How Brian Kemp Resisted Trump's Pressure to Overturn the Georgia Election Results

[brooklynite]

Politico

In conversations I’ve had with Republican officials in Georgia over the past year, they gave the full, behind-the-tweets version of how Kemp and Trump’s relationship deteriorated, and the tensions that split the Republican party in Georgia in late 2020. The pressure from Trump was enough to make Sen. David Perdue, up for a tough reelection, wonder what he, Kemp and Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler could do to pacify Trump’s growing outrage over his Georgia defeat. And several Georgia lawmakers were split between their political concerns about losing Trump’s support and their fears of unleashing endless litigation if they were to do as the president asked. Ultimately, it was Kemp’s firm leadership on the issue that held together all the disparate and flagging members of the party.

At the time, Trump told aides the governor owed him. He urged Kemp to use “emergency powers” to block the certification of the results and demanded that the governor call a special session to overturn the election results and name a slate of Republican electors to award him the state’s 16 electoral votes. Each time he was rebuffed, Trump leveled a new wave of vicious attacks at Kemp on Twitter and to aides, ultimately calling for the governor to resign. And each time Trump’s advisers cautioned him to tone it down, he kept going back to the November 2018 rally that he headlined for Kemp.

“They were there for me, not for him. They didn’t know who he was,” Trump later said in a radio interview. “And then when I ask him for help on a special session for election integrity, ‘Sir, I won’t be able to do that.’ I say, you’ve got to be kidding. One thing has nothing to do with the other. He’s a disaster.”

Each time Trump blasted him, Kemp refrained from returning fire, careful not to antagonize the president. He was determined to absorb the president’s rage, hoping it would prevent Trump from punishing Loeffler, a Republican, who was facing a tough challenge from Democrat Rev. Raphael Warnock, and couldn’t win without the president’s full-fledged support.

[CurtEastPoint]

1. You should see the DISGUSTING Perdue ads slamming Kemp and showing Perdue w/TFG over and over

and that GD whiny voice.

[Hoyt]

5. No joke. Definitely not a Kemp fan, but that Purdue ad is pure pandering to trump rubes with lies.

[dawg]

2. And now Perdue is running against Kemp so he can seal the deal next time.

To me, David Perdue is one of the most reprehensible politicians ever to hail from the state of Georgia. (And that's saying something.)

[CurtEastPoint]

3. IKR? At least Lester Maddox was not hiding his idiocy.

[Hoyt]

6. Lester Maddox. I was in high school when this crud was going on:

?fb

Years later, I worked for Georgia State Government as they were gearing up Medicaid and Maddox was Lt Gubnor, after being Gubnor. He'd walk through the old state office building with an entourage -- which even included people he hated because of their ethnicity -- and shake hands.

The old state buildings had these big marble restrooms, endless stalls and urinals. One day I was standing at a urinal and that creepy Maddox wanted to shake my hand.

To this day, I wish I had turned around an soaked him.

[Cha]

4. And, now Putin's American Puppet is

Off twitter.

💙💛