President Trump on Wednesday took aim at Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff (D) and what he called “communist” Democrats during his speech in the Peach State, calling him “terrible” and likening him to the comedic character Pee-Wee Herman.
Ossoff is running for reelection against Trump-backed Rep. Mike Collins (R-Ga.) and his viral speeches and Senate grillings have inspired chatter about a 2028 presidential run.
“Georgia is a state that believes in common sense, and yet your terrible senator Jon Ossoff is terrible,” Trump told a crowd in Marietta, Georgia.
“Jon Ossoff and the Democrat communists want to let the Marxists into power, bankrupt your families, and leave you totally undefended with wide open borders,” Trump said. “But we will not let that happen to our country.”
He repeatedly said Ossoff looks like Pee-Wee Herman, originally getting the Paul Reubens-created character’s name wrong, calling him “Pinky Herman.”
Trump said Ossoff is not respected in Washington and boasted that he beat him in an election years ago because he was asked to get “involved.”
He clarified later that he endorsed Ossoff’s opponent, Karen Handel, for Congress in 2017. Ossoff and Handel were running for Trump’s former HHS Secretary Tom Price’s seat. Handel won a runoff by more than 3 points.
The president claimed Ossoff was “easily winning,” but he backed Handel because he thought “anybody would be better than this guy.”
“He lost, but I have to hand it to him because instead of being a congressman, he later on became a senator,” he said. “If he was a congressman, he probably wouldn’t have run. Who knows? Got to give him a little credit for that.”
Ossoff won his Senate seat in 2020, the same year Trump sought to overturn his election loss to Joe Biden in the state, calling Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to ask him to recalculate the results so that he would be the winner.
Trump’s address to the nation last week about election security and fraud put Georgia Democrats on red alert, spurring them to defend their elections.
The president’s trip to the Peach State was billed as a way for him to talk about affordability, but some wondered whether Trump would bring up election fraud.
Instead, he focused on Trump accounts and touted his other economic efforts, before turning his attention to his favored midterm attack line: warning that democratic socialists are threatening to give rise to communism in the U.S.
“Communism is a loser,” he said. “The concept, the policy, it’s a loser, and it always has been, and it always will be.”
“With communism, everything turns to s—,” he added.
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