I went to a black-tie dinner in Washington, D.C., on Saturday night. Actually it was a white tie dinner, as fancy as it gets, with women in long gowns and gentlemen in tuxedos with tails.
The occasion was the famous Gridiron Dinner, the first I had ever been to, that usually hosts the top journalists in New York and Washington, along with the president of the United States. In normal times, the president and the press put unpleasantries aside to toast to the president’s success for the good of the country. If that sounds as antiquated as an old movie, you’re right. Times have changed in Washington.
On Saturday night, President Donald Trump was nowhere to be found. But two days before, he was at the Department of Justice for a speech, where he repeated the false claim that he won the 2020 election, called Jack Smith, the Jan. 6 prosecutor, “scum,” and accused CNN and MSNBC of being arms of the Democratic National Committee.
“In my opinion, they are really corrupt and they are illegal,” he said of the reporters for the outlets. “What they do is illegal.”
Needless to say, the mood among the press Saturday night was somewhere between gloom and doom. I told a friend it was like the scene from “The Sound of Music,” when the Von Trapp family sings in a local talent show before soldiers come to arrest them — the last moment before everything changed.
But back in the Georgia State Capitol on Monday, the mood was completely different. In fact, the Republicans running the state seem to love what they’re seeing from Trump, even the ones who used to be on the receiving end of similar threats and insults.
Take Attorney General Chris Carr, whom Trump targeted for a GOP primary challenge in the 2022 midterm elections after Carr had refused to join a Texas court challenge to Trump’s 2020 election loss.
“Chris Carr was a disaster every step of the way,” Trump said at a 2022 campaign rally in Commerce, Georgia. “He wasn’t looking for election integrity, but rather an easy way out.”
Fast forward two years, and Carr was in Washington on Friday for a Trump speech on fentanyl trafficking. The AG posted photos of himself at the Justice Department where Trump had spoken the day before. “Honored to stand with @POTUS & (Attorney General Pam Bondi) for a powerful speech on restoring law & order & putting #AmericaFirst.”
Carr was just one of several Trump primary targets in 2022, among an entire slate of Georgia Republicans he tried to take down. The first among them was Gov. Brian Kemp.
Kemp and Trump had been battling for years over Kemp’s perceived slights against the president, but none were worse than the governor refusing to help Trump overturn the 2020 elections in the state.
As recently as last fall, Trump blasted Kemp at another Georgia rally, calling him a “bad guy, a disloyal guy and a very average governor.” He even insulted first lady Marty Kemp for saying she’d written her husband’s name in for president. “In my opinion, they want us to lose,” Trump said.
Kemp managed for years to hold Trump at arm’s length, while keeping Trump’s voters on his side. His dominant victory for a second term made Georgia’s Republican Party an outlier. Although Republicans held every statewide constitutional office, they were mostly at a distance from Trump as he litigated his 2020 loss over and over and ran for another term.
But with Trump’s victory in November, and another statewide election in 2026, that uneasy truce has turned into a wholesale pro-Trump moment in Georgia. In fact, Georgia Republicans are not just vocally supporting Trump, they are taking concrete steps to help him advance his agenda where they can.
On Monday, Kemp announced that he is seeking federal approval for Georgia Public Safety officers to perform some of the functions of federal immigration agents. Kemp’s office told me he will follow immigration laws and uphold the U.S. and Georgia constitutions. But his announcement came on the same day that Trump defied a federal district judge’s order to return flights of deported migrants, whom U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said were Venezuelan gang members, to the United States for failing to even disclose their names, let alone follow federal immigration laws.
Asked about the judge’s order, Trump’s immigration director Tom Homan told Fox News, “We’re not stopping, I don’t care what the judges say.” Next, the president posted a message on social media calling the judge a “radical, left lunatic,” and called for him to be impeached.
In response to that, Chief Justice John Roberts took the rare step of issuing a public rebuke against any calls to impeach a judge over a decision he issues.
“For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose,” Roberts said.
But, in most countries, that would be called a constitutional crisis. In Washington, D.C., it’s a Tuesday.
But if you are waiting for an elected Republican in Georgia to criticize any of this you can keep waiting. Instead, the state Senate will soon vote on Senate Resolution 246, which commends Trump for his reelection and “successful conservative policies.”
Nowhere in the resolution does it mention layoffs at the CDC, putting Elon Musk in charge of federal spending, blaming Ukraine for being invaded by Russia, launching a global trade war or engaging in a standoff with the chief justice of the United States.
It turns out that Georgia Republicans criticizing the president might now be an idea as antiquated as an old movie, too.
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