Is he handing out personal IOU’s or trying to help his party?
Strike that!….
That man has only ONE friend….
HIMSELF…..
Not the party…..
Donald Trump is endorsing candidates in party primary elections all the way down the ballot, a level of involvement that’s virtually unheard of among recent former presidents.
What’s remarkable about Trump’s picks isn’t just their breadth — he’s endorsed close to 40 candidates so far in 23 states — it’s their seemingly random quality. What’s even more unusual is that the political goals of the GOP’s de facto leader aren’t necessarily in sync with his own party — in some cases, they are starkly at odds.
If there’s a thread running through nearly all of Trump’s endorsements, it is his habit of rewarding allies and punishing enemies. So far, at the national level, he’s backed primary challengers to four House GOP incumbents and one sitting senator — all of whom voted for impeachment.
When it comes to state and local races, Trump’s seal of approval is often linked in one way or another to his failed efforts to have the 2020 election results overturned. In the three secretary of state contests where he has endorsed — Arizona, Georgia and Michigan — the common denominator is that his claims of election fraud were dismissed in those places by the current secretaries of state due to a lack of evidence….
After the 2020 election, Republican Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan of Georgia was concerned that the party was continuing to entertain the election conspiracy theories perpetuated by then-President Donald Trump, to the point where it threatened the electoral fates of GOP Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler.
Perdue and Loeffler had fallen short of the 50% threshold in their races in the November election, forcing them to compete with Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, respectively, in dual runoff elections to represent the fast-growing Deep South swing state in the Senate.
The outcome of the races would determine control of the upper chamber.
Duncan, who sought to focus on conservative policy successes and less on unsubstantiated conspiracy theories, including Trump’s belief that votes had “come out of ceilings and come out of leather bags,” wrote about the scorn he received for rejecting GOP “groupthink” in his newly-released book, “GOP 2.0.”
“The president and his surrogates continued fanning the flames, and they forced the two GOP senators into fringe and dishonest positions on election fraud,” the lieutenant governor wrote. “I worried their rhetoric would lose the race for our party. I walked the line as best I could and just kept repeating: ‘No fraud in November, trust the electoral system, vote in the run-off on January 5, and please, out-of-state politicians, stop making the GOP seem like an extreme faction. You’ll only hurt our candidates in the run-off.'”
He added: “I felt at odds with this new prevailing dynamic. I felt like a stranger. Who was this party? Why did it seem to literally worship the president? What was it doing to the bedrock of our democratic republic? What would it do to me?”….
“Each time I said ‘No fraud’ or ‘President-elect Biden’ on national television, the insults and hate poured in from across Georgia and from forty-nine other states too,” he wrote. “Groupthink – or doublethink – was the goal, and Republican leaders achieved it.”
He added: “Each time I read messages on the way home, I sure felt good I had two Georgia state troopers with me. …
— John L. Dorman, The Insider via Yahoo! News,
Sat, September 18, 2021
https://news.yahoo.com/georgia-gop-lt-gov-geoff-132700370.html
Hopefully those acts of intimidation will be addressed in Georgia and Wash DC….