…if this guy gets in. He’s a full-blown white supremacist:
GOP Rep. Mo Brooks is very happy about the Alabama Senate race right now. Just ask him.
Buoyed by a high-profile endorsement from former President Donald Trump, who remains immensely popular with Republicans in that state, Brooks is running away with the GOP primary at this point.
“We’re probably up 30 to 40 points over whoever the second place person is,” Brooks said in an interview, citing a poll Trump mentioned during an interview on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show Monday night. No further details on that poll were available.
“Looks like he’s got clear sailing,” Trump said of Brooks. And Brooks is holding a fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago on Friday.
That Brooks is doing so well is a problem for both Democrats and the GOP establishment, neither of which want the 66-year-old former state representative in the Senate. But Trump is still the boss of Alabama politics, and if Trump wants Brooks, that might just be that.
Brooks was heavily criticized for speaking at Trump’s Jan. 6 rally on the Ellipse prior to the deadly attack on the Capitol. During his speech, Brooks urged rally goers to “start taking down names and kicking ass.” Brooks insists he was talking about the 2022 elections, not urging attacks on lawmakers as they certified Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory. Democratic Reps. Tom Malinowski (N.J.) and Debbie Wasserman Schultz (Fla.) introduced a resolution to censure Brooks, but up until now, they haven’t pushed it.
The Jan. 6 controversy fits the bill for Brooks, now in his sixth term in the House. Brooks once read from Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” on the House floor in a bid to own Democrats. He seems to think the “National Socialist German Workers Party” means the Nazis were socialists. He’s a climate change denier, and once he accused Democrats of launching a “war on whites.”
Four years ago, a Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell-aligned Super PAC helped bury Brooks in the GOP Senate primary with a wave of attack ads. But the strategy backfired as Roy Moore went on to win the primary — McConnell was backing incumbent GOP Sen. Luther Strange. Moore lost in the general election to Democrat Doug Jones.
This time, Brooks said it doesn’t matter who McConnell or the GOP establishment is backing — he’s got Trump.
“I’m not really concerned about any other campaign,” Brooks said. “I have to run my own race. If I run a good race, I believe the people of the state of Alabama will elect me.”
The only other Republican candidate in the GOP primary right now is Lynda Blanchard, a wealthy self funder who has vowed to pour millions of dollars into the race. Blanchard recently wrote an op-ed for the Yellowhammer News in Alabama entitled “A man in a skirt is not a woman — It is an abomination.” Blanchard described herself as “a Christian, conservative, Trump Republican who is one hundred percent committed to the MAGA agenda and America First initiative” in the op-ed. Blanchard was Trump’s ambassador to Slovenia.
Katie Boyd Britt, president and CEO of the Business Council of Alabama and a former chief of staff to Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), had been touted as a possible top-tier candidate. Britt, though, hasn’t gotten into the race yet, and it’s not clear she could beat Brooks if she did. Politically connected Alabama business leaders are busily scrambling to find someone else, fearing another potential Roy Moore debacle if Brooks is the GOP candidate in 2022.
Brooks said he doesn’t care what the Republican party bosses say, think, or do about him at this point. “Doesn’t make any difference to me,” Brooks said. “If anything, having the establishment Republican senators support someone else probably enhances my chances for election.”
He’s probably right about that. Being a radical jerk is a prime selling point in the Republican Party these days. Owns the libs dontcha know.