ATLANTA —
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 2020 loss — a defeat he continues to blame on Republican officials based on his false theories of election fraud.
Trump railed at Kemp on his social media site before his a rally in Atlanta and said Kemp should be “fighting Crime, not fighting Unity and the Republican Party.” He also criticized Kemp’s wife, Marty, for saying she would write in her husband’s name for president this fall instead of voting for the Republican nominee. He blasted Kemp for defying Trump’s demands to help overturn his 2020 loss in the state.
At the Saturday rally, Trump assailed Kemp in a roughly 10-minute tirade, blaming him for his loss to President Biden and for not stopping a local district attorney from prosecuting him and several associates for his efforts to overturn the results.
““He’s a bad guy. He’s a disloyal guy,” Trump said.
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.”
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 Vice President Kamala Harris. To win this time, Trump will likely need the support both of Kemp’s political operation and moderate and conservative voters who aren’t as committed to him as his base.
Harris backers packed the same arena four days earlier. “The momentum in this race is shifting,” Harris told the cheering, boisterous crowd on Tuesday. “And there are signs Donald Trump is feeling it.”
The Harris campaign issued a statement before Trump’s rally predicting the former president would “likely ramble about crowd size, deny the 2020 election results” and “dedicate approximately zero time to discussing real solutions for the American people.”
Trump’s Republican allies have urged him to focus on issues where they see an advantage over Harris, notably the economy and immigration. Although 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.
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 Assn. 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.”
Associated Press writer Barrow reported from Atlanta, Kinnard from Chapin, S.C.