A year ago, Erick Erickson’s annual conservative conference became a de facto tryout for Donald Trump’s rivals. This year’s event showcased how some of the former president’s GOP targets are handling their troubled relationships with him.
Gov. Brian Kemp and state Attorney General Chris Carr both addressed hundreds of GOP activists on Friday at The Gathering days after Trump devoted a chunk of his Atlanta rally to reviving attacks against them.
As expected, Kemp didn’t return Trump’s fire. And he scarcely mentioned the former president’s name, even as he maintained Republicans should be “laser focused” on the GOP ticket and assailed Vice President Kamala Harris’ record on immigration, the economy and green energy regulations.
“This is still a state we can win if we have all the mechanics and the things you need to do to win an election,” the governor said of GOP chances in Georgia. “We’ve raised enough money and we have good candidates. And so regardless of all the noise, we’re flying ahead.”
Carr steered clear of the topic entirely on stage with Erickson, though he echoed Kemp’s stance in an interview shortly after his remarks.
“We’ve got to be talking about two things: our record as Republicans and the other team’s record,” Carr said. “I think this is a distraction, and we have to keep focusing on November.”
Others addressing the three-day conference include former Vice President Mike Pence, who has famously refused to endorse his former political boss, and U.S. Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell, who has also struggled with Trump’s dominance of the party.
Pence didn’t take any shots at Trump but praised Kemp.
“For my part, there’s a lot of talk about what the agenda of a future Trump administration should be,” Pence said. “I’m thinking of launching Project 2017. Let’s just go back to what we did before.”
The spotlight in Georgia, however, is focused largely on Kemp, who made his first public remarks about Trump since the former president abruptly reopened raw wounds on Saturday in Athens by maligning the governor and his wife, Marty.
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
Blasting him as a “bad guy,” Trump renewed attacks he made after his 2020 defeat that Kemp was disloyal to him for not working to illegally reverse the outcome of the Georgia vote.
Their long simmering dispute shaped the 2022 midterm, but after Kemp demolished a Trump-backed challenger in that election, an uneasy truce prevailed. On Saturday, the tenuous peace shattered. Since then, Trump hasn’t relented, criticizing Kemp again on Thursday.
The second-term governor responded with a terse social media post urging the president to focus on Harris — and lay off personal attacks against his family — but he said little publicly about Trump until Friday.
Kemp’s allies, meanwhile, have vented. They say Trump’s surprise broadsides against a governor popular with the party’s base threaten GOP chances of recapturing Georgia at a time when Harris’ campaign is gaining steam.
And Democrats have mocked Kemp’s allegiance to a former president who has repeatedly tried to make his life miserable, whether by trying to oust him from office or leveling personal insults at him and his family.
State Sen. Josh McLaurin, D-Sandy Springs, sees something else at play.
“The No. 1 reason Georgia Republicans want the state to go red in November is so their election-denier base doesn’t literally threaten them for the next several years,” McLaurin said. “This is not meant to be punchy or joking. These are just facts.”
Though Kemp wasn’t eager to talk about the tiff on Friday, it didn’t go unmentioned. The governor drew laughs when he said Trump’s campaign rally was one of two storms to churn through Georgia in the past week, preceding Hurricane Debby’s soggy slog to the coast.
And Kemp maintained his support for Trump at the top of the ticket, saying any nasty fighting ahead of the November election amounts to unhelpful internal “distractions.” And he said he would continue to direct his formidable political machinery to boost both Trump and down-ballot Republicans in tough legislative races.
“Despite all of that noise, my position hasn’t changed,” Kemp said. “I’ve said for a long time, before the presidential primary ever started, when we had all those great candidates that were running, that I was going to support the nominee, that we were going to use our political operation to win Georgia despite past grievances.”
The governor added, pointedly, that it’s “in our best interest that we win in Georgia in 2024 — unlike we did in 2020.”
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