Trump moves to general election mode with Pennsylvania rally
WILKES-BARRE, PA. >> Larry Mitko voted for Donald Trump in 2016. But the Republican from Beaver County in western Pennsylvania says he has no plans to back his party’s nominee for Senate, Dr. Mehmet Oz — “no way, no how.”
Mitko doesn’t feel like he knows the celebrity heart surgeon, who only narrowly won his May primary with Trump’s backing. Instead, Mitko plans to vote for Oz’s Democratic rival, Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, a name he’s been familiar with since Fetterman’s days as mayor of nearby Braddock.
“Dr. Oz hasn’t showed me one thing to get me to vote for him,” he said. “I won’t vote for someone I don’t know.”
Mitko’s thinking underscores the political challenges facing Trump and the rest of the Republican Party as the former president shifts to general election mode with a rally Saturday night in WilkesBarre, Pennsylvania, the first of the fall campaign.
While the rally was organized to bolster Oz and Doug Mastriano, the GOP’s hard-line nominee for governor of Pennsylvania, it was Trump’s first rally since the FBI’s search of his Mara-Lago club, and Trump spent part of the evening railing against it.
He called it “one of the most shocking abuses of power by any administration in American history” and “a travesty of justice.”
“They’re trying to silence me and more importantly they’re trying to silence you. But we will not be silenced, right?” Trump said.
Investigators recovered thousands of documents in the search, including more than 100 with classified and top secret markings.
Trump’s endorsed picks won many Republican primaries this summer, but many of the candidates he backed were inexperienced and polarizing figures now struggling in their November races. That’s putting Senate control — once assumed to be a lock for Republicans — on the line.
In addition to Oz, among the others are author JD Vance in Ohio, venture capitalist Blake Masters in Arizona and former football star Herschel Walker in Georgia.
“Republicans have now nominated a number of candidates who’ve never run for office before for very highprofile Senate races,” said veteran Republican pollster Whit Ayres. While he isn’t writing his party’s chances off just yet, he said,
“It’s a much more difficult endeavor than a candidate who had won several difficult political races before.”
The stakes are particularly high for Trump as he lays the groundwork for an expected 2024 presidential run amid a series of escalating legal challenges.
This past week, President Joe Biden gave a primetime speech in Philadelphia warning that Trump and other “MAGA” Republicans — the acronym for Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign slogan — posed a threat to U.S. democracy. Biden has tried to frame the upcoming vote, as he did the 2020 election, as a battle for the “soul of the nation.” Biden’s Labor Day visit to Pittsburgh will be his third to the state within a week, a sign of Pennsylvania’s election-year importance.
Trump repeatedly attacked Biden — saying at one point “above all this election is a referendum on the corruption and extremism” of Biden and Democrats — and gave a brief spotlight to Oz and Mastriano.
Mastriano, he noted, had fought with him from the beginning to try to help Trump overturn the 2020 election and stay in power, saying Mastriano fought “like very few people fought.”
Oz, Trump said, “is going to work and fight for Pennsylvania,” while he attacked Fetterman and the Democratic nominee for governor, Josh Shapiro, as extreme while distorting their positions on issues like crime and abortion. In particular, the former president went after Fetterman’s irreverent dressing habits — shorts and hoodies — saying that “I don’t like those dirty sweat suits, they’re disgusting.”
“Fetterman may dress like a teenager getting high in his parents’ basement, but he’s a raging lunatic hell-bent on springing hardened criminals out of jail in the middle of the worst crime wave in Pennsylvania history,” Trump said.
Republicans have targeted Fetterman for backing proposals to release more geriatric or rehabilitated inmates from prisons and provide flexibility in certain mandatory-sentencing laws.
While Republicans were once seen as having a good chance of gaining control of both chambers of Congress in November, benefitting from soaring inflation, high gas prices and Biden’s slumping approval ratings, Republicans have found themselves on defense since the Supreme Court overturned the landmark Roe v. Wade decision protecting abortion rights.
Some candidates, like Mastriano, are sticking with their primary campaign playbooks, hoping they can win by turning out Trump’s loyal base even if they alienate or ignore more moderate voters.
Mastriano, who wants to outlaw abortion even when pregnancies are the result of rape or incest or endanger the life of the mother, played a leading role in Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election and was seen outside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, as proTrump rioters stormed the building.
But others have been trying to broaden their appeal, scrubbing from their websites references to antiabortion messaging that is out of step with the political mainstream. Others have played down Trump endorsements that were once featured prominently.
The shifting climate has prompted rounds of fingerpointing in the party, including from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who last month cited “candidate quality” as he lowered expectations that Republicans would recapture control of the Senate.
Florida Sen. Rick Scott, who leads the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said those who complain about the party’s nominees have “contempt” for the voters who chose them.