When a political player starts drawing personal insults from President Trump and his people, it is a pretty good sign that his star is on the rise.
For Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia, that moment arrived this summer. In July, Mr. Trump dubbed the fresh-faced lawmaker “Pee-wee Herman.” The next month, upset over Mr. Ossoff’s criticism of the president, one aide called Mr. Ossoff a “feminine theater kid” and a “lightweight loser,” and another derided him as “a miserable person” and “the biggest cuck loser in politics,” while deploying a sexually explicit moniker unfit for a family-friendly publication.
Mr. Ossoff gives as good as he gets. Maybe better. He has derided Mr. Trump as “a failed president,” “a national disgrace” and a “draft-dodging crook.” This anti-Trump feistiness has boosted the senator’s standing in his party and turbocharged his re-election campaign. Once talked about as the most vulnerable Democratic senator of the cycle, he is now being talked up as a hot presidential possibility for 2028.
If Mr. Ossoff winds up in the White House, Mr. Trump will have largely himself to blame. The president didn’t just help him win his seat. He also spent years undermining the Republican Party in Georgia, sowing internecine discord, championing losing candidates and destroying conservative voters’ faith in the electoral system. With impressive, if unintentional, drive, Mr. Trump has fostered the conditions that transformed Mr. Ossoff from a charmingly nerdy, vaguely awkward, low-key freshman lawmaker into a political star.
Not all of it is Mr. Trump’s fault. Demographics have partly driven Georgia’s political turn from red to purple. The state’s populace is young, and a growing majority belongs to racial or ethnic minority groups. Republicans cannot win statewide contests simply by turning out the MAGA base. And over the past decade-plus, Democratic organizers, including Stacey Abrams and her New Georgia Project, have done yeoman’s labor mobilizing the blue team.
But the president has done much to speed the shift. Most famously, his election fraud lunacy after losing the state in 2020 depressed Republican turnout and cost the party both Senate seats in runoffs held in January 2021. This tipped control of the chamber to the Democrats, a mark of shame that sat poorly with many Georgia Republicans.
Mr. Trump’s ensuing feud with Gov. Brian Kemp, a fellow Republican who refused to help overturn the state’s 2020 election results, greased the state party’s slide into extremism and obsolescence. The rise of MAGA elevated the far right, most prominently the Georgia Republican Assembly, a grass-roots group that has feuded fiercely with more mainstream Republicans and pushed to impose arbitrary purity tests on candidates. In 2023, the group unsuccessfully pressed the state party to pass a rule blocking candidates from running who were insufficiently conservative or traitors to the party. (This of course included Mr. Kemp and Brad Raffensperger, the state’s secretary of state, who refused to “find” Mr. Trump 11,780 extra votes.)
As Team MAGA took over the state party apparatus, Mr. Kemp and other elected leaders distanced themselves from it, creating parallel fund-raising and voter turnout machines. The state G.O.P. got bogged down in niche issues, such as a crusade for paper ballots, that are not top-of-mind concerns even for most Republican voters.
Republican elected officials now view the state party not as an organ for helping get them elected so much as one aimed at litigating grievances against G.O.P. officials and candidates deemed insufficiently MAGA, party operatives have told me.
Mr. Trump himself continues meddling, despite having displayed a reverse Midas touch in statewide races. In the 2022 midterms, his preferred candidates lost their primaries for governor, secretary of state, attorney general and insurance commissioner. Herschel Walker, Mr. Trump’s pick to face Senator Raphael Warnock, won the primary but lost the general.
Mr. Trump narrowly carried Georgia in 2024. But less than two years later, his approval numbers are deep underwater there. In this summer’s primary, his pick for governor, Burt Jones, lost to the businessman Rick Jackson.
As for this year’s Senate race, Republicans had aggressively courted Mr. Kemp to take on Mr. Ossoff. He declined. Allies of his told me at the time that he decided it was not worth another brutal statewide campaign — with at best grudging acceptance by a president and a MAGA movement that had long vilified him — to be just another member of the party’s Senate roster. And so the G.O.P. was left to pick from a constellation of lesser lights.
Enter Mike Collins, the Trump-backed horse in the race. The hard-right representative emerged from a nasty G.O.P. primary tarnished by scandal, short on campaign cash, polling well behind Mr. Ossoff and facing grave doubts among many Republicans in the state that he can turn things around. Mr. Collins isn’t really an anti-establishment outsider; his father was a House member. But he rocks the middle-finger swagger and the country-fried good-ol’-boy shtick — complete with a mullet, his critics marvel — that tends to thrill the MAGA base. Many big-money donors are skeptical of him, and he is expected to be a hard sell among the more traditional Republicans, independents and swing voters who determine statewide races.
Mr. Collins’s scandals and missteps have not helped. Several people in his orbit, including his son-in-law, have been chummy with white nationalists, publicly promoted white nationalism or been otherwise accused of antisemitic behavior. Rather than swiftly addressing the dust-up within his family, Mr. Collins refused to answer questions and allowed the mess to drag on for weeks before firmly declaring himself not a racist.
The representative is also under investigation by the House Ethics Committee over allegations that his office misspent taxpayer funds on a no-show paid internship for the girlfriend of his longtime chief of staff, Brandon Phillips. (Mr. Collins has denied impropriety.)
Compounding the awkwardness, Mr. Collins fired Mr. Phillips in May, in response to the aide’s offensive posting on social media. Then the representative had to replace his subsequent chief of staff, Kip Talley, because of his participation in a group chat that included Nick Fuentes and Richard Spencer, notorious white nationalists. Even the party’s nominee for governor, Mr. Jackson, is keeping a healthy distance from Mr. Collins.
This all serves to fuel the emerging mythos of Mr. Ossoff. The 39-year-old senator — still the youngest in the chamber — stands poised to romp to re-election in a state made more purple by Mr. Trump’s machinations. Better still, Mr. Ossoff’s choirboy looks and often earnest demeanor, coupled with his taste for political combat and his social media savvy, give him an edge in the political mud pits. He can land some pretty rough insults without coming across as nasty or extreme.
In June, my colleague Michelle Goldberg noted that Mr. Ossoff seemed to have been cooked up in a lab as the perfect Democratic candidate for 2028. The rich irony is that Mr. Trump has been a — maybe even the — most important cook.
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