ATLANTA — Democrats fired back after President Donald Trump’s visit to Georgia where he touted his policies and promoted Republican candidates ahead of the November midterm elections.
Trump called Democrats “Dumocrats,” and he accused the party of dragging the nation toward communism.
Democrats accused Trump of using the event at Wheeler High School in Cobb County Wednesday to distract from rising costs for everything from gas to groceries, adding that Republican policies were depriving thousands of Georgians of access to health insurance.
Trump used the event to promote GOP candidates for statewide office.
“This is a disaster for Georgia Republican candidates at every level of the ticket, who will be forced to own the failed president’s corrupt and unpopular agenda every day between now and November,” Charlie Bailey, chairman of the Democratic Party of Georgia, said in a statement.
The event was billed as an opportunity for Trump to promote new tax-advantaged accounts for American minors.
Babies born during his current term also are getting $1,000 grants from the federal government to get their “Trump accounts” started.
But Trump’s speech, which lasted well over an hour, went far afield of that one topic. He also covered the war in Iran, drug prices, economic development, immigration, inflation, the stock market, tax breaks and voting laws.
And he promoted several GOP candidates, from Rick Jackson for governor to Sen. Greg Dolezal, R-Cumming, for lieutenant governor, whom the president called “fantastic” while mispronouncing his surname as “Dolezwall.”
“You have my complete endorsement,” Trump said.
The campaign of Dolezal’s opponent, Sen. Josh McLaurin, D-Sandy Springs, accused Dolezal of blowing “baseless election-denier whistles” on stage because Dolezal had said Georgia was a red state in 2020, when Trump lost against Joe Biden, and that it remained one now.
“Don’t you believe for a second when the fake news will tell you this is a purple state,” Dolezal had said.
Dolezal cast the upcoming elections as existential, and not just for the state or the country.
“I believe that we are not only in a fight to save America, but we are in a fight to save Western civilization,” he said from the stage before Trump arrived. Dolezal returned to that theme near the end of his speech: “We are in a fight to save Western civilization. We will do it by saving America. And providentially, we will save America by saving Georgia. And we will save Georgia by saving the American Dream.”
McLaurin dismissed that part of Dolezal’s plank, saying in a statement that his opponent “continues to drone on about his battle for ‘the West.'”
McLaurin also criticized the Cobb County School District for hosting what was effectively a campaign event in a school.
“I was under the impression Cobb Schools was willing to host Trump as an official event, not as a GOP campaign rally with a series of statewide candidate stump speeches,” McLaurin said.
The district had already heard such criticism before the event.
John Floresta, the district’s chief strategy and accountability officer, said in an interview at the school before the candidates took to the stage that he did not see an issue.
After all, Trump was coming to talk about the Trump accounts, Floresta said. “We don’t think it’s controversial for moms and dads to hear about a thousand dollars being put in their kid’s bank account.”
ATLANTA — President Donald Trump visited Wheeler High School in Cobb County Wednesday to talk about the midterm elections, the impact of his policies on the economy and new tax-advantaged retirement accounts for children created under his administration.
He also talked about what he called the “skirmish” in Iran, saying the Iranian government was not yet ready to negotiate peace.
Prior to his arrival in Georgia, Trump had gone to Dover Air Force Base to salute the remains of four service members killed in the conflict.
Among them was Army 1st Lt. Tyler James Feeha, whose family is from the Marietta area. Trump gave them a ride home on Air Force One, and they attended his event at Wheeler High.
Trump said Iran cannot be allowed to obtain nuclear weapons.
He also said Democratic victories in the midterms would pose a greater threat to the country than both world wars and the attack on Sept. 11, 2001, because, he said, Democrats want to take America toward communism.
“The blue states are all going bad. They’re all going bad because communism is a loser,” the president said midway through his speech to an adoring crowd in the high school arena, which seats 3,000.
“With communism, everything turns to shit,” he added later to a roar of approval.
President Donald Trump speaks at Wheeler High School in Cobb County on Wednesday, July 22, 2026. (Ty Tagami/Capitol Beat)
The visit was an opportunity to promote his party ahead of the November elections.
Trump has endorsed U.S. Rep. Mike Collins for U.S. Senate, with the hope of unseating Democratic U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff.
Collins skipped Trump’s event, saying in a social media post that he had important votes to cast in Washington. Trump concurred from the stage, saying he ordered Collins to remain at the Capitol to vote on farming and military bills.
Trump used his visit to make it clear that other candidates for state office in Georgia had his “complete and total endorsement,” including state Rep. Tim Fleming, R-Covington, who is running for secretary of state, and two state senators — Brian Strickland, R-McDonough, for attorney general, and Greg Dolezal, R-Cumming, for lieutenant governor.
