McKoon’s Bizarre Tweet: Duncan, You’re Out!

I am really tired of talking and writing about Geoff Duncan. I served with him. I endorsed him for Lieutenant Governor. And I have been baffled by him since late 2019. As a result I have blasted him several times on this platform both in blog posts and on the podcast. And now that he has gone down the road of being one of the “White Dudes for Harris,” I am more convinced that my post several weeks ago about him is spot on.

I wrote that post after many of my former colleagues in the House and Senate who had been his supporters had reached out because they were getting killed for having been with him in the past. There is a collective feeling of him duping a whole lot of people. But my personal hope is that people can see how after Duncan and his family were subjected to death threats, it would make sense why he would be a, “Never Trumper.”

But being a never Trumper is not the same thing as being a pro Biden, and now pro Harris guy. There are countless Republicans who remain dismayed that Trump is the GOP nominee and are unsure of how they are going to vote this November. But Harris, while trying to reinvent herself, has a record that cannot be synced with much of anything the GOP has and should stand for.

In short, Duncan has forgone policy in favor of politics, which is not good for the country nor for him.

Enter Georgia Republican Party Chairman, Josh McKoon, who posted this tweet:

An Open Letter to @GeoffDuncanGA

August 2, 2024

Dear Mr. Duncan:

In a life otherwise devoid of accomplishment (e.g. dropping out of college, failing as a minor league baseball player, starting a series of sketchy businesses), your nominations by the Republican Party were signal honors, without which you would have never served as a member of the Georgia General Assembly or the Lieutenant Governor of this Great State.

You repaid this debt of gratitude with a single, largely self embarrassing term in office as Lieutenant Governor.

As Chairman of the Georgia Republican Party, I write to demand that you cease referring to yourself as a Republican. You are not one.

Your lapses and failings as Lieutenant Governor alone are sufficient to forfeit your claim to membership in our party. But your desperate and ridiculous endorsements of Joe Biden and now Kamala Harris for President, coupled with your inexplicable opposition in 2022 to Burt Jones and Herschel Walker, not to mention your comical attempt to run for President as an independent candidate, are violations of the oaths of loyalty you repeatedly swore when you qualified as a Republican candidate for office.

On the surface, your animus against President Trump makes little sense. When you ran for Lieutenant Governor in 2018, you mimicked him like a chimpanzee, even going so far as to falsely claim his endorsement. You begged in 2020 for opportunities to speak on his behalf at Trump rallies and the Republican National Convention. But it has become clear that prostituting yourself to CNN as a Trump critic is now how you support yourself and your family. You will no longer do so claiming to be a Republican.

Your conduct has given me no choice but to take the following actions to protect the Republican brand:

1) The State Executive Committee will consider action to permanently ban you from qualifying as a Republican candidate for any elected office in this state as your signing of the loyalty oath at this point would obviously be false swearing;

2) The Republican National Committee will be requested to adopt a resolution permanently banning you from the Republican Party as well as permanently banning you from qualifying as a Republican candidate in any state or territory for any position whatsoever;

3) A resolution condemning your self serving and hypocritical behavior, and expelling you from the Republican Party, will be published on the @GaRepublicans website as a notice to the world clarifying that your commentary is made as an expelled Republican.

4) You will be treated as a trespasser should you attend any event, meeting, caucus or convention of the Georgia Republican Party. Every county Republican Party and Congressional District Party in the state of Georgia will be requested to issue you the same warning and condition.

Consequently, you are not and never will be considered a Republican ever again.

I request that you govern yourself accordingly.

Sincerely, GEORGIA REPUBLICAN PARTY

Josh McKoon, Chairman

From Josh McKoon’s X account, 8/2/2024 at 9:09 AM

Before I go any further, I want to declare that I consider Josh McKoon to be a friend and I have a ton of respect for the man. I totally get the sentiment of what he is trying to convey, but this tweet crossed the line in several ways that were wholly unnecessary to the point that it is bizarre.

Before I get into the aspects of the tweet that make it so strange it is important to explain that McKoon is very close with David Shafer. Duncan thoroughly embarrassed Shafer in the 2018 GOP runoff for the LG nomination, coming back from a 22+ deficit to win. Meanwhile Shafer was a groomsman in McKoon’s wedding. They are the best of friends.

Duncan’s campaign, which I privately told him at the time was unbecoming of who I knew him to be, was nothing short of one of the most devastating character assassinations ever executed in Georgia politics. And I do not even like David Shafer, who I find to be one of the most duplicitous, self serving characters I have ever met in my time in office. But that campaign was truly brutal.

So when I read McKoon’s tweet today, I could not help but wonder how much of it was fueled by the lingering personal animus McKoon carries on behalf of his friend. It isn’t hard for me to imagine that Shafer had a significant influence in the word choices that McKoon employed, as it read like a 2018 Shafer attack ad against Duncan for the LG nomination. It was so… personal.

Let’s start with the line about Duncan’s life being devoid of accomplishments. This is demonstrably false. Geoff Duncan was drafted by the Florida Marlins out of Georgia Tech and left school to chase his dream as a professional baseball player. Calling that “dropping out of college” and “failing as a minor league baseball player,” is completely misleading. Duncan ascended to AAA before hanging up his spikes and got to do something a minuscule percentage of people get to do: get paid to play baseball, and at a very high level. There is no reality where that can be considered a failure.

