ATLANTA – When Former President Donald Trump took to the stage in Atlanta over the weekend he didn’t only focus his fire on Vice President Kamala Harris and Democrats, he also took shots at another Republican: Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp.
“Your Governor Kemp and [Georgia Secretary of State Brad] Raffensperger, they’re doing everything possible to make 2024 difficult for Republicans to win,” said Trump. “What are they doing? I don’t know. They’ve got something in mind. You know, they’ve got a little something in mind. Kemp is very bad for the Republican party.”
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Trump also criticized Kemp and his wife on Truth Social, and the governor responded.
“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. You should do the same, Mr. President, and leave my family out of it,” he posted on “X,” formerly known as Twitter.
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.
— Brian Kemp (@BrianKempGA) August 3, 2024
You should do the same, Mr. President, and leave my family out of it. pic.twitter.com/m8y6CSuZKY
News4JAX Political Analyst Rick Mullaney said this appears to be a very personal issue for Trump because of his unproven claims about election fraud in 2020 along with Kemp not endorsing Trump in the Republican primary.
“When he is attacking a very popular governor in Georgia in a swing state that is crucial to election rather than aiming his comments toward his opponent Kamala Harris, I think most would tell you, strategically, he’s not serving his campaign very well,” Mullaney said.
Georgia is likely to see another closely contested election as both campaigns push hard in the state, with Democrats riding a new wave of enthusiasm after President Joe Biden dropped his reelection bid and endorsed Harris. To win this time, Trump will likely need the support both of Kemp’s political operation and from moderate and conservative voters who aren’t as committed to him as members of his base.
Going to Atlanta put Trump in the state’s largest media market, including suburbs and exurbs that were traditional Republican strongholds but have become more competitive as they’ve diversified and grown in population. Thousands of supporters packed the same arena for a Harris rally days earlier.
Biden beat Trump in the state by 11,779 votes in 2020. Trump pressured Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to change the outcome and his allies tried to present slates of so-called “fake electors” that could replace the Democratic voters Biden won.
Trump was later indicted in Georgia for his efforts to overturn the election, but the case remains on hold while courts decide whether the Fulton County district attorney can continue to prosecute it.
Kemp certified the electors that Biden won four years ago and repeatedly rejected efforts by Trump allies to replace them. He’s since proven to be the rare Republican nationally who could hold his ground against Trump without sacrificing his power or popularity, with 63% of Georgians approving of his job performance in a June poll conducted for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Kemp won the governor’s office narrowly in 2018 after garnering Trump’s endorsement. But Trump backed a primary rival against Kemp in 2022 — former Sen. David Perdue, who spoke at Saturday’s rally. Kemp trounced Perdue on his way to defeating Democrat Stacey Abrams, a national star in her party, by 7.5 percentage points, a veritable blowout in a battleground state.
Kemp will chair the Republican Governors Association for the 2026 election cycle when he is leaving office. And he’s widely known to be national Republicans’ top choice to take on Democratic U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff in that midterm cycle.
Kemp has said he didn’t vote for anyone in this year’s primary but will vote for the Republican ticket in November.
Erick Erickson, a prominent conservative host in Georgia, said of Trump, “He can’t help himself.”
“Donald Trump is really trying to build unity in Georgia by attacking the sitting Republican Governor whose ground game he will need to win and also that Governor’s wife,” Erickson wrote on X. “And if he loses, it’ll be because of this stuff, not a stolen election.”
The Harris campaign called out Trump before the Saturday rally for what it predicted would be a speech in which he would “deny the 2020 election results.”
After the rally, the Harris campaign issued a statement from former Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, who served alongside Kemp during the 2020 election and has since repudiated Trump.
“If you were able to see through Donald Trump’s incoherence and vindictiveness tonight, you saw a Donald Trump who does not care about uniting this country or speaking to the voters who will decide this election,” Duncan said in the statement. “Millions of Americans are fed up with his grievance-filled campaign focused only on himself.”