Trump had endorsed the current lieutenant governor, Burt Jones, during Jones’ primary campaign for governor. But after Jones’ loss last month to political newcomer Rick Jackson, Trump switched to the winning candidate.
Trump invited Jackson onto the stage with him to talk about the retirement accounts for children, which are being called “Trump accounts.”
They are available to any American under age 18, but babies born during Trump’s current term will get a $1,000 contribution from the federal government.
Jackson said that if he wins against Democrat Keisha Lance Bottoms, he will urge the General Assembly to match that $1,000. The wealthy entrepreneur pledged to fund the matching contributions out of his own pocket if the Legislature refused.
Before Trump’s arrival, those other candidates took the stage to tout the tax-advantaged savings accounts, which were established by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act last year and took effect on July 4.
Also praising the new Trump accounts as transformational investments were U.S. Small Business Administration Administrator Kelly Loeffler, Education Secretary Linda McMahon and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
Trump said the accounts would grow with the stock market, expanding to hundreds of thousands of dollars in value by the time newborns become adults.
But before his arrival, Bessent gave the crowd a slightly different estimate.
“Millions of American youth are now able to watch their investment accounts compound in real time from a couple thousand dollars in kindergarten to an estimated half a million dollars by retirement age,” he said.
Whether that will help the GOP in November, amid widespread frustration with the high costs for gasoline, groceries and other daily staples, is an open question.
Democrats see affordability as a clear line of attack.
Liz Pancotti, a vice president of the left-leaning Groundwork Collaborative in Washington, D.C., said in an interview Tuesday that the accounts would do little to address financial pressures on households in the near term.
Trump also touted the tax cuts he signed into law last year, but Pancotti said many of the president’s other policies, including the war in Iran and related fuel prices, had wiped out the benefits from tax cuts and refunds for most working people.
Trump’s trip to Cobb was in many ways a standard pre-election campaign event, she said. “The problem, of course, is that he has mostly delivered higher prices and a lot of economic pain for American families.”
Even so, throngs of Trump fans, many wearing red MAGA ball caps, stood in long lines in the baking sun to watch Trump speak.
As they waited, the Wheeler Wildcats rifle team was hawking bottles of water for a dollar.
Across the street, an anti-Trump protest had assembled behind metal barricades. One of the protesters yelled that water was free on their side.
During his time on the stage, Strickland, the candidate for attorney general, said that despite “all the noise” from those protesters, the Trump accounts were a “real investment” in American families.
“And I’m proud to put my name behind this kind of work,” he said.
After Strickland spoke, U.S. Treasurer Brandon Beach, a former Georgia state senator, noted the significance of Trump for GOP candidates.
“President Trump may not be on the ballot,” Beach said, “but his policies are.”
ATLANTA — The genetic testing company 23andMe gave tens of thousands of Georgians insights into their ancestry and health predispositions.
A massive data breach also subjected those Georgians to an invasion of privacy, allowing others an opportunity to see their genetic information after their data was published for sale on the dark web, according to Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr.
Carr announced that 171,125 Georgians were affected by the 2023 breach that compromised the genetic data of 6.9 million customers worldwide.
The unraveling of the company has led to a settlement between state attorneys general and the bankruptcy trustee for 23andMe that will result in a $452,232 payment to the state treasury, Carr’s office said last week.
The money comes from an $18 million settlement fund for participating states. It is separate from a $47 million class-action settlement with customers, a spokesman for Carr’s office said Tuesday.
The claim period for the class-action lawsuit ended in February.
The company initially denied the breach had occurred, then blamed consumers for exposing themselves with their account setup or password choices, according to Carr’s office, which said 23andMe initially accepted no responsibility for a “credential stuffing” breach.
Carr joined 41 other attorneys general to hold the company to account. Their investigation found “unreasonable” data security practices, Carr’s office said, including failure to remediate known vulnerabilities.
The company filed for bankruptcy in March 2025, and its consumer data and other assets were sold to TTAM Research Institute, a nonprofit that was formed by 23andMe founder and former CEO Anne Wojcicki and subsequently reregistered as 23andMe Research Institute.
Customers can delete their genetic data by signing into their 23andMe account: Start with the user profile in the upper right-hand corner, click “settings,” scroll to “23andMe Data” at the bottom and click the “view” button, then scroll down to the red “Permanently Delete Data” button at the bottom and click it.
Customers can download their data first by clicking the “Request Download” button after clicking the “view” button and before clicking the delete button.
ATLANTA — When President Donald Trump delivered his primetime address about election fraud Thursday, Dana Barrett was watching and ready to take notes.
But Barrett, a Fulton County commissioner, did not hear much worth writing down.
The Democratic commissioner represents a county that Trump has repeatedly blamed for his 2020 election loss.
Last winter, the FBI raided the Fulton election warehouse and seized ballots.
Then, in early July, came reports that the FBI had plans to “surge” 260 analysts and specialists to Fulton for what a government memo described as a “priority” investigation.
