President Trump and Republican Ed Gillespie kind of sort of played nice during the latter’s gubernatorial campaign, but as soon as the race was called for Democrat Ralph Northam on Tuesday, the president uncorked his true thoughts.
“Ed Gillespie worked hard,” Trump tweeted, “but did not embrace me or what I stand for.”
Ed Gillespie worked hard but did not embrace me or what I stand for. Don’t forget, Republicans won 4 out of 4 House seats, and with the economy doing record numbers, we will continue to win, even bigger than before!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 8, 2017
Though he recorded a robocall for Gillespie in the last lap of the campaign, judging by the immediacy of his reaction to the results, it’s likely Trump had kept those sentiments bottled up for some time.
With this tweet, Trump is almost chiding Republicans who choose to hold him at arm’s length, suggesting Gillespie’s loss plainly shows his hostile takeover of the GOP is final. The battle is over. Republican candidates who do not run on his agenda, so the president seems to be arguing, are destined for failure. Thus, keeping with that logic, the broad Trump agenda is now necessarily the uniform agenda of the Republican Party everywhere from California to Michigan to Alabama.
He wants deference, and if Trump is right in claiming Gillespie’s insistence on distance was a tactical error, Republican voters might just agree.
