Jon Ossoff vs The Big Ugly Bill— And Another Big Ugly Trumpanzee Lie

While Trump Rants About Epstein, Ossoff Is Fighting For Georgians

Ossoff, Trump, Bongino, who seems to have suddenly vanished

The presidential elections in Georgia were very close in both 2020, when Biden beat Trump a fraction of a point, and in 2024, when Trump beat Kamala by about 2 points. Georgia is officially a state with an R+1 PVI but it can go either way. The state has a Republican governor and two Democratic U.S senators. Of those senators, freshman Jon Ossoff is up for reelection next year in a race that promises to be the closest in the country. In a 2021 runoff, Ossoff squeaked by incumbent David Perdue 2,269923 (50.61%) to 2,214,979 (49.39%), despite have trailed Perdue by nearly 100,000 votes weeks earlier when Trump was on the ballot, beating Kamala 2,662,117 (50.73%) to 2,548,017 (48.53%). 

Ossoff is not being timid. This time around, his campaign appears focused on turning out his own base and not on winning over Trump-Perdue voters. Yesterday, Adam Van Brimmer and Greg Bluestein reported that Ossoff is all in running against Trump, attacking him “as a corrupt conman who in the first six months of his term has broken a string of promises with working Americans. Sounding a little FDR-like Ossoff told his supporters in Savannah that “Today our fight is against deeply entrenched corruption and greed. Greed that has so deeply rotted our system that it gave rise to this depraved man who has now plagued our public lives for a decade. Come next November, we will do our part to end this spiral into chaos and corruption.”

Ossoff is determined to turn his reelection campaign into a referendum on Trump’s second term, making the unpopular Big Ugly Bill the center-piece, well-aware that “roughly 310,000 Georgians could lose insurance under the bill. With one exception, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, all the Republicans running for the GOP nomination to oppose Ossoff are defending the bill, a lucky break for Ossoff, ho voted against it. The Republicans “are making a politically risky bet that midterm voters will accept steep cuts in clean energy tax credits and public health programs in exchange for tax cuts and other Trump priorities.”

Ossoff on Saturday presented a different perspective on the polarizing legislation signed into law July 4. He targeted the measure’s cuts to Medicaid, its slashing of federal jobs and grants for research and infrastructure, spending increases on illegal immigration enforcement and the impact on the national debt.

He said “what’s happening to our country right now should chill us to the bone.”

Attendees roared their agreement, cat-calling Trump and Georgia Republicans who Ossoff says are choosing “loyalty to Trump” over allegiance to their constituents.

High-profile Democrats at the rally took note of the crowd’s energy. The vote remains nearly 16 months away, but the atmosphere had more of a month-out-from-the-election feel, one said.

“To say Georgians are frustrated would be an understatement; more like alarmed, worried, and this response is them putting their concerns into action,” said state House Rep. Anne Westbrook (D-Savannah). “The Trump administration is doing the work for us. All Sen. Ossoff has to do is keep it in the spotlight.”

Savannah resident Amanda Hollowell called Trump’s actions since taking office in January “ruthless and harmful.” She’s a caregiver to her elderly father, a military veteran who receives benefits from the Department of Veteran Affairs and from Medicaid. That assistance is in jeopardy under Trump, she said.

“We have to speak out and make a change,” she said. “We must stop Trump and take our rights back.”

And it doesn’t hurt that the Republicans trying to defend themselves regurgitate a word salad of widely rejected GOP talking points. Nor that Trump is rapidly losing his mind. He posted this insane diatribe on his social media platform over the weekend, even crazier than most of the nonsense he posts. Just read this latest freakout over murdered Trump crony Jeffrey Epstein.

