MAGA Fave Mo Brooks Drops Groveling Ad to Try to Get Back in Trump's Good Graces
Less than 24 hours after a report indicated that Donald Trump has soured on Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.), the Senate candidate whom he endorsed last year, Brooks released a campaign ad that doubles as a pledge of fealty to the former president and his lies about the 2020 election
The ex-president is considering pulling his endorsement, the Washington Examiner reported Wednesday. “Mo Brooks is disappointing,” Trump told the publication during a phone interview earlier this week. “I’m determining right now, has Mo Brooks — has he changed?”
Trump suggested that if Brooks appears to be shying away from his previously declared stance that the 2020 election was fraudulent and should be investigated, he could revoke his support. At a Trump rally in Alabama last August, Brooks was booed for telling attendees to move past the election. (Perhaps realizing the danger of running afoul of Trump’s supporters, he later asserted — falsely — on Twitter that Trump would have won the election “if only legal votes” were counted.)
“I’m disappointed that he gave an inarticulate answer, and I’ll have to find out what he means,” Trump said, referring to Brooks’ rally comments. “If it meant what he sounded like, I would have no problem changing [my endorsement] because when you endorse somebody, you endorse somebody based on principle. If he changed that principle, I would have no problem doing that.”
Cue Brooks’ new campaign ad. It opens with the congressman declaring in his speech at the Jan. 6 Stop the Steal rally that “America does not need any more weakling, cowering, wimpy Republican congressmen and senators.” After reminding viewers that on Jan. 6 he “proudly stood with President Trump in the fight against voter fraud,” Brooks criticized others in his party whom he deems not onboard the MAGA agenda, including Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell and Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney — both frequent targets of Trump.
Trump did tell the Examiner that Brooks “still” has strong feeling about election fraud, so perhaps the dominant factor behind Trump’s public waffling about his chosen candidate is actually that Brooks has been falling in the polls, and Trump surely doesn’t want to support a loser. (He has reportedly floated the idea of making multiple endorsements for the same races.) A poll conducted last week of 500 Republican primary voters had Brooks in the third spot with 17.6 percent, trailing businessman Mike Durant (33.8 percent) and retiring Sen. Richard Shelby’s former chief of staff, Katie Britt (32 percent). (The poll was commissioned by a political action committee for the Alabama Forestry Association, which endorsed Britt.)
“It’s a very tight race between the three of them right now, and I’m not particularly happy,” Trump groused.
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