Former senator David Perdue is unlikely to win the Republican primary for Georgia governor taking place on Tuesday. But on the off chance he does beat incumbent Brian Kemp, he’s already previewed how he’d go after Stacey Abrams—who’s running unopposed the Democratic nomination—in the general election. And if you guessed, “with substantive criticism on issues that affect all Georgians,” you wildly overestimated the Donald Trump–backed candidate!
At a campaign stop on Monday, Perdue asked supporters, “Did you all see what Stacey said this weekend? She said that Georgia is the worst place in the country to live. Hey, she ain’t from here. Let her go back to where she came from. She doesn’t like it here.” (Abrams’s remarks were about Georgia’s terrible record with mental health and maternal mortality, in addition to its rising incarceration rate and declining wages. She also said, “Georgia is capable of greatness. We just need greatness to be in our governor’s office.”) Abrams was born in Wisconsin and moved to Georgia in high school, where she has lived for decades. Perdue’s vile comments were reminiscent of Trump’s 2019 attack on then freshmen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib, who he claimed “originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe,” insisted had no right to weigh in on “how our government is to be run,” and said should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” Given that Ocasio-Cortez, Pressley, and Tlaib were all born in the United States, and Omar became a citizen in 2000 at the age of 17, the then president’s position was more than a little clear: that only white people are true Americans.
Anyway, Perdue‘s racist remarks didn‘t stop at the suggestion that Abrams is an interloper in Georgia who should mind her own business, he also had the audacity to boldly claim that the Black Democratic candidate has no respect for Black people. Referring to a 2018 remark in which Abrams pledged to create new jobs in the renewable energy industry, saying, “People shouldn’t have to go into agriculture or hospitality to make a living in Georgia,” Perdue told supporters on Monday: “When she told Black farmers, ‘You don’t need to be on the farm,’ and she told Black workers in hospitality and all this, ‘You don’t need to be,’ she is demeaning her own race when it comes to that. I am really over this. She should never be considered material for governor of any state, much less our state where she hates to live.”
Later that night, he doubled down on his nauseating “go back to where you came from” comments.
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Asked about Perdue’s attacks on Monday evening, Abrams simply responded: “Regardless of which Republican it is, I have yet to hear them articulate a plan for the future of Georgia.”
Trump, who was attempting to exact revenge on Kemp for not overturning the 2020 election results in Georgia, endorsed Perdue in February. But even the notoriously delusional former president appears to have realized his candidate of choice has little chance of winning, and, per NBC News, “seem[ed] to have given [Perdue’s] campaign up for dead” earlier this month. While Trump took to Truth Social to insist he still believes in Perdue and that reports to the contrary are “phony” news, he chose not to hold a last-minute rally for the candidate, The New York Times noted, and called into a Monday event by phone to predict Perdue would pull out a surprise victory. To which the former senator cringingly responded “You’re the best, boss. Thank you.”
The post David Perdue, Trump’s Pick for Georgia Governor, Wraps Up Bid for Office With Wildly Racist Remarks About Stacey Abrams appeared first on Vanity Fair.
