President Donald Trump bumps Herschel Walker: Screen Shot

The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Remember watching the election returns in November, 2020 as Georgia became the one state in the American South to go blue and help Joe Biden beat Donald Trump?

The people of Atlanta, of all places, not only helped save democracy from corporate, capitalist fascism. Their hard work also carried the day to hold the Senate and keep control out of the hands of Mitch McConnell and the tea party Trump Republicans.

Democratic Senate candidate Raphael Warnock elbow bumps with President-elect Joe Biden during a campaign rally in Atlanta, Monday, Jan. 4, 2021, as Biden campaigns for Senate candidates Warnock and Jon Ossoff: AJC

The Rev. Raphael Warnock became the first African American senator in Georgia’s history, as well as the first popularly elected Black Democratic senator from the South, in large measure because of massive voter turnout by African American voters in the Atlanta megalopolis, dwarfing the votes from the more conservative, rural areas in the rest of the state.

The results of Warnock’s race, along with Jon Ossoff’s simultaneous runoff election, tipped the balance in the Senate and sent shock waves through Georgia’s political establishment.

Warnock is now running for reelection, and faces a famous challenger in former college and professional football star fullback Herschel Walker, who had no political ambitions until he was lured into running by Trump.

Local polling shows the race in a statistical dead heat in a general-election matchup.

Women have claimed Walker threatened them with violence, and he has acknowledged a history of mental illness, the press has reported. But his stature with Republicans seems to have suffered little.

After Walker published a book about suffering from dissociative identity disorder in 2008, which has been challenged as patently false in my cases by people who know Walker, his ex-wife told ABC News that at one point during their marriage, her husband pointed a pistol at her head and said, “I’m going to blow your f’ing brains out.”

She filed for divorce in 2001, citing “physically abusive and extremely threatening behavior.”

Maybe being a serial liar and an abuser of women are top qualifications on the Republican politician resume these days with Trump in charge of who gets to run and win.

No one believes it, except maybe Trump, but Walker has been going around claiming he graduated top of his class at the University of Georgia and was valedictorian in high school, even though everyone knows he never graduated from college. He left to play professional football.

In his 2008 book, Walker claims he grew up as a “fat kid” who stuttered, which he called twin “sins”, and wrote that his teachers looked through him as if he hadn’t been there and that the older children ridiculed him as “stupid.”

But, Walker wrote: “If I’m proud of anything I did in my high school career, it’s what I did in the classroom that I reflect on and relish the most. I did more than just shed the ‘stupid’ label placed on me as a result of my speech impediment. I shed it, erased it and rewrote it with the titles: Beta Club president and class valedictorian.”

CNN’s KFile reviewed Walker’s high school yearbooks and coverage of him in local newspapers at the time and could find no evidence to support the claim that he was a high school valedictorian.

Maybe many politicians exaggerate, but lying is lying.

“It goes to the character of the man much more than any physical or psychological condition,” wrote columnist Charles Blow in the New York Times.

After months of not seriously challenging Walker, will some Georgia Republicans wake up to the reality that they may have made a grave mistake and that he could lose if he advances to the general election?

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution wrote about a potential Walker candidacy last summer.

“Herschel Walker hasn’t lived in Georgia for decades. He’s never held public office, doesn’t attend the sort of Republican events that are mainstays on the political calendar and has bypassed the backslapping fund-raising circuit that helps decide winners and losers in the state’s premier races.”

But Trump weighed in last March, writing in a statement: “Wouldn’t it be fantastic if the legendary Herschel Walker ran for the United States Senate in Georgia?”

“He would be unstoppable, just like he was when he played for the Georgia Bulldogs, and in the N.F.L. He is also a GREAT person. Run Herschel, run!”

Trump kept up the pressure. He told the “The Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show” in June that Walker had told him he was going to run, and Trump thought he would. The former president said, “I had dinner with him a week ago. He’s a great guy. He’s a patriot. He’s a very loyal person.”

Why Walker?

Walker is Black, so the Republican Party could use that to say, “See, we’re not racists after all.”

It would give the party a shot at winning more of Georgia’s Black voters.

Will this use of Walker as a political tool work?

It could, unless more people around the country get informed and help fund Warnock’s campaign.

See how: Project Protect Democracy

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