President Trump on Monday indicated what he’ll be doing once he leaves the White House later this month: commanding US politics.
At a rally in Dalton, Georgia just before two crucial Senate runoff elections, outgoing commander in chief railed against the Peach State’s Republican Gov. Brian Kemp for not overturning President-elect Joe Biden’s win there — and said he’d work to remove him from office.
“I will be here in 18 months and I’m going to be campaigning against your governor and your crazy secretary of state, I promise you,” the president told a crowd of supporters.
“I shouldn’t state this, I shouldn’t state this since I simply don’t need you to tell anyone outside of this room, other than the millions of people watching,” he quipped.
The president was in Georgia to fire-up support for GOP Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler who are facing off against Democratic Party challengers Jon Ossoff and Rev. Raphael Warnock in two races that will determine which party controls the US Senate in 2021.
But the eyes of the nation have been trained on the Peach State since November after Biden won there by less than 12,000 ballots and Trump accused Democrats of cheating him out of re-election by fraud.
A machine recount and a hand recount of ballots only cemented Biden’s win as Georgia Republican state officials like Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger resisted calls from Trump and his allies to toss out the vote.
In Dalton, Trump repeatedly claimed that he was the true victor of the November presidential election despite presidential electors giving Biden a majority of 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232.
“There’s no way we lost Georgia. That was a rigged election,” Trump said.
“I ran two elections. I won both of them, the second one much more successful than the first,” he said.
Trump pleaded with the crowd to vote Tuesday, saying that Perdue and Loeffler should not suffer the same fate he did and wait weeks for a result.
‘We can’t let this happen any longer,” he said. “We’re not going to have that tomorrow night where you’re leading and then all of a sudden, boom, it’s gone, like magic.”
Last month, Trump told Fox News that he was “ashamed” of endorsing Kemp in 2018, saying he had “done absolutely nothing” to advance his claims of fraud.
Audio also emerged Sunday of a phone call between Trump and Brad Raffensperger where Trump asked state officials to “find” enough votes to overturn Biden’s win.
The Dalton rally, one of the rare public events Trump has held since Biden was declared the winner on Nov. 19, was an opportunity for the president to air his grievances.
The president hit the Supreme Court for rejecting his campaign’s multiple lawsuits contesting the ballot count, accusing them of “not stepping up to the plate”
He also lashed fellow Republicans for not doing enough to contest the election ahead of a vote by Congress on Wednesday to certify Biden’s Electoral College victory which many GOP lawmakers have announced they will object to.
“We have good support in the Senate, I wouldn’t say great, it could be better, but people will remember the people that don’t support us,” Trump vowed, while also issuing a warning to Vice President Mike Pence who will oversee the vote count.
“I hope that Mike Pence comes through for us. Of course, if he doesn’t come through, I won’t like him so much,” Trump said.
Already over 3 million Georgians have voted early in the critical races which will determine whether Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) holds on to governing power or swaps roles with Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY).
Perdue is being challenged by Ossoff, the 33-year-old CEO of an investigative television production company who would become the youngest US Senator in 40 years if he won.
Loeffler, a freshman senator who was appointed by Kemp to fill the vacancy left by Sen. Johnny Isakson last December, is facing off against Warnock, the senior pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church, where civil rights icon Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. once preached.
