Georgia governor a no-show at runoff rallies, relationship in tatters with Trump

Once a rising star in the Republican Party, Kemp is now persona non grata and is facing a bitter backlash by the outgoing president and his allies for not overturning the results in Georgia’s presidential election in Trump’s favor.

On Monday night, Trump headlined a rally in Dalton to energize his base ahead of Tuesday’s Senate runoff races between Republican Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler and their Democratic challengers Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock. Instead of using all of his time to tout the merits of the two GOP candidates, the president used chunks of his 80-minute speech to rail against Kemp, who he vowed to campaign against in 2022.

“I’ll be here in about a year-and-a-half campaigning against you, governor,” Trump said. “I guarantee that.”

Kemp wasn’t at the Dalton rally. In fact, he has been a no-show at nearly all of the post-general election GOP events.

Loeffler, who has sided with Trump over Kemp, has choppered in some of the biggest GOP names in the country in the closing days of her campaign, including South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.

Absent from her roster of Republican rock stars was Georgia’s GOP governor.

The same went for Perdue, who, from quarantine, had former Texas Gov. Rick Perry stumping for him in Georgia.

Over the weekend, an hourlong telephone call between Trump and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger was leaked to the Washington Post in which Trump pressed Georgia’s top election official to “find 11,780 votes” to overturn the presidential race in his favor, despite three separate vote counts that confirmed his loss.

“The people of Georgia are angry. The people of the country are angry, and there’s nothing wrong with saying that, you know, that you’ve recalculated,” Trump said in the call. “All I want to do is this: I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have.”

Biden won the state by 11,779 votes.

But instead of accepting defeat or being embarrassed by his actions, Trump has gotten even angrier at Kemp, convinced his former friend is the only thing standing between him and another four years in the White House.

Along with Raffensperger, Trump has raged against Kemp, tweeting that the governor is “hapless,” a “joke,” “a clown,” and “clueless.” He’s also tweeted the governor should resign from office.

But after keeping quiet for so long, Kemp is slowly starting to push back.

Last week, he said he was focused on the state’s response to the coronavirus pandemic and the runoff. Everything else, he said, was a “distraction.”

“I’ve supported the president. I worked as hard as anybody in this state for his reelection,” Kemp told reporters during a news conference at the Georgia Capitol. “But at the end of the day, I have to follow the law and the Constitution.”

Kemp also defended the Georgia Bureau of Investigation against criticism by Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph Giuliani, who called a signature match audit of absentee ballots in Cobb County that the GBI helped conduct “a joke.”

The audit found no evidence of fraud.

Kemp said he was glad Raffensperger ordered the audit and that the GBI did a good job on it.

It’s unclear if Trump and Kemp will ever patch up their political friendship, but stranger things have been known to happen.

Among the more puzzling moves made by Kemp was attending the White House Christmas Party and then tweeting out two pictures of himself and his daughter grinning at the event.