President Donald Trump’s incessant volatility is continuing to even affect his relationships with people in his own political party. This past weekend, he met at the White House with Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, and the Wall Street Journal reports that the meeting ended abruptly after the two disagreed over the best path forward for a U.S. Senate seat that Johnny Isakson is vacating with a resignation effective at the end of this year. Trump has stormed out of meetings before, including a couple of high profile incidents when he’s turned attempted White House summits with Congressional Democrats into similar spectacles of his ego.
The disagreement that sparked the reported tension this past weekend centers on who should replace Isakson. Although Kemp has reportedly been leaning towards appointing business executive Kelly Loeffler, Trump has advocated for Georgia Congressman Doug Collins, who’s the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee and has already very loudly defended Trump during House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry. If Collins gets into the Senate, he could continue his loudmouthed defenses there — in other words, the president seems to be seeking a political appointment for his very clear personal benefit.
The White House, of course, says there’s nothing to see here.
Press secretary Stephanie Grisham — who has so far not held a single press conference in her months on the job — said:
‘President Trump had a very nice meeting at the White House on Sunday with Gov. Kemp of Georgia. They discussed many things including his potential appointment of a senator and the timing of the appointment. Various names were discussed. It was a very friendly meeting.’
Is the best that they could come up with really that Trump and Kemp had a “very nice” meeting and discussed “many things”? That sounds like the work of someone who’s never even heard of a thesaurus.
For his part, Collins has been vocally receptive to the president’s idea. He recently insisted to the Atlanta-Journal Constitution:
‘In recent days and weeks, I’ve heard from more and more Georgians encouraging me to pursue statewide service. Those Georgians deserve to have me consider their voices – so I am, strongly. As I focus on defending the president against partisan impeachment attacks, I recognize Georgia needs someone with experience serving at home and making them heard in Washington.’
So his idea of making Georgians’ voices heard is to spend all his time winding up against Democrats leading the impeachment inquiry? They will never, ever, ever be able to erase the fact that there is currently ample evidence against Donald Trump, implicating him in the alleged Ukraine quid pro quo plot to exchange aid for political intel. That doesn’t mean that they’re going to stop trying!
Trump has good reason to be worried — no matter how many times he and his cronies insist that really, the American people are on their side, the fact is that an average of about one in two of them support the impeachment inquiry. At present, Trump consistently loses by significant margins when pitted against leading Democratic presidential primary candidates in polls.