A plea to help his corrupt and dishonest Attorney General, Pam Bondi keep her job, this is too much even for most MAGAts, let alone normal people who haven’t been obsessed with the Epstein case the way the MAGA-QAnon base has been. Just after Trump’s looney-tunes post Althea Legaspi and Asawin Suebsaeng were clear that Señor TACO is having a meltdown over Epstein. They reminded their readers that early in Trump’s second term “Bondi told Fox News that Epstein’s client list was ‘sitting on my desk right now to review. That’s been a directive by President Trump. I’m reviewing that.’ A week later, the Justice Department released a ‘first phase’ of Epstein files, and officials brought right-wing influencers to the White House to collect the report in person, an episode that embarrassed the administration when the files contained no new information. In March, she said ‘everything’s going to come out to the public,’ and accused the Biden administration of ‘sitting’ on the documents. Predictably, MAGA heard the siren call of a conspiracy case seemingly closed without resolve and got big mad. Many prominent right-wingers were outraged and some even called on Bondi to be fired, and it’s been an unshakable within the Trump administration.” And Musk stuck in the knife:

On Saturday, Trump, who definitely seems to care himself about the Epstein files that he claims “nobody cares” about, had his own spin on the Epstein files, baselessly claiming they were written by a slew of Democrats and political adversaries and critics,  including former President Obama, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and former FBI Director James Comey, whom Trump fired during his first term.

“For years, it’s Epstein, over and over again. Why are we giving publicity to Files written by Obama, Crooked Hillary, Comey, Brennan, and the Losers and Criminals of the Biden Administration, who conned the World with the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, 51 ‘Intelligence’ Agents, ‘THE LAPTOP FROM HELL,’ and more?” Trump claimed.

“They created the Epstein Files, just like they created the FAKE Hillary Clinton/Christopher Steele Dossier that they used on me, and now my so-called ‘friends’ are playing right into their hands,” he continued. “Why didn’t these Radical Left Lunatics release the Epstein Files? If there was ANYTHING in there that could have hurt the MAGA Movement, why didn’t they use it? They haven’t even given up on the John F. Kennedy or Martin Luther King, Jr. Files.”

…For days, several Trump administration officials and senior aides have been privately communicating with MAGA influencers and other prominent Epstein files obsessives who they’ve known for years, trying— largely in vain— to convince them to lay off the Epstein issue, post-memo release, according to sources with direct knowledge of the matter.

Trump’s social media post on Saturday is unlikely to quell any of this intra-MAGA unrest over his administration’s alleged lack of transparency on this issue.

One Trump administration official tells Rolling Stone on Saturday evening: “He is making it very hard for some of his biggest supporters to not think that maybe he really is in the Epstein files.”

Another longtime Trump associate simply says: “awful damage control instincts.”

There’s a reason Ossoff isn’t wasting his breath trying to win over the same voters still clutching their MAGA hats while Trump spirals into a psychotic breakdown over Epstein. Ossoff knows what time it is; his race isn’t about persuasion— it’s about clarity-drive turnout and taking the fight around a movement that long ago stopped pretending to care about governance. While Ossoff talks about saving Medicaid and keeping VA benefits intact, Trump is vomiting up deranged accusations about ghostwritten Epstein files authored by Obama, Hillary, Comey and any other random MAGA bugaboo who pops into his mind. You couldn’t script a better contrast if you tried. One man is talking about saving lives; the other is channeling QAnon bullshit from inside a gold-plated bunker.

And what does the GOP offer Georgia in response? Pretty much just a slate of empty suits defending the Big Ugly Bill, parroting broken tax-cut mantras and pretending not to hear the screams from their own base, which now suspects Trump might be hiding something in those very files he insists no one cares about. This is the kind of election that doesn't just decide a Senate seat. It decides whether reason can still beat madness in American politics. Ossoff’s target is the whole rotted edifice of Trumpism itself, not just whomever the GOP primary decides to offer up as their sacrificial lamb. This is a contest between governing and grifting and between confronting reality and escaping into conspiracy. If Ossoff can keep the focus on what Georgians stand to lose— from Medicaid, FEMA and food stamps to NPR and clean energy jobs— and if Trump keeps reminding voters why they wanted him gone in the first place, this race could well turn into a bellwether and a turning point. Let’s see  the Republicans try defending the indefensible.