ATLANTA — With two days to go before the runoff election, President Donald Trump has sided with U.S. Rep. Mike Collins in his race for U.S. Senate against Derek Dooley.
Trump said in a 12:56 a.m. post Sunday on Truth Social that Collins “has my Complete and Total Endorsement.”
The support came weeks after Collins beat Dooley 40.5% to 30.2% in the May primary.
Collins posted a brief reaction on X later in the morning, saying he would be the one to unseat Democratic U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff in November.
That is also the goal for Dooley, who posted on X a half hour after Collins that he respected Trump but still expected to beat Collins in Tuesday’s runoff. The former football coach touted his own support from Gov. Brian Kemp.
It is not the first disagreement between Kemp and Trump over a pick for U.S. Senate.
Differences over Kemp’s appointment of Kelly Loeffler to an open U.S. Senate seat in 2019 triggered years of attacks by Trump, which were exacerbated by Kemp’s refusal to call a special legislative session over Trump’s 2020 election loss.
(Trump had wanted Kemp to appoint then-U.S. Rep. Doug Collins, who is not related to Mike Collins, according to an interviewwith the latter first published by the Jackson Progress-Argus in 2022.)
Trump said Mike Collins had been with him “from the very beginning” and offered a genteel critique of Dooley, basically calling him a carpetbagger.
“I don’t know Derek Dooley, and neither does anyone else, but he seems like a nice person. Unfortunately, he has lived outside of Georgia for most of his life,” Trump’s post said. Trump also dinged Dooley for saying Trump had lost the 2020 election.
Dooley has been careful not to alienate Trump supporters, publicly praising the president while bashing his opponent.
“Donald Trump is doing a great job trying to make change,” Dooley said at a debate in April, adding that Congress had not done enough to support the president.
Late on Sunday morning, Ossoff responded with his own social media post, calling both Collins and Dooley “Trump puppets” who had “made themselves both unelectable and terminally inseparable from the toxic president.”