Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her;
If you can bounce high, bounce for her too,
Till she cry "Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover,
I must have you!"
Such is how that famous Scott Fitzgerald novel The Great Gatsby begins. Strangely enough, this epigraph serves just as well as a prelude for Act Two of the 2022 Alabama US Senate race — which gold-hatted, high-bouncing candidate will win the love of Donald J. Trump?
For those keeping score, Act One of the Alabama US Senate race ended with a delicious plot twist of President Trump rescinding his endorsement of Mo Brooks. Trump claims his divorce from “MAGA Mo” was over what Brooks said regarding the 2020 election back in August of 2021 at their joint political hootenanny in the ever-so-humid, mud-soaked fields of Cullman.
Brooks was, indeed, booed by the crowd assembled in Cullman for suggesting conservatives put the question of a stolen 2020 election behind them (just as Trump was booed by the same tough crowd for talking up his Warp Speed vaccines), but this gaffe alone seems a convenient explanation ex post facto for Trump’s withdrawn support.
The real reason for the Trump/Brooks split appears obvious enough. Despite sticking his neck out for Trump on the issue of the 2020 election, Mo Brooks was simply not bouncing high enough in the public opinion polls in early 2022.
I suppose the moral of the story is that in politics, just as in love, it is never a good thing to bounce too high, too early.
So now Act Two has begun with Mike Durant and Katie Britt both seeking the endorsement of President Trump.
Even with Durant showing as the current front-runner, Britt is easily within striking range. The true money in this race has yet to be spent, and as both campaigns start to unleash their formidable war chests and arsenals of oppo-research (keeping in mind also that Congressman Brooks isn’t quite dead yet), Trump’s reinforcement could prove decisive in the forthcoming Election Day Battle.
Who Trump will ultimately back is anyone’s guess, but this dynamic has people paying special attention to what Mike Durant and Katie Britt are saying and have said about the issue of the ‘stolen’ 2020 election.
If we are to believe Trump’s claim that the 2020 election issue was the reason he dropped Brooks, what are Durant's and Britt’s thoughts on the matter?
As luck would have it, I had the opportunity on my radio show to ask both candidates whether or not they would have certified the election had they been in Congress in January of 2021.
Even luckier, I was able to ask this question long before Trump dropped Mo Brooks like a fickle lover.
Let us start with the current frontrunner, Mike Durant.
On January 5, 2022, Mike Durant was my in-studio guest, and the transcript reads as follows:
Joey Clark: January 6…if you were sitting there in the Congress that day, would you have certified the election results from the states in question? Would you have taken a different approach? Where would you be on what happened in the 2020 election?
Mike Durant: No, on that day I would not have certified because I think there were too many uncertainties about the results, and you know, I equate it to signing a contract because it is, it’s a contract with the American people – or the people of your state – that you are basically endorsing this, and I don’t believe there’s any way I would have had enough confidence in the results on that day to certify.
Listen to the full January 5, 2022 Durant interview here.
Now, let’s turn to Katie Britt, who I first asked this question all the way back in August of 2021 when she graced our radio studio right on the heels of the aforementioned Cullman rally where Britt herself witnessed Congressman Brooks being booed by the crowd.
Joey Clark: …if you were in the Congress, uh, in early January and had to vote on the certification of the election, would you have voted to certify the states in question or would you have not?
Katie Britt: Well, I’ll tell you, if I had been in Congress, what I would have done is started a lot earlier, Joey. So, I think if you look back, you know, President Trump, well, we can actually rewind all the way to really the 2016 election. It’s interesting how depending on kind of what happens, people forget. If you remember back in 2016, all of the Democrats said that there had been an interference in the election, and but for that interference, we would have had a President Hillary Clinton. If you look back over that, you see over those four years – in particular the first two – like ‘we’ve got to be paying attention to our elections.’ You see it in the New York Times. You see it in the Washington Post. ‘Why aren’t we doing more to secure our elections?’ You know, ‘This is the foundation of our democracy!’
Joey: Right.
Katie Britt: So, it’s interesting how that shifted once President Trump started sounding the alarms, and he did. He started sounding them in the summer of 2020, saying, ‘They are changing election protocol, they are doing things that are going to undermine this election.’ And so, if I had been in Congress, I would have joined those forces at that point in time because it’s easy to be a day late and a dollar short and to get on a bandwagon after, after you know the direction it’s going. It’s challenging to be upfront and to be a real leader and to say, ‘Let’s make sure that this doesn’t happen.’
And, so I think that’s kind of where people miss the mark. He was sounding the bells, and nobody did a thing, and then you have this playing out – and so it’s interesting too because the very people, the very people who said in the New York Times, ‘We have to secure our election, and if we don’t, it’s going to undermine our democracy,’ then those exact people are on the other side of this.
And I think that Congressman Brooks got it wrong on Saturday. I mean, if we do not shore up these elections, if people don’t have faith, Joey, in our process and have faith in the security of their vote, it will be a crack in the foundation of our democracy that we will never get over.
So, what I want to remind all of the people on the left is they had this very same thing to say after 2016. And so what does that show? It shows a pattern of lack of trust, and if all of the Americans that are citizens don’t trust the process and don’t believe it’s fair, then our nation will crumble.
And so I believe we need a forensic audit. We need to take a look and make sure that we know what’s happening and when, and that everybody is shoring up this process, and that way people have confidence, and they know that their vote counts, and that they know that our democracy is strong. And so those are the things I would fight for.
Later in our August 2021 interview, Britt went on to say, “I was pleased to see Coach Tuberville, you know, he came out and said, ‘Look, Arizona, there’s some real problems here, Pennsylvania, there’s some real problems here.’”
Listen to the full Katie Britt August 2021 interview here.
When Katie Britt returned to my show on January 7, 2022, I asked her again about election certification, and she reiterated she would have been with Senator Tuberville.
And there you have it. That’s what both Mike Durant and Katie Britt had to tell me about the 2020 election before Trump dropped Mo Brooks.
The question is: who will better impress President Trump on this issue as well as with their overall strength in this race?
The answer is hard to know, though for both their sakes, let’s hope Mike Durant's and Katie Britt’s pursuit of Trump pays off less tragically than Gatsby’s pursuit of Daisy, let alone what happened to Mo Brooks.
Let the gold-hatted, high bouncing continue!
Joey Clark is a native Alabamian and currently, the host of the radio program News and Views on News Talk 93.1 FM WACV out of Montgomery, AL M-F 9 am-12noon. His column appears every Tuesday in 1819 News. To contact Joey for media or speaking appearances as well as any feedback please email newsandviews931@gmail.com. The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of 1819 News. To comment, please send an email with your name and contact information to Commentary@1819News.com.
