Ossoff wanted to tie Collins to Trump in Senate debate. Collins did it for him.
You can’t say U.S. Rep. Mike Collins isn’t a loyal man. Despite President Donald Trump’s falling poll numbers, Collins left no daylight between himself and the president in his first debate against U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff Thursday night.
It was the exact opposite of the strategy deployed by Collins’ fellow Republican Rick Jackson, the nominee for Georgia governor, who never mentioned Trump’s name once in his debate against Keisha Lance Bottoms Tuesday night.
Collins will need Trump’s 2024 voters to come out in full force on Election Day to give him a chance to defeat Ossoff. So on issue after issue, from beginning to end, Collins made his case to appeal to the MAGA base.
On the war in Iran, Collins said Thursday night that Trump “had every right to go in there and make sure that Iran does not get a nuclear weapon.”
He defended Trump on his tariffs, too, which have been struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court and been blamed for increasing prices on everything from coffee to cars.
“It should be America first,” Collins said. “We have bowed down to the rest of this world and took it from companies or countries charging us tariffs over and over again. We shouldn’t be doing that.”
Collins defended the SAVE Act too. Trump wants to pass the federal election overhaul bill so much that he has suggested ending the filibuster to do it. The bill failed to advance in the Senate after several Republicans complained the legislation would make voting too onerous in some communities in their states, but Collins stood by it.
“People will go vote when they have confidence in our elections,” he said. “Until then, it is hard, and they just want to make sure that it is a fair, equitable election out there.”
From the first moments of the debate, it was clear that one of Ossoff’s goals for the night was to tie Collins to Trump in what is shaping up to be a colossally bad year for pro-Trump Republicans.
“Whatever Donald Trump says, Mike Collins does,” he said.
But Ossoff didn’t have to do much to tie Collins to the president when Collins was working so hard to do it himself, and succeeding in the process.
When Collins wasn’t defending Trump’s policies, the rest of the debate was marked by the same personal attacks that Collins and Ossoff have been trading all year.
In his opening statement, Ossoff said Collins had brought dishonor to the state “through his personal bigotry and his widely documented ties to white nationalists.” At one point he said Collins had “hired half of the Third Reich to staff your office.”
Collins, in turn, called Ossoff “a radical,” “an extremist who voted for men in girls sports,” and “a trust fund kid who’s never had a job in his life.”
Although the senator has been leading Collins by double digits in recent polls, he went on the offense against Collins with the most aggressive rhetoric of the entire campaign.
“If John Lewis were marching today from Selma to Montgomery, Mike Collins would be grabbing a billy club,” Ossoff said on the topic of voting rights.
People always ask who won a debate when it’s over, and on pure mechanics, you have to give it to Ossoff. He raised every attack he’s ever made against Collins in a single hour and connected Collins to Trump’s policies like a lock and key.
Collins, in the meantime, sometimes stumbled over the rules of the debate, and offered the same “nothing burger” defense of his staff scandals and ethics accusations that has left lingering doubts about his role in it all since the accusations surfaced nearly a year ago.
But if Collins is right, and simply getting the president’s winning coalition back to the polls is all it will take to win in November, then Collins more than got his job done Thursday night.
Unlike Jackson, Collins left no doubt that he is a MAGA Republican, ride or die. Ossoff could not have said it better himself.