With Donald Trump spending much of time criticizing the presidential election results, Fox News evening opinion host Laura Ingraham decided to take matters into her own hands. She’s flying to Atlanta Thursday evening to hold a live town hall to encourage Republicans in Georgia to vote Jan. 5 and keep the Senate in Republican majority hands.
“The America First movement I’ve been fighting for two decades plus, the conservative populist movement, the continuation of that in large part is going to depend on what happens in Georgia,” said Ingraham in an interview Wednesday with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “If the Democrats are able to roll over conservatives in the House and Senate and the executive branch over two years, that could be disastrous.”
Ingraham, whose show “The Ingraham Angle” has aired at 10 p.m. weeknights for the past three years, is a full-throated Trump supporter and during the 20-minute interview, she uttered no negative word about him, extolling his accomplishments in foreign policy, immigration and trade.
Still, she acknowledged that Trump’s chances of reversing a Joe Biden victory are getting bleaker. All six states where Trump has legally challenged the results have certified Biden wins. “The opportunities for legal challenges are narrowing” for Trump, she said, noting that he’s “running out of time.”
The town hall airing at 10 p.m. will not be like a crowded Trump rally. It will be held in a open-air plane hangar owned by Hill Aircraft at Brown Field in Fulton County with about 30 to 40 people in attendance. Each person who signed up will get a rapid COVID-19 test before entering the space. She wants her millions of Fox News viewers to understand the stakes of the upcoming run-off election next month and encourage Georgia Republicans to mail in a ballot or go to the polls.
Two major guests have agreed to show up: Gov. Brian Kemp and Sen. David Perdue (R-GA) , who is trying to fend off a Democratic challenger Jon Ossoff for one of the two Senate seats. Ingraham, as of late Wednesday, had not gotten commitments from Ossoff or the two people running in the other Senate race Kelly Loeffler (R-GA) and her Democratic challenger Raphael Warnock.
“After being in this business over 20 years, I can’t really think of a pair of Senate races more important,” Ingraham said. “It’s about the future of the country than these two. I didn’t want people to forget about Jan. 5. I thought it was very important for us as a show to go down there and talk to actual voters.”
She plans to explain the mechanics of the runoff and the options voters have. She wants to tell her viewers that “a double win for Republicans changes the dynamics in Washington... If the Democrats win, the stakes for states and the country, that could be catastrophic.”
Ingraham is befuddled by the idea posed by some Republicans to protest the Nov. 3 vote by skipping the Jan. 5 runoff, as suggested by L. Lin Wood, a pro-Trump attorney and a former Trump legal representative Sidney Powell at a rally Wednesday in Alpharetta. “They have not earned your vote,” Wood said of Loeffler and Perdue. “Don’t you give it to them. Why would you go back and vote in another rigged election, for god’s sake! Fix it! You gotta fix it!”
She finds this type of talk counterproductive and only benefits Democrats.
“I’m not disparaging anyone, but I don’t understand that strategy,” she said
She didn’t criticize Trump’s legal strategies to date, which haven’t reversed the election results but sowed doubt about the legitimacy of the election among many of his followers.
“There are many different viewpoints, complaints, concerns about how the vote has gone down,” Ingraham said. “I think all of that has to be reviewed comprehensively and challenged legally.”
She supports a bipartisan commission to review the election.
Ingraham also didn’t think much of William Barr’s interview with the Associated Press Tuesday saying that there was no signs of systemic fraud that would change the election results, noting that his department later clarified to say that the investigation is not complete.
She declined to delve into the idea of Trump pardoning his family members, even pre-emptively. She also said it was too early to speculate about Trump running again in 2024.
“Trump is the most powerful figure in the Republican Party and will be until he doesn’t want to be,” Ingraham said.
He garnered more votes than he did in 2016, she noted, and the Republican Party significantly narrowed the Democrats’ lead in the House of Representatives, not a result many pundits had expected.
“He has an opportunity to continue this movement,” she said, “and be a colossal kingmaker.”
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