Brian Kemp and Brad Raffensperger testified before the Georgia grand jury that indicted Donald Trump. Marjorie Taylor Greene is angry about their disloyalty and thinks she may be Trump’s VP. It’s bad for GOP party unity in the 2024 election.
One of the many fascinating aspects of the new indictment of Donald Trump by a grand jury in Fulton County, Georgia, is that this criminal proceeding is occurring in arguably the most politically polarized state in America. Georgia was the closest state in the 2020 presidential election that Trump tried to overturn (a major reason he and his cronies spent so much time disputing this one state’s results), and it could be the “tipping point” state in a 2024 presidential election. Georgia also gave Democrats control of the U.S. Senate in dual runoff elections in January 2021 and strengthened the Democratic Senate majority by rejecting Trump’s friend Herschel Walker in 2022.
But as Trump’s legal drama in Atlanta is reminding us, political polarization in Georgia isn’t just a matter of conflict between the two parties; it has also divided the Republican Party that controls state government. This intraparty division is mostly about Trump himself, or at least his efforts to boss and bully the Republicans who supervised the 2020 elections in Georgia and adamantly refuse to accept that it was “rigged.”
So while across the country most Republicans are lining up in solidarity with Trump and his contention that his legal problems are just another phase in his ongoing persecution by the Democrats who “stole” the presidency from him in 2020, the situation is very different in Georgia. Three of the top Republicans in state offices in 2020 — Governor Brian Kemp, Secretary of State (and chief election official) Brad Raffensperger, and then–Lieutenant Governor Geoff Duncan — have all testified before the Fulton County grand jury and will presumably be witnesses for the prosecution if and when this case finally goes to trial.
