Trump’s army takes aim at 2022 touting his election lies
Even Brooks admitted Monday that his campaign launch rally in Huntsville, Alabama, would not be quite so hyper. But he built the foundation for his run on proven falsehoods just the same.
“In 2020, America suffered the worst voter fraud and election theft in history,” Brooks said, claiming no other candidate for the US Senate had stood as strongly as he had alongside Trump. Channeling his hero, he slammed “weak-kneed RINOs,” the “fake news media” and “radical socialists.”
Multiple courts, including the US Supreme Court, rejected the ex-President’s claims of election cheating. Even Trump’s own Justice Department said that there was no widespread electoral fraud last year.
Brooks, who figures to have a strong chance of winning the GOP nomination and the Alabama seat, given Trump’s fervent support there, launched his effort alongside Stephen Miller, the hardline former White House official who authored many of the ex-President’s tough immigration policies.
“Nobody over the last four years has had President’s Trump’s back more than Mo Brooks,” Miller told the crowd. “But now, I need you to have his back.”
Brooks, who is running for the seat long held by retiring Republican Sen. Richard Shelby, a classic old-school conservative, was not the only member of Trump’s army targeting the Senate on Monday.
Former Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens, who also fanned false claims about election fraud, and who had resigned amid allegations of sexual and campaign misconduct, announced a bid for the seat of retiring Sen. Roy Blunt.
Greitens opened his campaign on Fox News and said he was running to “defend President Trump’s America First policies.”
The new recruits for Trump’s efforts to demonstrate his continuing hold on the GOP showed their stripes as the ex-President made a parallel bid to dismantle the democratic safeguards that confirmed his loss in Georgia last November.
Trump on Monday endorsed GOP Rep. Jody Hice for Georgia secretary of state — after attacking the incumbent, Brad Raffensperger, who had stood firm against Trump’s pressure on local officials to rig vote counts.
Hice has falsely claimed that there were multiple examples of fraud in Georgia, the key state that handed Democrats control of a 50-50 Senate in runoff elections in January.
Other outspoken pro-Trump Republican candidates are considering or have launched Senate campaigns in states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania where more GOP incumbents are retiring. Proteges of the ex-President are lining up challenges against some of the 10 Republicans who voted to impeach him for inciting an unprecedented and deadly insurrection designed to destroy basic US democratic principles.
The former President signaled to potential GOP candidates the price of his endorsement when he reemerged at the Conservative Political Action Conference this month, where he warned that Republicans needed to back an end to mail-in voting and called out GOP lawmakers who had voted to impeach him by name.
The former President’s shadow in 2022 will ensure that yet another election will be dominated by his pernicious claims that voting in America is corrupt — with all the consequent damage to US democracy that brings.
Nationwide voter suppression effort
Trump’s unending campaign of lies coincides with an effort across multiple states by local Republicans to suppress votes and reverse voting methods that resulted in a record turnout and his clear defeat in November.
The rededication of the party to Trump’s populist nationalist creed — characterized by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s visit to Mar-a-Lago earlier this year — helps explain the drive to make it more difficult for Democrats and minority voters to get to the polls.
The GOP could have rejected Trumpism and tried to broaden its appeal to win over more voters. But it doubled down on the “Make America Great Again” themes that lost the House, the Senate and a reelection race in Trump’s single term — so may need to attempt to muffle the voice of the majority of the nation that rejected the ex-President.
While the strategy may make sense in a base turnout election, it does pose questions for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican who strongly repudiated Trump’s behavior on January 6.
The influence of the ex-President threatens to deliver a slate of radical candidates that in some scenarios could make it tougher for Republicans to win swing states — in elections that history suggests should be tough for first-term Biden. The announcement by Greitens had been feared by the GOP establishment amid worries he could put a safe Republican seat at risk in 2022. The former governor’s run is stirring some dark memories among conservatives of Todd Akin’s 2012 loss to Democrat Claire McCaskill in Missouri.
Still, McConnell, as always with a shrewd eye on power, hedged by voting to acquit Trump in the Senate impeachment trial that took place after the former commander in chief had left office. And with typical…
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