Trump Endorses Mike Collins in Georgia's Senate Runoff
Two days before the runoff, Trump backed Collins over Derek Dooley, a late MAGA pick that pits the president against Gov. Brian Kemp.
President Donald Trump put his thumb on the scale in Georgia on Sunday, endorsing Rep. Mike Collins two days before a Republican primary runoff that will decide who takes on one of the Democrats’ most exposed senators this fall.
“Mike Collins is a true Friend, Fighter, and WARRIOR, who has been with us from the very beginning, and has my Complete and Total Endorsement to be your next United States Senator,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social account.
Collins, a two-term congressman, faces former University of Tennessee football coach Derek Dooley in Tuesday’s runoff, forced when no candidate cleared 50% in the May 19 primary. The winner advances to a general election against Sen. Jon Ossoff, the only Democratic senator seeking reelection in a state Trump carried in 2024, which makes the seat one of his party’s clearest pickup targets.
The endorsement also sets up a proxy fight inside the Georgia GOP. Gov. Brian Kemp, who has clashed with Trump before, had already backed Dooley, so Tuesday’s result will read partly as a test of whose word still moves Republican primary voters in the state, the president’s or the governor’s.
Georgia has become one of the most fought-over states in the country, flipping narrowly to Joe Biden in 2020 before Trump won it back in 2024, and Ossoff’s seat is central to both parties’ paths to a Senate majority. The move also fits a spring pattern of late, decisive interventions in Republican primaries, where Trump’s backing has often cleared the field for the candidate seen as most loyal. The Kemp dimension gives it an extra charge: the governor and the president have feuded since 2020, when Kemp refused to help overturn Georgia’s election result, and backing rival candidates now turns a simmering rivalry into an open contest of influence.
For Trump, it is the latest in a run of late primary endorsements aimed at shaping the Senate he will have to work with. He has spent the spring backing “MAGA” picks in contested Republican races, and Georgia, with its history of narrow margins and bruising Trump-Kemp friction, is among the most closely watched. Polls open Tuesday, and the question of whether the endorsement still works as a closing argument will not take long to answer.
