Trump tears into Georgia's Republican governor in Atlanta and online

Donald Trump grips the side of a lectern as he speaks in a large venue

By Bill Barrow and Meg Kinnard

Aug. 3, 2024 5:37 PM PT

ATLANTA — Former President 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 GOP officials based on his false claims of election fraud.

Before a rally in Atlanta on Saturday, Trump posted on his social media site that Gov. Brian Kemp should be “fighting Crime, not fighting Unity and the Republican Party.”

He also criticized the governor’s wife, Marty Kemp, for saying she would write in her husband’s name for president this fall instead of voting for Trump, the Republican nominee, and blasted Gov. Kemp for having defied his demands to help overturn his 2020 loss in the state.

“Leave my family out of it,” Kemp responded on X, urging Trump to stop “engaging in petty personal insults, attacking fellow Republicans, or dwelling on the past.”

Later, Trump assailed Kemp in a roughly 10-minute tirade at the rally, blaming him for his loss to Joe Biden and for not stopping a local district attorney from prosecuting him and several associates over efforts to overturn the results.

“He’s a bad guy. He’s a disloyal guy,” Trump said of Kemp.

Georgia is likely to see another closely contested election as both major-party candidates 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 Georgia this time, Trump would likely need the support of Kemp’s political operation and from moderate and conservative voters who aren’t as committed to him as his base.

Harris backers had packed the same arena for a rally four days earlier.

“The momentum in this race is shifting,” she 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 that predicted 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 presumptive Democratic nominee on both issues, he also brought up his debunked claims about fraud in 2020 again, and suggested he regretted having endorsed Kemp in 2018.

And he tied crime in Atlanta, the state capital, to Kemp — saying the governor had failed to reverse 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 told the crowd.

After Biden beat him 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. The ex-president 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 able to hold his ground against Trump without sacrificing his power or popularity — and ultimately, he has expanded both.

Kemp won the governor’s office narrowly in 2018 after Trump endorsed him — only to blast him after the 2020 vote for certifying 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 Stacey Abrams, a national star in the Democratic Party, by 7.5 percentage points. It was a veritable blowout for a battleground state.

Kemp is to chair the Republican Governor’s Assn. during the 2026 midterm election cycle, the last of his term. And he’s widely known to be national Republicans’ top choice to take on Democratic U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff in that election.

Regarding Trump’s rants against Kemp, Erick Erickson, a prominent conservative radio host in Georgia, said: “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.”

Barrow and Kinnard write for the Associated Press. Barrow reported from Atlanta and Kinnard from Chapin, S.C.