Glenn Youngkin woke up Friday morning to a stupid, racist-sounding nickname from Donald Trump, which is probably actually good news for the Virginia governor’s fledgling presidential hopes.
“Young Kin (now that’s an interesting take. Sounds Chinese, doesn’t it?) in Virginia couldn’t have won without me,” Trump started a post on his Truth Social website, which has been hanging on by the thinnest of strings for months.
“I Endorsed him, did a very big Trump Rally for him telephonically, got MAGA to Vote for him – or he couldn’t have come close to winning,” Trump continued, the copy-editing errors being the indication that it was the Big Guy, and not an underling, doing the typing.
“But he knows that, and admits it,” Trump went on with his Truth.
That’s what they call them on that site.
“Truths.”
As if, right?
“Besides, having a hard time with the Dems in Virginia – But he’ll get it done!” he finished up, mocking Youngkin for god knows what.
Objectively, Youngkin has had a decent first year as governor, if you’re for things like dumbing down K-12 education and rolling back LGBTQ+ civil rights, as most of his supporters are.
But Youngkin’s eyes are on a bigger prize – 2024 – and things haven’t been going too well for him on that front.
Youngkin went to bat for 15 Republican gubernatorial candidates in the 2022 midterms, and struck out big-time, with only four of those candidates winning their elections.
He also failed to push Republicans to a majority of House seats in Virginia, with two of the three competitive races in the Commonwealth going to Democratic incumbents.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was the big winner among the Republican presidential pretenders this week, coasting to a 19.4-point re-election win, and carrying 20 of the 28 U.S. House seats down ticket.
Meanwhile, Trump, the biggest loser, whose hand-picked celebrity know-nothing candidates flailed in Pennsylvania and Georgia, and appear headed to defeat in Arizona and Nevada, has spent the past couple of days lashing out at other Republicans and Fox News over his self-inflicted bloodbath.
Punching down at Youngkin with a racist-sounding nickname stands out as among the more head-scratching things from Trump in what has been a head-scratching week for him, though.
Youngkin is barely registering in the early polling looking at the 2024 race, and despite Trump’s claim that he wouldn’t have won Virginia without him last year, Youngkin did everything he could do in his run for governor to distance himself from Trump without actually distancing himself from Trump, if that makes sense.
Youngkin famously even avoided the call-in rally that Trump referenced in his social-media post, as he tried to dance around accepting the former president’s endorsement, sounding the race-whistle on the supposed influence of critical race theory in Virginia public schools, while also trying to be competitive in a state that has been trending blue for the better part of the past two decades.
The effort here from Trump to try to pick a fight with a relative moderate conservative who isn’t getting anything in the way of traction in terms of 2024 calls to mind Trump’s efforts in 2019 to leverage Ukraine for dirt on Joe Biden when Joe Biden was a fringe player at best in the 2020 Democratic presidential race.
Do Trump’s people see something with Youngkin that the rest of us aren’t seeing yet?
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Chris Graham
