“Are you saying that only some Republicans are welcome?” Good is seen on video from last weekend asking Karen Angulo, the now-former chair of the Appomattox County Republican Committee, who was kicking Good out of an event in Farmville.
The event: the grand opening of a Donald Trump campaign store.
Aside: wonder if they have any of those gawdy basketball high-tops there?
Angulo, in a statement after the event, noted that the organizers had invited State Sen. John McGuire as a “special guest,” “because John has been a supporter of President Trump and never wavered, unlike Bob Good.”
Sick burn there.
Good’s issue with Trump: the congressman endorsed Ron DeSantis for the 2024 presidential nomination.
That didn’t work out so well in the end. DeSantis dropped out of the 2024 race after spending $160 million to finish a distant second to Trump in Iowa.
The opening on the right flank left open by Good is being exploited by McGuire, who was just elected in November to a State Senate seat, and immediately pivoted to launching a campaign for the Republican nomination for the congressional seat representing the Fifth, which stretches from Albemarle County to the North Carolina border down the Route 29 corridor.
Good, last month, tried to make amends with a throaty Twitter “total endorsement” of Trump, who he called “the greatest President of my lifetime.”
McGuire responded with a dreaded “Never Trumper” putdown of Good.
“Bob Good has come groveling back to Trump in order to save his own hide — friends, don’t trust him,” McGuire said. “He’ll stab Trump in the back again the first chance he gets. Never Trumper Bob Good is only good for Joe Biden, not for the patriots of Virginia’s 5th Congressional District.”
It’s against this backdrop that the nonsense at the Trump store in Farmville went down.
“After being told the night before that he was not welcome, Bob showed up uninvited, and attempted to make the day about himself, instead of President Trump,” Angulo said, in a statement released, because of course it was, by the McGuire campaign.
“I repeatedly asked Bob to leave. Once he finally relented and left our store, Bob and his paid campaign staff stood out front for over four hours trying to block people from entering our store. The whole thing was very embarrassing behavior for anyone, let alone a sitting member of Congress.”
To be honest, hard to disagree there.
Embarrassing might be understating it, actually.
The Good campaign tried to cover its tracks in a statement to the Virginia Scope website, which, related, is worth a read for its wall-to-wall coverage of Virginia politics.
“We are very disappointed in the behavior of the McGuire campaign and their surrogates this past Saturday,” the campaign said. “Unfortunately, this fits with how they have conducted themselves thus far in this campaign to smear and lie about Congressman Good, his conservative record, and support for President Trump. Mr. McGuire has been dishonest since the day he launched his campaign, just a week after being elected to the State Senate, and we expect no less in the weeks and months ahead.”
The takeaway here: this all happened at the grand opening of a Donald Trump store.
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Chris Graham