If there is to be a true measure of success for the Christian man in America, one need only look at their family. I have gotten to see Geoff Duncan as the family man, and he has raised some outstanding young men while remaining completely devoted to his wife. Whenever someone under the Gold Dome steps out on their spouse, everyone finds out. There has been a cloud over many people at the Capitol in that regard, but there has never been anything close to that associated with Duncan.

And then there is the claim that by signing another loyalty oath the GOP would be considered false swearing. What? I will concede that Duncan’s logic on what is best for the party is twisted, but he has repeatedly said that he believes what he is doing is loyal to the party. Don’t be confused, I completely disagree with that thinking, but it would be just as easy for Duncan to claim that McKoon was the one who was not being loyal to the party. That’s the problem with loyalty oaths; each person is free to interpret their own actions as loyal, and people can disagree on what loyalty looks like. And at times, they can seem counterintuitive and lead to oppositional stances. Just look at how many times Josh McKoon voted against Republican sponsored legislation as a State Senator as an example. It doesn’t mean McKoon was disloyal, he just saw it differently and took action according to his own conscience.

McKoon claims in his tweet to not understand Duncan’s animus toward Trump at a surface level. Oh come on. Hello? Death threats!

And back in 2020 we were all pulling for Trump to beat Biden. McKoon pointing out that Duncan offered to be helpful to that cause ignores some very key facts that happened after the election in November. Hello? Death threats!

When it comes to the points the party is prepared to take action on, I am not sure how necessary any of that is. I agree with the sentiment that at this point, in the totality of Duncan’s decisions, he should stop associating with the GOP on a voluntary basis. I mean after all, endorsing Kamala Harris? Kamala. Harris. I don’t care how bad you think Trump is, and while I am sensitive to the fact that there were death threats, it’s still Kamala Harris.

Our eagle eyed Peach Pundit contributor and trained attorney, Jason Shepherd, shared with me that bullet point number four in McKoon’s tweet may actually be in violation of state election law. Per Shepherd, “Precinct caucuses are considered to be governed under state election law which is why the party can’t charge a fee as it legally is considered a poll tax. As McKoon can’t charge him for trespassing at a polling place for a GOP primary, he can’t bar him from a precinct caucus meeting. For the other meetings, party rules, which are backed by state election laws, says all meetings are open to the public. Therefore, he can’t be barred from simply showing up to any meeting that’s considered open to the public under party rules and state law.”

So there’s that.

McKoon could have, and should have left the attack ad style rhetoric out of this open letter. The way he chose to word it, littered with personal attacks that do not have anything of value other than make his buddy feel good, isn’t going to win over any of the thousands of self identified Georgia Republicans who experience a great deal of heartburn at the prospect of Trump at the top of the ticket. Tens of thousands of voters voted for down ballot Republicans both in 2016 and 2020, but not for Trump. I was one of many candidates on the ballot who received more votes in my State House District than Trump in 2016. In fact every member of the Cherokee County Delegation got more votes as down ballot Republicans than Trump in 2016. And you cannot blame Dominion voting machines on that.

If you read that other post about Duncan, you already know about his competitive streak. So you know he wasn’t going to just ignore McKoon’s letter. He posted his own reply on X:

An open letter to @JoshMcKoon

Dear Josh:  

Life is a series of choices, and choices bring consequences.  

On the one hand, you have decided to lick the boots of Donald Trump, a man who spent most of his life registered as a Democrat, donating to Democrats and supporting Democratic candidates.  

His one term in office was marked by broken promises, no wall built on the southern border, $8 trillion added to the national debt and ceaseless attacks on our conservative Governor, Brian Kemp. On Trump’s watch, Democrats won the House 2018, the White House in 2020 and two Democrats were elected to the U.S. Senate from Georgia in 2021, the first time in a generation. So much for all that winning.  

Donald Trump even recruited one of those defeated senators to run a haphazard and primary challenge to Governor Kemp, a futile effort that wasted more time and Republican resources.  

In 94 days, Donald Trump will lose once again, and you’ll be left explaining to your donors why the Georgia GOP spent nearly $2 million dollars of their money on Trump related legal fees.  

One thing you and Trump do have in common: you both know how to lose campaigns. He lost his 2020 election because he had lost the credibility of the American public. Your own bid for secretary of state didn’t go much better – a distant third, barely above the Mendoza line, as we would say in baseball.  

I sleep soundly every night comfortable with not only my conservative credentials but also the knowledge that I don’t wake up every day hoping I won’t have to defend the indefensible conduct of a morally bankrupt man who couldn’t pick you out of a police lineup, even if he tried.

When you finally get tired of losing, feel free to purchase a copy of my book GOP 2.0.

From Geoff Duncan’s X account, 8/2/2024 10:32 AM

Yay for party unity, or something. And there is plenty wrong here too, like the complete lack of self awareness for criticizing Donald Trump for supporting Democrats when you have just endorsed… checks notes… oh that’s right… Kamala Harris. But I am tired. So I am going to leave the last word with my favorite youth football coach, @3YearLetterman.