Luther Strange will likely be the first and last establishment candidate Trump will make the admitted “mistake” of supporting…
Roy Moore defeated Alabama Sen. Luther Strange in Tuesday’s Alabama Republican Senate primary runoff.
The primary took on national importance as President Trump endorsed Strange, while traditional Trump allies, such as former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, backed Moore.
“They’re going to say, ‘Donald Trump, the President of the United States, was unable to pull his candidate across the line. It is a terrible, terrible moment for Trump,’” the president said while imitating news anchors at a Friday rally in Alabama in support of Strange.
Strange become a senator when Jeff Sessions left his seat to become attorney general. The senator is a former lobbyist and was backed by a super PAC linked to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and the Chamber of Commerce, a typical establishment GOP partner.
“Mitch McConnell and this permanent political class is the most corrupt and incompetent group of individuals in this country. They think you’re a pack of morons. They think you’re nothing but rubes,” Bannon said at a rally Monday in support of Moore. “They have no interest at all in what you have to say, what you have to think or what you want to do.”
However, Trump contended at his Friday rally in support of Strange that the senator barely knew McConnell, and that the Alabama senator is “determined to drain that swamp.”
The president would go on to say, “I’ll be honest, I might have made a mistake,” and said he would campaign “like hell” for Moore if he were to win the primary. The former Alabama Supreme Court chief justice led the race throughout in the polls, and was up by 11 points in the final public poll.
Moore is a major figure in Alabama and became nationally known in 2003 when he was removed from office after defying a federal court’s ruling to remove a Ten Commandments monument from the Alabama state Supreme Court building.
Like Trump, the former judge has a brash and sometimes offensive manner of speaking.
“Now we have blacks and whites fighting, reds and yellows fighting, Democrats and Republicans fighting, men and women fighting. What’s going to unite us? What’s going to bring us back together? A president? A Congress? No. It’s going to be God,” Moore said in a campaign speech. –Daily Caller
