(Ben Sellers, Headline USA) Former President Donald Trump cast aside his four-year-old feud with Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp as the two agreed that the need to prevent a socialist takeover of America outweighed their past grievances.
Kemp made an appearance Thursday on Fox News host Sean Hannity’s show, where he was reacting to the Democratic National Convention on the same night that Democrat Kamala Harris was due to deliver her acceptance speech.
Among the speakers at the convention was his former lieutenant governor, NeverTrump RINO Geoff Duncan, who was briefly considered a potential presidential pick for the No Labels party.
Geoff Duncan's full DNC speech. "Doing the right thing will never be the wrong thing. Stay strong." pic.twitter.com/fJH3XoKDaY
— Blue Georgia (@BlueATLGeorgia) August 22, 2024
Kemp countered the Democrats’ emotionally driven appeal for four more years with a brutal dose of reality.
“I feel the joy is subsiding and when the sugar high of the convention subsides, people are going to really start thinking ‘It’s not so joyful when I look in my bank account,'” he said, according to Fox 5 Atlanta. “It’s not joyful when I can’t make my car payment or my rent payment or I have to decide to buy gas or buy groceries.’”
However, according to The Hill, Kemp’s real objective in going on Hannity’s show—believed to be one of Trump’s favorites—was to bury the hatchet and offer the GOP presidential nominee his endorsement.
“We gotta win. We gotta win from the top of the ticket on down,” Kemp said. “We need to send Donald Trump back to the White House. We need to retake the Senate. We need to hold the House.”
Trump responded with kind words of his own, thanking him for his “help and support” in the key battleground state.
The bad blood between the two came after Kemp refused to get involved in efforts to challenge the outcome of the state’s 2020 election, where suspicious activity in Fulton County and other blue strongholds helped to deliver a narrow win to Biden with just under 12,000 votes.
Evidence from the Georgia Board of Elections and other investigations has subsequently proven that Fulton, in particular, violated election laws and likely processed enough fraudulent and invalid votes to more than reverse the outcome.
Initially Kemp—whom Trump endorsed in his own narrow 2018 election victory against Democrat powerhouse Stacey Abrams—had signaled that he would support a full signature audit of the votes.
However, a few weeks later he reversed himself, attributiong the allegations of vote fraud to “bogus online blogs,” according to 11Alive.
In between the two statements, 20-year-old Harrison Deal, an intern with then-Sen. Kelly Loeffler, R-Ga., and the boyfriend of Kemp’s college-age daughter, died in a fiery and mysterious car accident, leading some to suspect that he may have been compromised.
Eyewitness testimony sounds so awful, mentioning hearing multiple explosions. It also appears that Harrison Deal was pulled off to the side of the road beyond the shoulder with at least two other vehicles. I hope Chatham county does a thorough investigation https://t.co/rHWP1v99Bc pic.twitter.com/7pqcLpW96Q
— Geoffrey Joynt (@JoyntGeoffrey) December 5, 2020
Others openly wondered if Kemp—a frequent guest at the globalist World Economic Forum convention in Davos, Switzerland—and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger—who once thanked his donors in fluent Mandarin Chinese—had been plants all along, secretly running as Republicans while trying to flip the reliably red state.
A staffer in Raffensperger’s office secretly recorded a January 2021 call between Trump and the state’s top election official in which Trump sought Raffenperger’s help finding evidence of fraud. The staffer, Jordan Fuchs, then leaked the audio to the Washington Post, which used the call to claim Trump was attempting to interfere in the election.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis subsequently used it as the basis for her investigation, in which she attempted to charge Trump and 18 of his political allies with a racketeering conspiracy.
Earlier this month, Trump offered harsh words for Kemp and his wife during a rally in Atlanta, as well as on his Truth Social platform, prompting a sharp online retort from the governor.
My focus is on winning this November and saving our country from Kamala Harris and the Democrats – not engaging in petty personal insults, attacking fellow Republicans, or dwelling on the past.
You should do the same, Mr. President, and leave my family out of it. pic.twitter.com/m8y6CSuZKY
— Brian Kemp (@BrianKempGA) August 3, 2024
A number of conservatives questioned Trump’s wisdom in reopening the old wounds.
Despite the personal animus, Kemp has supported legislation in Georgia to close some of the election loopholes that left-wing operatives exploited and to fortify the state’s election-integrity laws.
If Trump were to claim Georgia and Pennsylvania—two battleground states that swung his way in 2016 but were delivered to Biden in 2020—assuming he held all the states he won in 2020, it would be enough to put him at the 270 electoral votes needed to win the race.
Ben Sellers is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/realbensellers.
