By Noah Rothman
Monday, August 05, 2024
Beyond 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?
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