ATLANTA (AP) — Former President Donald Trump picked a new fight with Georgia’s Republican governor as he campaigned in the key swing state where he’s looking to avenge his narrow 2020 loss — a defeat he continues to blame on Republican officials based on his false theories of election fraud.
Gov. Brian Kemp, Trump wrote on his social media site, “should focus his efforts on fighting Crime, not fighting Unity and the Republican Party!” He also criticized Kemp’s wife, Marty, and alleged that both Kemps were once grateful for his endorsement when Brian Kemp won the 2018 governor’s race.
In a subsequent post, Trump railed on Kemp for defying his demands to help overturn Trump’s narrow 2020 loss in the state. And at his rally, he went on about Kemp for several minutes and blamed him for his loss to Democratic President Joe Biden and for not stopping a local district attorney from prosecuting him and several associates for his efforts to overturn the results.
On X, Kemp told Trump to “leave my family out of it” and urged him to stop “engaging in petty personal insults, attacking fellow Republicans, or dwelling on the past.”
The back and forth came just ahead of an afternoon rally, when thousands of supporters packed the same Atlanta arena as Vice President Kamala Harris’ backers did four days earlier. 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 Biden dropped his reelection bid and endorsed Harris.
Trump’s Republican allies have urged him to focus on issues where they see an advantage over Harris, notably the economy and immigration. While Trump attacked the likely Democratic nominee on both issues, he also again brought up his debunked claims about fraud in 2020 and suggested he regretted endorsing Kemp two years earlier.
And he tied crime in Georgia’s capital city to Kemp’s inability to turn around what Trump portrayed as lax crime reduction efforts supported by Harris.
“Your governor ought to get off his ass and do something about it,” he said.
Biden beat Trump in the state by 11,779 votes in 2020. Trump pressured Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to change the outcome. 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.
Meanwhile, Kemp has proven to be the rare Republican nationally who could hold his ground against Trump without sacrificing his power or popularity — and ultimately, he has expanded it.
Kemp won the governor’s office narrowly in 2018, after garnering Trump’s endorsement. But Trump blasted him after the 2020 election when Kemp certified Biden’s slate of electors, defying the then-president’s demands to help overturn Trump’s narrow loss in his state.
Trump backed a primary rival against Kemp in 2022 — former Sen. David Perdue, who spoke at Saturday’s rally — but the governor trounced him 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 Governor’s 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.
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.”
Meg Kinnard reported from Chapin, South Carolina. Barrow can be reached at https://x.com/BillBarrowAP and Kinnard can be reached at http://x.com/MegKinnardAP.
