Donald Trump Suggests Georgia’s GOP Primary Will Be “Rigged”

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Donald Trump campaigning with Brian Kemp in 2018, before their falling out.Daisuke Tomita/AP

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Donald Trump is already stoking fears of election fraud in the Georgia governor race. This time, his baseless allegations are aimed squarely at a member of his own party.

This morning, former Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.) announced that he would run against incumbent Republican Brian Kemp in the GOP gubernatorial primary. It didn’t take long for Trump—still angry at Kemp for refusing to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election—to suggest that a Kemp win would be possible only through fraud.

“This will be very interesting, and I can’t imagine that Brian Kemp, who has hurt election integrity in Georgia so badly, can do well at the ballot box (unless the election is rigged, of course),” Trump wrote in a statement. “He cost us two Senate seats and a Presidential victory in the Great State of Georgia.”

Never mind that Kemp himself signed a voter suppression law inspired by Trump’s false claims of election rigging. Or that controversy about suspiciously timed stock trades did more to harm the two Republican senators’ 2020 election campaigns than Kemp ever could. It’s no longer just Democrats on the receiving end of Trump’s election fraud lies and insinuations: It’s anyone, even a right-wing governor, who refuses to bow to the former president and his attempts to undermine democracy.