Donald Trump’s huffing and puffing may blow Senate Joe Biden’s way

The ability of Joe Biden to shape America’s future hinges on two crucial contests in Georgia. The outgoing President’s fury may tip the balance in his favour

Donald Trump, left, has been warring so fiercely with his own party that some Republicans believe he wants them to lose to back up his allegations of electoral fraud by Joe Biden. Picture: AFP

‘Immerse yourself in holiday magic at Stone Mountain with millions of dazzling lights, spectacular shows and visits from some of your favourite holiday characters!” An invitation to Georgia’s most popular tourist destination proved too good to resist — and so I found myself celebrating 2021 at the world’s biggest shrine to white supremacy.

The Ku Klux Klan used to hold its ceremonies beneath the 500m-high granite outcrop on the outskirts of Atlanta. Members of the armed black militia calling itself the “Not F..king Around Coalition” held their own rally there in July. On the side of the scenic mountain, huge bas-reliefs of the three “giants” of the Confederacy — Robert E Lee, “Stonewall” Jackson and Jefferson Davis, riding their steeds — have been carved in stone.

You do not often hear that the monument was devised by the same sculptor as Mount Rushmore, where Donald Trump has longed to be immortalised alongside George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. Losing the November election was such a shock to his ego that Trump still insists he won “big”.

Democratic Senate candidate Reverend Raphael Warnock. Picture: AFP

On Tuesday, two run-off elections in Georgia will determine which party controls the Senate — and Trump has been warring so fiercely with his own party that some Republicans believe he wants them to lose in order to back up his allegations of electoral fraud. For if their candidates for the Senate can beat the “crooked” Democrats, then how did he fail to achieve the same feat? Yet, after three recounts and much griping by Trump, Joe Biden was confirmed as the winner of the state by 12,000 votes.

On the way to the Summit Skyride cable cars I met Laurie, 56, who was walking her dog in the winter sunshine. “I hate to see the mountain being misused by white supremacists. I like to think of it before it was defaced,” she said.

Black families were also enjoying the seasonal cheer. Don Jr, 18 — “no relation,” he laughed — was there with his father, Don Sr, having just voted early for the Democrats in the run-offs.

“The carvings should never have been done, but they’re part of our history,” Don Sr said. “What I wish is that they would add some of the people who were on the other side.”

There is nothing new about polarisation in Georgia — its divided past is written in stone. Yet the presence of so many families of every race and creed enjoying a day out in the shadow of a civil war memorial suggests a better future for the state. Economic growth and innovation have brought demographic change and new jobs to “Techlanta” and its suburbs.

First, however, Georgia needs to settle the fate of the Senate. At stake is the freedom of the Biden administration to set its own agenda. If the two Democratic challengers, Jon Ossoff, 33, and Raphael Warnock, 51, win, Biden will be able to push his legislation through US congress with the help of Kamala Harris’s casting vote as vice-president.

The Republicans need only one of their two senators, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, to retain their seats in order to harry and block Biden at every turn. They call the run-offs a “firewall” against socialism. Yet they have been hobbled by civil strife in their party. Last week Trump again turned his fire on the Republican governor of Georgia and other election officials. “@BrianKempGA should resign,” he rage-tweeted. “He is an obstructionist who refuses to admit that we won Georgia.”

Democrat Jon Ossoff. Picture: AFP

If Loeffler and Perdue lose, Trump is certain to be blamed for their defeat. Some of his diehard supporters may not bother to vote at all. Lin Wood, a conspiracy-obsessed lawyer from Georgia who has gained the President’s ear by pressing him to declare martial law, has urged fellow Trumpists to boycott the polls: “Why would you go back and vote in another rigged election?”

Yet Trump and Biden are both landing in Georgia on Monday for last-ditch, get-out-the-vote rallies, while Harris arrives in the state today. As in the presidential election, Trump’s gathering will be a raucous, largely unmasked affair, while Biden’s will be a COVID-19 compliant drive-in. In the past, Republicans would have expected an easy win, but a record three million people have already voted.

According to a leaked memo by Karl Rove, the Republican election guru, the Democrats are surpassing their November 3 performance by “a couple of points”, yet Republicans could close the gap on the day if there is a huge turnout. The vote is on a knife-edge, with the latest polling averages showing a narrow lead for both Democrats, with Ossoff 0.9 percentage points ahead of Perdue, and Warnock 1.8 points ahead of Loeffler — but nobody trusts the polls any more.

