President Donald Trump has come to Georgia four times this year to speak at rallies ahead of next week’s elections, in Rome, Marietta, Dalton and last Saturday in Perry. He’s yet to say a good word about Atlanta.
Atlanta is a “dangerous hellhole,” he told supporters in Perry, and when Rick Jackson gets elected governor, Trump said he expects he will be calling him to send in the National Guard to quell violence in the city. Citing a statistic which fact-checkers are having a hard time locating, the president said Atlanta was “the single most dangerous city per capita in the nation.”
It’s not at all coincidental that early voting in Atlanta and environs is running well ahead of the rest of the state. Trump might regard a great many of those votes as dangerous.
Depending on how the political winds blow, this might be the last rally Trump ever has in Georgia. But it’s hard to imagine these will be the parting shots in his long feud with the city.
Trump’s message in Perry was a lot about giving and taking away. He announced that Audi will build a $4 billion plant near Macon, which he said was a result of his tariff policy. Audi CEO Gernot Dollner caught heat back in Germany for appearing on stage with Trump, at a time when the German auto industry is making cuts. A spokesman for the Social Democratic Party called it a “disgrace,” and the head of a major union described it as “extremely embarrassing, politically unacceptable and not worthy of the company.”
No doubt Gov. Brian Kemp was a little miffed, also, at having his own announcement stepped on.
As for taking away, Trump said it would make “a big difference” who Georgians send to Washington to deal with him. If they send Mike Collins, who was on stage with him, he’ll take his call. But if they send Pee Wee Herman, his name for Sen. Jon Ossoff, things will be different.
“But he needs money for Georgia,” he said, imitating an assistant’s plea.
“I don’t give a damn what he wants, I’m not in,” he said, imitating himself.
One of the most interesting recent additions to Trump’s rally speech is his advice to communities regarding data centers. They should allow the construction of data centers, because we have to stay ahead of China. But they should hit up the companies building the centers for as much money as they can, because they can afford it.
“It’s the way life works,” he said.
It has been noted that a lot of Trump’s rallies in the closing days of this year’s election season have been in very safe red states like Oklahoma or Alabama, as if he were going more to find a supportive audience than to engage in the campaign.
That’s definitely not the reason he’s been to Georgia so many times. Over three elections, Trump has come to take Georgia personally. Going back to those desperate hours in the aftermath of the 2020 election, he has developed a lingering attitude of being shortchanged of something, returning again and again in the attempt to get it back.
The Justice Department has said it intends to send some 1,000 election monitors to all 50 states, but we are only learning this week where they will be going. In Georgia, notification letters have been sent to Bibb, Cobb, Chatham, DeKalb, Fulton and Gwinnett. Just for good measure, Justice might have thrown in at least one majority white, Republican county.
Depending on what they find, the monitors might become the scaffolding for some kind of challenge to the election results, which polls indicate won’t be to the administration’s liking. But it’s a little hard to see exactly how that would work.
Well over a million people have already voted early — and unmonitored — in Georgia, and conventional wisdom is that those who show up on Election Day itself are much more likely to vote Republican. We’ll know soon if the conventional wisdom continues to hold up. Increasingly, it’s looking like people in both parties are voting whenever they want.
