Donald Trump dusts off his ‘How to lose Georgia’ playbook with 2020 rehash
Is President Donald Trump trying to lose Georgia for Republicans in 2026? He’s sure acting like it.
Instead of visiting the state, talking to voters, stumping with GOP nominees, or most obviously, telling Georgians what Republicans might do to bring down the cost of living, the president is running backward into the fire of the 2020 election that he lost here and refuses to accept.
Earlier this week, the White House announced that Trump will deliver a major “address to the nation” Thursday night. Immediately, reports emerged that the president would use the address to revive his disproven claims that he won the 2020 election in Georgia and possibly even allege, for the first time, that Georgia’s two 2020 Senate races were stolen in the process.
Ironically, anyone who lived through the 2021 Senate runoffs can tell you that it was Trump who cost former U.S. Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue their seats, not some international plot.
He sunk their chances with performances like the one he delivered at a rally in Dalton the night before the runoffs. Instead of focusing on Loeffler and Perdue and the work they had done in Washington, Trump started and stayed on the subject he just can’t let go.
“Hello, Georgia!” he began. “By the way. There’s no way we lost Georgia. There’s no way. That was a rigged election, but we’re still fighting it, and you’ll see what’s going to happen.”
Loeffler and Perdue lost the next day.
Trump was back in Georgia two years later to campaign against Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, the top Republicans who had rejected his efforts to overturn Georgia’s election results in 2020. Again, Georgia voters in the primary and general elections rejected campaigns focused on claims of rigged elections, and Trump’s candidates lost by huge margins.
Fast forward to this week, with a Senate seat and an open governor’s race on the line, and Trump is still talking about the election he lost here six years ago.
But this time, his focus on 2020 goes much further than just a speech he’s planning. Not only did the FBI seize hundreds of boxes of 2020 election materials from a Fulton County warehouse earlier this year — an FBI memo obtained by the AJC showed that the agency has “surged” 260 FBI agents to investigate Fulton County ahead of a July 17 deadline.
Last week, a federal judge appointed by Trump also quashed a subpoena from the Department of Justice that had sought the names, addresses, phone numbers and other personal information about all of Fulton County’s 2020 election workers. U.S. District Court Judge Billy Ray called the request both “staggering” and pointless.
Ray pointed out that, even if a crime was committed (and there has been no evidence to show that it was), the statute of limitations related to the 2020 elections has come and gone.
“The DOJ cannot evade the statute of limitations based merely on a theory that someone, somewhere, somehow did something that was illegal,” he added.
The downstream effects of all this won’t hurt the president in November. He’s not on any ballot in 2026.
Instead, the damage will be done to U.S. Rep. Mike Collins, the Republican challenging U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff, who told CNN’s Manu Raju recently of 2020, “Trump won that race,” and will be asked again and again if he thinks Ossoff stole his election, too.
Rick Jackson, the GOP nominee for governor, won’t be helped either. Although he’s well positioned with plenty of money, a compelling personal story and no particular relationship with Trump before this election to explain, GOP operatives know Jackson’s chances of victory depend heavily on Ossoff’s margins. If Ossoff beats Collins by a huge margin, Jackson could only outperform Collins by so much.
Neither Jackson nor Collins’ campaigns responded to a request for comment on Trump’s upcoming speech.
Instead of waiting to see what Trump says on Thursday night, Ossoff called a news conference on Capitol Hill Tuesday afternoon to say it was Trump who committed election fraud in 2020, not anyone else.
“He fears defeat in the midterms, and that explains his spiral into conspiracy theories,” Ossoff said, adding later, “Let’s see how Mike Collins handles this.”
Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, in Atlanta to campaign for Ossoff and former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms Tuesday, told me Republicans should be “embarrassed” by Trump’s conduct.
“He’s going to give an address, presumably, talking about a conspiracy theory which has been debunked over 60 times in courts,” Moore said. “But he’s not going to stand up and give a talk about the fact that we’re in another foreign forever war or the fact that gas prices, energy prices and food prices are continuing to skyrocket.”
Republicans, including Trump, have won and lost elections in Georgia in the last six years. When they focused on the issues Georgians care about, they’ve won. When they’ve rehashed the 2020 elections, they’ve lost.
Why Trump wants to dig out his losing Georgia playbook now is anyone’s guess. But Collins and Jackson would be wise to reject it, acknowledge Georgia’s legal election results and forge their own path to win in November.