John Reid, the embattled Republican Party lieutenant governor nominee, wants you to think the attacks on his campaign are coming from Democrats, and not from inside the party.
“We’ve seen it over and over: the politics of personal destruction. They’ve done it to President Trump every day of the last decade, since he came down that escalator,” the radio shock jock said at an event on Wednesday in Henrico County, which was originally slated to be a unity rally featuring Reid and the other two Republican Party statewide-ticket nominees, Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, who is running for governor, and Jason Miyares, who is running for a second term as attorney general.
Nice try, but we all know what’s going on here.
ICYMI
- Earle-Sears backs Reid in fight with Youngkin, who wants Reid off the ballot
- This John Reid-Glenn Youngkin fight over gay porn is worth keeping an eye on
- John Reid resists pressure to drop out of LG race over hot gay online photos
- Virginia 2025 Republican ticket set: That’s a pretty diverse group there
Earle-Sears and Miyares were nowhere to be seen at the, ahem, unity rally, which says a lot about the lack of party cohesion at a most inopportune time, with Earle-Sears, at the top of the ticket, flailing in the polls, which will almost certainly impact the down-ticket races as the next few months play out.
The reason the three aren’t on the same page: let’s just say it’s coming from the top.
When Reid says “they’ve done it to President Trump every day of the last decade,” implying that the people trying to undermine his candidacy are the same people doing that kind of thing to Trump, i.e., Democrats, he’s obfuscating the fact that the people trying to get Reid to step down as the Republican LG nominee are, in fact, fellow Republicans – and not just run-of-the-mill Republicans, but Republicans working at the behest of the sitting governor, Glenn Youngkin.
The Youngkinistas have been working behind the scenes to try to get Reid, who is openly gay, to drop out of the lieutenant governor race, using what appears to be dirty tricks inspired by Nixon’s daffy plumbers, in the form of a social-media account set up under a username associated with Reid to post gay porn.
Virginia Democrats have been playing this the way you should play when your opponent is focused on bumbling its way toward self-immolation – with nuclear silence.
It boggles the mind that Virginia Republicans have created this controversy for themselves, but the issue at hand dates back to the moves four years ago to nominate Earle-Sears, a Black immigrant woman, and Miyares, the son of a Cuban refugee.
Youngkin’s sweeping win over Terry McAuliffe in the 2021 governor’s race carried Earle-Sears and Miyares across the finish line with him, but since the Virginia Constitution doesn’t allow a governor to run for re-election, that set up the problem the party is now forced to deal with, in terms of having two candidates of color with immigrant backgrounds on the statewide ticket, at a time when the Trump administration is focused on ending DEI initiatives and cracking down on immigration.
The party can’t do anything about Earle-Sears and Miyares, so it’s throwing the hammer down on Reid.
“The Richmond swamp doesn’t like it when they encounter a different type of person who they can’t control,” Reid said at the Wednesday event in Henrico County, again, trying to make it sound like it’s the other side that is acting swampy, when it’s Republicans making the effort to control.
“That’s what’s happened here. They have now tried coming after me, threatening me, pressuring me with every trick in the book. And I want to thank you for standing with me, standing with me against the corrupt political machine that’s been hindering Virginia’s success for years,” Reid said.
Pay attention to what Reid just said there: he’s calling the Republican Party that is now in power in Richmond a “corrupt political machine that’s been hindering Virginia’s success for years.”
Isn’t he?
This time last week, Republicans thought the worst thing that could happen to them was having a gay man on the statewide ticket with the immigrant Black woman and the Cuban.
Now, they’ve got the immigrant Black woman, the Cuban, and the guy openly saying the Republican Party is corrupt who appears to have the receipts to back him up on that.
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Chris Graham
