What Happens When Trump Endorses the Candidate of the Hated Establishment?
BIRMINGHAM, Ala.—No one seems to know what moved the president to issue the tweet that shook Alabama.
Last Tuesday, President Trump took a break from his usual bluster—blasting the Fake News media; threatening North Korea with “fire and fury”—to make a different kind of statement, the likes of which he’d never made before. “Senator Luther Strange has done a great job representing the people of the Great State of Alabama,” Trump tweeted at 9:16 p.m. “He has my complete and total endorsement!”
It was the first time the president had waded into a contested Republican primary, and he had done so on behalf of the race’s most disliked candidate—an incumbent backed by the Washington establishment but unpopular in his home state, who viewed him as the beneficiary of a corrupt bargain with a governor driven from office by a sex scandal.
Republicans in Alabama were puzzled. Strange himself was surprised—he nearly drove off the road when Trump called him from the White House on Tuesday afternoon, he said. Republicans in Washington didn’t know it was coming, either; Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, had previously lobbied Trump to back Strange, but had not mentioned it to him for weeks, a source close to McConnell told me.
The usual slavishly pro-Trump conservative media were enraged. Mark Levin, the conservative radio host, Trump’s tweet “a stab in the back to every conservative in this country,” while a Huntsville talk-radio host “ignorant.” The normally pro-Trump quarters of Fox News and lit up with condemnation.