The memo gave the analysts until July 17 to check 708 records, the Associated Press reported after obtaining a copy.
So, Barrett figured Trump’s decision to schedule his speech on July 16 must have been related to that deadline and that he would be revealing big news about Fulton.
Then, Trump went live with his speech — and he did not mention the county.
Barrett said that was a telling omission. “There was really nothing that Trump said in that speech that was significant,” she added.
Along with Trump’s speech came his declassification of documents related to investigations of election meddling. Despite the president’s past claims that Georgia had been a hotbed of voter fraud, the Peach State was mentioned only a handful of times in those 58 documents, which the public can download from the White House website.
None of those references contained clear evidence of fraud.
One document points to a 2017 television news report about an FBI investigation of a data breach at Kennesaw State University while the university was involved in maintaining the state’s voter registration database.
Another refers to a 2021 federal lawsuit against Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger that included a report from an expert who said barcodes, like the QR codes used by Georgia’s voting machines, were vulnerable to hackers.
Many of the declassified documents were heavily redacted, including one that mentions Georgia and other states along with the government of China. So much of that document is blacked out that it is not possible to summarize its contents, but it mentions the personal information of millions of Americans in voter registration databases. Other documents say China vacuumed up such information, much or all of it publicly available.
Finally, one of the documents notes that Trump alerted leaders in 15 states, Georgia among them, that their voter registration rolls had been “compromised” by China.
Yet, a 2020 memo by the National Intelligence Council says the country’s elections would be difficult to undermine.
The newly declassified document says voting locations are not connected to the internet or to each other, so they can only be manipulated in person. It could still be done in enough states to influence a presidential election, the memo says, but it would be difficult and, the authors concluded, “postelection audits and paper trails very likely would uncover such an effort.”
That memo, which says vote tabulation systems in the United States “would be difficult to manipulate on a wide enough scale to compromise election results,” was written during Trump’s first term.
Another declassified memo also mentions Georgia. It offers a narrative seemingly at odds with the president’s claims that the state runs unreliable elections.
Trump has been unsparing in his criticism of Raffensperger, who oversaw the 2020 election when Trump lost, as well as the 2024 election when he won.
More than a quarter million noncitizens are illegally registered to vote in four states, the new Department of Homeland Security memo says. But as of late June, it says, 10 states had “conscientious” leaders who had successfully used the agency’s services to scour their rolls for such noncitizen voters.
Georgia is listed among these “proactive” states.
This document was among the declassified election-related reports released by the White House in connection with President Donald Trump’s July 16, 2026 speech.
ATLANTA — Argentina or Spain will win the World Cup Sunday, but MARTA is already celebrating a win, announcing Friday that it moved 4.7 million riders during the 35 days of events in metro Atlanta, with no major crimes reported.
The transit agency came into the FIFA World Cup amid a federal investigation, after a woman was stabbed to death on a train and another was stabbed in a separate incident.
The violence prompted U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy to order an investigation by the Federal Transit Administration in early June.
MARTA Interim General Manager and CEO Jonathan J. Hunt responded to the federal inquiry by describing a host of improvements since he took over last August.
In a June 17 letter to the federal agency, Hunt wrote that the MARTA crime rate fell 25% from 2024 to 2025, with aggravated assaults down 27% and robberies down 35%.
MARTA had 230 police officers when he took over, and it had 268 by the time he sent the letter.
And the fiscal year 2026 forecast for police expenditures at the agency were nearly $58.7 million, up 22% from the prior fiscal year.
“Our increased law enforcement actions are having a positive impact,” Hunt wrote.
But he also acknowledged a core challenge: “While MARTA has positive and improving crime statistics, we realize that if our customers don’t perceive the system to be safe they will not ride.”
Most of the money comes from local sales taxes, though the federal government gave MARTA nearly $11 million in grants for safety and operations preparation ahead of the World Cup, Hunt said in a letter to Georgia lawmakers last month.
The agency seized on the increased ridership during the World Cup as a promising sign.
The busiest day was the match between Morocco and Haiti on June 24, with 240,000 daily riders, which was 2.6 times the normal count. The next busiest day was when England played the Democratic Republic of Congo, with 230,000 riders, 2.5 times normal.
Though no major crimes were reported, three suspects in prior violent incidents were apprehended, the agency said, as hundreds of MARTA officers worked nearly around the clock, with help from transit police from Denver and other jurisdictions.
Six hundred MARTA ambassadors and 100 multilingual FIFA volunteers also pitched in, as the agency gave directions, water, sunscreen and first aid to fans.
In a statement Friday, Hunt thanked the officers and workers.
He also thanked the public “for trusting” MARTA to whisk them to matches, watch parties, on errands and to work, adding, “We hope you’ll continue to let MARTA drive.”
