, Republicans just by name. (AND) The big election victory 2020 that only exists in the Trump camp’s imagination and propaganda.
Finally or finally, Trump has become bored, Rick Lowry writes in a column for Politico Magazine. He is the editor of the Conservative National Review and belongs to the Republican establishment that has struggled with the view of Trump. There can be a measure of wishful thinking – he admits it – when he now tries to portray the former president as predictable and even single-minded.
But this is Lowry’s point: six years ago, Trump at least put the spotlight on white low-skilled industrial workers and rural residents, with proposals ranging from migration to the opioid crisis.
Then the main message was that “only I can fix this”. Now the slogan is rather that “only I can be so fixated”.
Georgia became a signal that voters want to look ahead, rather than want to break with Trump. Possibly the margins were larger than expected because Democrats chose to run in the Republican primary. I met some of them at the polls and they told me that they had chosen to try to block Trump’s candidates at all costs. They will not vote for the Republicans in the November election, but could damage Trump’s image as a kingmaker anyway.
However, the former president gets more chances to act as godfather. On Tuesday, seven more states will hold primary elections and Trump has given his blessing to candidates such as Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Governor Kristi Noem of South Dakota.
On Saturday, there is a filling election to the House of Representatives in Alaska and former Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin are fighting for the seat. Later this summer, Kari Lake can secure the party’s support in the Arizona gubernatorial election. Both have been hugely embraced by Trump. You can say a lot about them – but the judgment “boring” is not close at hand.
In mid-August, the big battle for Wyoming’s only seat in the House of Representatives takes place. By all accounts, the Trump camp has a good chance of getting rid of Liz Cheney – the congressman who had the audacity to try to get to the bottom of what was going on in the White House during the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
On Thursday, the congress begins special review group – led by Cheney – public hearings on the riot. It’s hard to say how the interrogations will affect Trump’s grip on Republicans. The party leaders in the House of Representatives have distanced themselves from the investigation. They want to get along well with Trump – although it will probably be easier if they can leave what happened from November 2020 to January 2021 there.
Facts. Primary
In the mid-term elections in November, all seats in the House of Representatives and one third of the seats in the Senate will be filled. In addition, 36 states hold gubernatorial elections.
During the spring and summer primary elections, the parties’ candidates are appointed. On Tuesday, June 7, primary elections will be held in California, Iowa, Mississippi, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico and South Dakota.
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Trump’s setback in Georgia’s primary election
Clear victory for controversial Republican in primary election