At present, Senator Kelly Loeffler finds herself in a difficult position: she has to actually earn her title at the ballot box. When Loeffler was appointed to the Georgia seat by governor Brian Kemp in January after incumbent Johnny Isakson stepped down due to health reasons, she had no prior experience in public service or as an elected official at any level. Polls of Georgia’s upcoming “jungle primary”—in which one of several Republican and Democratic candidates running needs a majority of votes to avoid a run-off election in January—show that Loeffler faces an uphill battle, despite her backing from the National Republican Senatorial Committee. (Her status as one of the richest senators in Washington and the millions she’s already poured into the race haven’t hurt either.) But rather than trying to win over Georgia voters by crafting her own platform, Loeffler is attempting to claim her first election victory by permanently attaching herself to Donald Trump’s coattails.
Loeffler has spent a large part of the past few months talking up her perfect field-goal percentage when voting for legislation backed by the president. But this live-by-the-Trump, die-by-the-Trump strategy backfired on Wednesday, when the senator gave a master class in the kind of selective amnesia that seems to somehow only plague congressional Republicans. On Wednesday, a reporter for NBC’s Atlanta affiliate followed up on Loeffler’s insistence that there are no issues on which she’s not aligned with Trump by bringing up the Access Hollywood tape in which the president brags about grabbing women by the genitals. Loeffler—fresh-off confirming the president’s Supreme Court pick, who almost certainly poses an existential threat to abortion rights, among other things—dodged the question with a line about Trump putting “America first” since his inauguration. When reporter Doug Richards used more explicit terms to try to jog her memory, saying that Trump admitted on tape to “personally sexually assaulting women,” Loeffler repeated a favorite excuse of her GOP colleagues when they are asked about the president’s tweets. “I’m not familiar with that,” she said.
The comment comes after Loeffler asserted earlier this month that she has no issues with any of the president’s past remarks. She has aggressively tried to claim the top spot on Trump’s list of favorite senators, outshining even South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham, who occasionally departs from his toadiness to wish out loud that the president would tweet less, and who has called QAnon, which Trump has refused to disavow despite being given ample opportunity to do so, “batshit crazy.”
Loeffler, on the other hand, is now following Trump into the depths of the Q-verse. Earlier this month, she celebrated an endorsement from Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican congressional candidate who has voiced support for the QAnon conspiracy theory and has a history of racist comments. The two appeared together at a campaign stop that was livestreamed by Loeffler’s campaign. While the senator showered Greene with praise, calling her a “much-needed voice” in Congress who is exemplary of “conservative values” and a warrior fighting the “radical left,” it was the QAnon sympathizer who arguably made the most disturbing comments. “What impressed me with Kelly is I found out that she believes a lot of the same things that I believe,” Greene said from behind a Loeffler campaign podium. “And I found out that she’s actually the most conservative Republican in the race.”
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