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- President Donald Trump promised to campaign against Georgia’s Republican governor and secretary of state in 2022 during a rally for Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler on Monday night in Dalton, Georgia.
- The president recently sued both Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in an attempt to decertify Georgia’s Nov. 3 election, which he lost to President-elect Joe Biden by about 12,000 votes.
- Kemp and Raffensperger have both rejected Trump’s demands to illegally overturn the election results, but Kemp has refused to say whether Trump won a second term.
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President Donald Trump promised to campaign against Georgia’s Republican governor and secretary of state in 2022 during a rally for Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler on Monday night in Dalton, Georgia.
“I’m going to be here in a year and a half and I’m going to be campaigning against your governor and your crazy secretary of state, I guarantee you,” Trump said to loud cheers.
The president recently sued both Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in an attempt to decertify Georgia’s Nov. 3 election, which he lost to President-elect Joe Biden by about 12,000 votes. On Monday, lawyers for Kemp and Raffensperger wrote in a brief that Trump “seeks to disenfranchise millions of Georgia voters” by attempting to overturn the state’s election results.
Trump and his allies have spent the last several weeks lashing out at Georgia officials over the election results and falsely claiming the president won the state by thousands of votes. Kemp and Raffensperger have both rejected Trump’s demands to illegally overturn the election results, but Kemp has refused to say whether Trump won a second term. After endorsing Kemp during his 2018 gubernatorial bid, Trump has taken to calling the governor a “fool” and a “clown.”
Trump traveled to Georgia on Monday to galvanize support for the state's two Republican senators, whose runoff elections on Tuesday will determine control of the Senate. He opened the large in-person rally by falsely claiming "there's no way we lost Georgia" and spent the evening repeating disinformation and conspiracy theories about the election.
Trump's rally came just a day after The Washington Post published a recording of the president pressuring Raffensperger to "find" additional votes in order to overturn his 2020 election loss in the state during an hour long phone call on Saturday. Legal experts say Trump's efforts to tamper with Georgia's presidential are an abuse of his power and potential violations of federal, state, and local laws.
During the call, Trump repeated a slew of debunked conspiracy theories about voter fraud in Georgia and suggested Raffensperger and his general counsel would be criminally liable if they didn't find thousands of nonexistent ballots that Trump falsely claimed had been illegally destroyed.
Raffensperger repeatedly dismissed Trump's claims and told him, "the data you have is wrong."