EVANS, Ga. (AP) — After making up privately, former President Donald Trump and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp are using the aftermath of Hurricane Helene to put their détente on public display with a month to go before Election Day.
Trump, the 2024 Republican presidential nominee, and Kemp, a popular second-term governor, are slated to appear together Friday afternoon outside Augusta, Georgia, to tout recovery efforts after Helene made landfall in Florida and wrought widespread damage as it moved inland through Georgia and other states.
The appearance will take place at a public pavilion in the town of Evans, with Trump and Kemp surrounded by water, paper products and other relief supplies. It marks the latest turn in the two Republicans' contentious relationship tracing back to Trump's insistence that his 2020 election defeat was fraudulent and his repeated broadsides at Kemp for not helping him overturn Democrat Joe Biden's narrow victory in Georgia.
It also comes days after Kemp publicly disputed Trump's false assertions that Biden and his White House were not helping Georgia and other GOP-run states affected by the storm. Kemp told reporters plainly that Biden had called him personally and offered whatever assistance Georgia might need.
“The president just called me ... and I missed him and called him right back and he just said ‘Hey, what do you need?’ And I told him, you know, we’ve got what we need, we’ll work through the federal process,” Kemp said of Biden. “He offered if there are other things we need just to call him directly, which I appreciate that.”
In Valdosta on Monday, Trump ignored reporters' questions about Kemp confirming that Biden and his administration were indeed directing federal response and working with officials in the affected states, which are led by governors from both major parties.
It was not clear Friday whether Trump and Kemp might take questions from reporters gathered in Evans — a situation that almost certainly would put the governor in a position to again dispute Trump's false accounts with the former president standing beside him.
As recently as August, Trump used social media posts and an Atlanta rally to accuse the governor of “fighting Unity and the Republican Party” and criticizing Georgia’s first lady for saying she planned to write in her husband’s name on her presidential ballot. Kemp had been saying for months that he would support “the Republican ticket,” but without naming Trump specifically.
That spectacle raised concerns among Republicans in Georgia and nationally that GOP dissension would lead to a repeat of 2020, when Biden won the state by fewer than 12,000 votes out of 5 million cast.
South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham and Trump's running mate JD Vance helped negotiate a detente, with Kemp finally stating in a cable news interview that he supported Trump's comeback bid and Trump, in turn, praising the governor on social media. Not long after, Vance and Kemp spoke at a Faith & Freedom Coalition gala in Georgia and met privately backstage. During his speech at the dinner, Kemp did explicitly call for returning Trump to the White House. But he still spent most of his argument criticizing Democratic nominee and Vice President Kamala Harris rather than extolling Trump.
Bill Barrow, The Associated Press
