About a week ago, Sen. JD Vance appeared on Fox News and assured the public that Donald Trump is not a “vengeful guy.” By all appearances, the Ohio Republican wasn’t kidding — though the comment was unintentionally hilarious to those of us familiar with the former president’s record.
Six days after Vance’s on-air declaration, Trump proved his hapless running wrong in spectacular fashion. The Associated Press reported:
Donald Trump picked a new fight Saturday with Georgia’s Republican governor as he campaigned in the key swing state where he’s looking to avenge his narrow 2020 loss — a defeat he continues to blame on GOP officials for not giving into his false theories of election fraud.
The new offensive against Brian Kemp, Georgia’s incumbent GOP governor, began in earnest on Saturday afternoon, when Trump posted an odd screed to his social media platform. To hear the former president tell it, the governor only won the office because of Trump’s support, and years later, the former president is blaming Kemp for his state’s crime rates and underwhelming economy.
The missive went on to call the conservative governor a “bad guy,” who could’ve derailed Trump’s criminal prosecution in the state “with a phone call.”
Hours later, the GOP presidential nominee kept going. As a Washington Post report summarized, “Trump mocked him sarcastically and called him ‘Little Brian’; repeatedly called him ‘disloyal’; blamed Kemp for Trump being charged in Georgia by a prosecutor whom Kemp has criticized; suggested Kemp wanted Republicans to lose elections; and argued Georgia would have better crime and economic numbers if Kemp were no longer governor.”
That’s really just a sampling. Trump also targeted the governor’s wife and goaded his followers into booing their own home state’s Republican governor. It’d probably be an overstatement to say the 2024 candidate attacked Kemp more than Vice President Kamala Harris, but it was close.
Perhaps most importantly, though, the former president singled out the Georgia governor for failing to commit election fraud to benefit him in 2020.
Trump is going all in on attacking Brian Kemp for not helping him steal the 2020 election: “Kemp is very bad for the Republican Party. He wouldn’t do anything.”
Trump complains about Kemp preventing Georgia Republicans from having a special session to “go over” the 2020 results pic.twitter.com/wYma0ohubY
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 3, 2024
It was only natural to wonder why in the world the Republican Party’s presidential nominee would repeatedly attack a GOP governor, in his own competitive state, with three months remaining before Election Day. Indeed, Georgia Republicans were apparently baffled by Trump’s offensive.
But the man the public saw on the stage in Atlanta was a familiar figure: Kemp didn’t help Trump cheat four years ago, and he did little to boost his primary candidacy four months ago, so the former president felt justified in throwing a tantrum — indifferent to electoral and/or strategic considerations.
For Democrats, the spectacle was notable, not just because of the inherent value in seeing Trump invest so much energy into attacking an ostensible ally, but also because of the larger messaging.
The night President Joe Biden ended his re-election campaign, someone overnight who works in Democratic politics sent me a text that said a Harris-Trump match-up would be “the future vs the past.” The Republican nominee would be on the ballot for the third consecutive cycle, the argument went, while the Democratic nominee would offer voters something new and exciting, despite being an incumbent vice president.
The point was obvious: In a contest between stale and fresh, bet on the latter.
It was against this backdrop that Trump went to Atlanta, lied about his 2020 defeat (again), lashed out at local officials (again), targeted an intraparty foe’s spouse (again), recycled derisive nicknames (again), and even congratulated Russia’s Vladimir Putin (again).
It’s as if Trump heard about “the future vs the past” framing and decided to help prove the point.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
Source Agencies
