Former President Donald Trump appears to be making good on his promise to force disloyal GOP politicians to face the might of his fundraising juggernaught.
Politico reported on Wednesday that Mr Trump’s Save America PAC is committing half a million dollars to an effort to oust Brian Kemp, the conservative governor of Georgia who irked the ex-president in 2020 by refusing to pressure his state legislature into an attempt to throw out Georgia’s valid 2020 election results.
Mr Trump’s failure to win Georgia was one of the final nails in the coffin which entombed his 2020 campaign; the former president expected to win the traditionally-red state as well as a handful of other swing states which fell to Joe Biden last November. In the months since, Mr Trump has baselessly alleged that widespread fraud kept him out of office for a second term.
Mr Kemp is one figure in a long line of GOP officials who now face retribution from Mr Trump over their choice to deny assistance to the former president’s attempts to overturn the lawful election results of the 2020 presidential contest.
While the $500,000 donation is a small drop in the massive bucket that is Mr Trump’s campaign war chest, it nevertheless represents a major shift for the de facto leader of the Republican Party who has thus far kept much of his prolific fundraising in the bank following his exit from the White House. At the end of 2021, his team announced a cash-on-hand total of $122m across its various entities; its spending total, meanwhile, topped out at just $1.3m.
It is also notable given the sheer number of candidates and causes that have earned Mr Trump’s favour in recent months; many analysts expected Mr Trump to be more generous in his gifts to Trump-aligned candidates this year in particular as the GOP attempts to retake the House and Senate.
The hesitancy of Mr Trump to spend more than he has already could indicate plans of the former president to mount another White House bid in 2024. The fundraising haul could not be directly transferred to his campaign were he to run, but could indirectly support a presidential run through other means.
Mr Kemp is currently battling a GOP primary challenge from David Perdue, a former senator who lost a special election to Sen Jon Ossoff in early 2021 that saw both of Georgia’s Senate seats flip blue in a historic sweep. Mr Perdue ran on his loyalty to Mr Trump and has remained an ardent supporter of the former president and his false claims about both the 2020 election and his own runoff.
"Most people in Georgia know that something untoward happened in November 2020," MrPerdue said during an interview last month, adding: "I’ll just say it ... in my election and the president’s election, they were stolen. The evidence is compelling now."
Mr Perdue was not one of the senators to vote to object to the 2020 election’s certification because his term ended three days before the events of January 6, when rioters attacked the US Congress seeking to block the certification of Mr Biden’s victory.
His fellow Georgia Republican senator at the time, Kelly Loeffler, had planned to vote for the objections, but after the attack on Congress released a statement claiming that she could not "in good conscience" continue to support objections to the 2020 election’s integrity.
