Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and President Donald Trump have largely avoided attacking each other over the last year, after Kemp rejected Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia. But the détente may be wearing thin, as top lieutenants in Trump’s political orbit believe Kemp is going rogue in the Georgia Senate race.
The governor himself was everyone’s top choice to run for Senate in what Republicans believe is their top pickup opportunity of the cycle. But when the popular governor decided not to run, there was a conversation between Kemp and the White House that ended in an agreement: Let’s work together.
The understanding was, according to three sources familiar with the deal, that Kemp, the White House and the Senate GOP’s campaign arm — the National Republican Senatorial Committee and Senate Leadership Fund — would work together to find the right candidate to take on Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff.
But Kemp has been clear: He wants former University of Tennessee football coach Derek Dooley.
When Kemp first started pushing Dooley as a potential candidate, people were open to him, the sources said. Dooley met with the NRSC, the White House and the Senate Leadership Fund. And while no one strictly objected to Dooley, the message to Kemp was that he shouldn’t get involved without everyone signing off.
But then Kemp started working behind the scenes to push Dooley, getting dangerously close to outright endorsing him in meetings, sources told NOTUS.
“You think in Georgia they would’ve learned their lesson with someone tied to football. But apparently they haven’t,” one source close to Trump told NOTUS.
According to reporting from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Kemp has been pushing Dooley to run and helping him lay the groundwork for a potential bid. The governor even went as far as to tell Rep. Buddy Carter, Insurance Commissioner John King and Rep. Mike Collins — who hasn’t announced a run for Senate but is expected to next week — that he won’t support their bid for Senate.
Kemp’s angling for Dooley has angered many in Trump’s orbit.
“Team Trump has earnestly been trying to work in good faith with Kemp over the past several months. There was already some annoyance over him selfishly punting on the Senate race because he has presidential ambitions in 2028, but people had gotten past that,” one source close to Trump’s political operation told NOTUS.
Now Kemp’s decision to push for his own candidate, despite an agreement with the White House to work together, is viewed as a “slap in the face.”
Another source put it more bluntly.
“People are pissed. Trumpworld is pissed,” a second source close to Trump’s political operation told NOTUS.
One GOP operative close to the race expressed anger with Kemp’s team for pushing someone like Dooley, who has no political background or ties to Trump, when Carter and Collins are already established.
“Nobody is on board with this shit,” the operative said. “It’s stupid. They can’t articulate the pathway forward. It’s Kemp thinking he’s going to exert his will over the White House to support a candidate that should’ve been him. If he wanted to have a say in this, he should’ve just run.”
A source close to Kemp told NOTUS that the governor meant it when he said he wanted to work with Trump to find the right candidate.
“The governor meant it when he said he wanted to work with the president, his team, and Senate leadership to beat Ossoff — and has worked for two and half months to do so,” the source said.
But one Trumpworld source said people close to the president are starting to view the Georgia GOP primary as a “proxy war” against Trump and Kemp.
The sources who spoke to NOTUS emphasized that, all along, the White House and the Senate Republican apparatus have sought to work together. But Kemp doesn’t seem to be interested in that.
“The White House, the Super PACS and the committees — whether it’s House, Senate, whatever — are working very close together because it’s really important,” one of the sources close to Trump said. “You have to come to an agreement and work together and try to minimize primaries. For Governor Kemp to go rogue like this shows he had no intention of ever wanting to work together. And we’re scratching our heads. It doesn’t make sense. Pissed off is an understatement.”
One source with knowledge of the rift said Kemp seeming to jump the gun “all but guarantees Trump goes against Dooley.” The source added that the president and his team have nothing against the football coach, but the way Kemp has gone about pushing Dooley makes it difficult for Trump to endorse him in the primary.
“He’s putting Dooley in a really bad position, because no one in Trump’s operation had anything against him, but Kemp pushing him like this could really sours him with them,” one of the sources close to Trump’s political operation said.