Trump hails Glenn Youngkin as ‘fantastic guy’ in last-minute phone rally on eve of Va. election

Former President Donald Trump made a quick cameo Monday evening in Glenn Youngkin’s marketing campaign for governor of Virginia, telling voters that the Republican is a “unbelievable man” who will “do a job like no one can do.”

The feedback got here not throughout an extended and winding speech at a rally like those Trump sometimes holds to advertise himself and different GOP candidates however, moderately, in an 11-minute phone name.

Youngkin, who has not campaigned alongside Trump in a state that President Joe Biden gained by a large margin in 2020, faces Democrat Terry McAuliffe, the commonwealth’s former governor who’s in search of a return to the job, in Tuesday’s election. The previous non-public fairness govt didn’t take part in Monday’s name, billed as a “tele-rally.” However Trump spoke as if he and Youngkin are longtime friends.

“I’ve gotten to know him so properly and our relationship is nice,” Trump advised listeners. “The faux information media wish to say one thing else, as a result of they’d like our massive, big, lovely base like there’s by no means been earlier than to not vote as a lot as they are going to. We now have an amazing relationship and he is a unbelievable man.”

McAuliffe and his Democratic allies have spent months tying Youngkin to Trump, and although they share views on coverage and a few cultural points, Youngkin has stored the previous president at a cautious distance. Virginia’s race for governor — routinely held the 12 months after a presidential election — is all the time intently watched and considered as a harbinger for the next 12 months’s midterm elections.

Trump final week teased a doable look in Virginia earlier than the election, however settled for the digital occasion. A spokesperson didn’t reply to a query about what number of dialed in for the decision.

After a quick introduction by Mercedes Schlapp, a Virginia resident who served in Trump’s White Home as director of strategic communications, the previous president spoke for about six minutes.

“Glenn Youngkin is a Republican candidate,” Trump mentioned at one level. “And you’ve got so many different nice folks operating, however he is your chief. He is your massive Republican chief in Virginia and they are going to take heed to him, and they are going to respect him, and you are going to see issues occur in Richmond that you just would not have believed, particularly with regard to taxes and your youngsters’s training.”

At one other level, Trump returned to a declare he made repeatedly in his shedding re-election bid: that Democrats wish to “abolish the suburbs,” a phrase that echoes segregationist rhetoric.

“Terry McAuliffe, as you already know, he is embraced the far left’s plan to abolish and he’ll actually abolish the suburbs as you already know them in the present day,” Trump mentioned. “I fought very laborious to assist the suburbs and did very properly in that regard, however they wish to construct and do issues. … They wish to ban single household dwelling zoning and switch lovely residential neighborhoods into residence towers. It is the mistaken factor and it will change your suburbs perpetually.”

Trump additionally hit on “crucial race principle,” a phrase Youngkin and different Republicans have seized whereas protesting in opposition to what they see as anti-white curriculum in public colleges. Youngkin has attacked McAuliffe for vetoing payments in his earlier time period as governor that will have allowed dad and mom to decide their youngsters out of classes involving books deemed to have sexually specific content material. The guide on the coronary heart of that debate was “Beloved,” Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel in regards to the horrors of slavery.

“He truly mentioned, ‘I do not suppose dad and mom must be telling colleges what they need to be instructing,'” mentioned Trump, barely altering a McAuliffe debate response that Youngkin has hammered him with within the race’s closing weeks. “Properly, which means all of these college boards which might be instilled and put in are listening to loads of offended dad and mom. And we do not need that. We would like there to be concord and peace.”

McAuliffe, whose crew has been counting the variety of instances Trump has endorsed Youngkin in public feedback, used Trump’s involvement within the marketing campaign’s closing days to strengthen his principal assault.

“Glenn Youngkin’s marketing campaign will shut in the present day similar to it began: with Donald Trump,” McAuliffe mentioned in a press release earlier Monday. “The one factor Glenn has been upfront with Virginians is about his whole allegiance and full embrace of Donald Trump’s agenda and harmful lies.”