Democrats say they are encouraged by the large number of African-Americans who have already voted. Their champion is Stacey Abrams, who orchestrated the registration of 800,000 new voters, mostly black, after she narrowly failed to win the Georgia governorship in 2018. Abrams was one of the celebrity guests with Elton John and the actor Tyler Perry on the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s Spotify podcast special last week. The year 2020 saw “horror and meanness surge, and justice fight back”, she told Meghan and Harry.

Trump and the Republicans have their own celebrity supporter in Georgia — Alveda King, the niece of Martin Luther King Jr. The evangelical minister, 69, recently recorded an EP called Merry Christmas “Again” in Trump’s honour.

“I felt oppressed by people who said, ‘Oh no, we don’t say that any more. We say Happy Holidays,’” King said. She was also impressed by Trump’s support for the “sanctity of life from the womb to the tomb”.

“Life is a civil right. Abortion is a civil wrong. My daddy, my uncle and my grandfather, Martin Luther King Sr, did not support abortion.”

King pointed out that more black people voted for Trump last year than in 2016. I asked about his surprising boast to have done more for African-Americans than any president since Abraham Lincoln.

Republican Senate candidate Kelly Loeffler. Picture: Getty Images

“I don’t believe President Trump is exaggerating about the promises he’s kept to the black community,” she replied, citing his support for small businesses, historic black colleges and criminal justice reform. “He said, ‘We all bleed the same,’ so I know he’s not a racist.”

Most of Martin Luther King’s family do not share her views. Adding spice to the feud, Warnock — one of the Democratic candidates — is the senior pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church, where King used to preach. That does not faze Alveda. “It’s not exactly true,” she demurred. “My uncle preached in the historic church across the street.” (The modern one is much larger.)

Warnock has taken the bulk of the fire from Republicans. They have seized on his use of the words “God damn America” and are broadcasting it non-stop on attack ads (although it was wrenched out of context from a speech about Barack Obama’s former pastor, the Rev Jeremiah Wright). Equally damaging, however, is the accusation by Warnock’s former wife that he ran over her foot in a car after a domestic dispute, a charge he denies, while allegations of child abuse have surfaced at one of his church camps.

Rangy, long-haired Loeffler, 50, is the most intriguing of the two Republican candidates. She is America’s richest senator and is married to Jeffrey Sprecher, the chairman of the New York stock exchange. Loeffler has been playing up the folksy side of her farming childhood, but lives in a palatial mansion where her husband collects paintings by the black artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. His triptych, Catharsis, hangs over their pool table.

Fellow candidate Perdue, 71, is known as the most prolific stock trader in the Senate. Some of these trades have been deemed “suspicious”, according to media reports. He has kept a low profile during the campaign, and is in quarantine after coming into contact with a person infected with Covid-19.

Both Republicans have been put on the spot by Trump’s last-minute ploy to increase pandemic relief payments from $US600 ($491) to $US2000. They were against the rise before capitulating to Trump’s wishes, but the measure seems doomed to fail in the Senate. Loeffler has been upping her obsequiousness to Trump in the hope of persuading his aggrieved base to vote.

Republican David Perdue. Picture: AFP

Ossoff, the other Democratic candidate, is a smooth-talking, rising young politician who serves as the chief executive of a British documentary film company, Insight TWI. He was mocked for his fancy title and foreign job three years ago in a video showing the office to be a small, terraced home in East Finchley, London.

I met the man responsible, Jason Shepherd, the chairman of the Cobb County Republican Party, at his office in Marietta, one of the fast-growing suburbs of Atlanta that has flipped to the Democrats. He is an Anglophile and card-carrying member of the Conservative Party after taking a business course at Oxford. One of his friends is the new Brexiteer peer Daniel Hannan.

Surely he was too smart to believe Trump’s allegations of cheating? Well, yes, the results were “more or less accurate”, Shepherd admitted. “Certainly not enough to overturn the result.”

Did he worry that Trump was taking his claims too far? “I do and I don’t,” he replied smoothly. “The good news,” Shepherd added, “is that they don’t seem to be trickling down. They’ve become part of the noise associated with every conspiracy theory.”

Although the Trump train is still rolling in Georgia, it is losing steam. I got the sense that voters are waiting for this week to be over — and for all the thunder and outrage to pass. On Stone Mountain, I met a Republican voter called David, 58, who told me Trump was “way out on a limb”.

“I supported a lot of his policies on immigration and dealing with China, but enough is enough,” he said. “It’s too late for him to quieten down, but he needs to step aside and let the Republican Party reclaim its roots.”

The ghosts of the South are stirring in this election, but they have not yet been awakened.

The Sunday Times