(If you want to read the best recap of President Trump’s visit to northern Kentucky last week, read this piece from reporter Audrey Goss at the Kentucky Kernel.)
After the president rallied the crowd in Kentucky last week, denigrating Republican U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie and promoting his own handpicked replacement for Massie, Ed Gallrein, I kept hearing how great it all was.
What fun. What a love fest.
But if you want to know how much the president loves the people of Kentucky — a state he won with 64.6% of the vote in 2024 — you should note that this is the first time he’s held a rally here in seven years since, back in 2019, he tried and failed to get then-governor Matt Bevin re-elected.
The president was also here in 2018 when he rallied to re-elect Rep. Andy Barr, so that makes three.
Three rallies. In eight years.
Even on the most generous of scales, that’s some pretty limited love.
For more than an hour on Mar. 11, the president bounced from one rambling subject to another: jobs, the Green New Deal, the “rigged” 2020 election, drug smuggling, Gavin “Newscum”, Barack “Hussein” Obama, the Ave Maria, taxes, voting laws, inflation — a mishmash of his greatest hits even as he failed to mention how much his ill-advised tariffs have hurt our Commonwealth’s farming families and bourbon industry.
Presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin often says that one of the key attributes of a president is empathy, a quality President Trump was sorely lacking in his speech as he made no mention of Sgt. Benjamin N. Pennington, 26, of Glendale who had died just a few days earlier from injuries he sustained in an Iranian attack at the Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia amid Operation Epic Fury.
This is unconscionable.
He also did not express concern for the soldiers under Fort Knox command who have died in this war. Not one word.
Why? Because his being here was not about us. It was all about him.
Listening to the president, I frankly wondered (a) if he knew where he was, or (b) if it mattered. Other than flogging Massie and talking up Gallrein in the most generic manner possible, the president could have been anywhere from Idaho to Texas to North Carolina and made the same speech.
Kentucky gave this president 64.6% of our votes in 2024, but like the distant cousin you only hear from when he wants to borrow money (again) this president comes to Kentucky for one reason: When he wants something.
Like Massie or not, it was stunning to hear the president say about a sitting member of Congress, as he wages war in the Middle East, that our congressman who pledged an oath to the Constitution “is disloyal to the Republican Party. He’s disloyal to the people of Kentucky. And most importantly — he is disloyal to the United States of America.”
In normal, non-MAGA times, such a grotesque statement would take our breath away.
Dare I say, if a Democratic president came to Kentucky and talked like this, days after one of our own young soldiers died in a war he’d started, we would run that monster out on a rail.
But nobody at the rally, and nobody with an official voice in the Kentucky Republican Party, seemed to care. Not even our alleged-moderate Secretary of State Michael Adams, who said, “President Trump has shown Kentucky a lot of love, and as you can see the feeling is mutual. … From day one, President Trump has worked to get this country back on track and to make it great again.”
Really, Mr. Secretary? When has he showed us a “lot of love”?
If you want to pinpoint what this president has done for Kentucky — other than grace us with his presence three times in eight years — look no further than the flagrant disrespect he showed members of his own party while was here last week.
GOP candidates for Sen. Mitch McConnell’s senate seat — Daniel Cameron, Nate Morris, and Rep. Andy Barr — attended the rally and were not given so much as a small speaking part. He barely mentioned them. Even as Cameron, Morris, and Barr spend virtually all of their time and campaign dollars touting their perpetual devotion to President Trump and his nebulous “agenda” as though they are desperate contestants on The Bachelor, hoping against hope for the final rose.
The president is not endorsing any of them because they are all the same to him.
It does not matter who wins because, as evidenced in their very expensive ads and talking points, they are fighting solely over who loves this president most — as he barely mentions their names — and will do whatever he says.
It’s like the wedding scene in the movie Coming to America when Eddie Murphy’s character tells the woman he does not know but is about to marry to jump on one leg, scratch like a monkey, and bark like a dog. She does all of it, gleefully, because she has been conditioned to do it, and so it goes with interchangeable brides Cameron, Barr and Morris.
How humiliating.
Turns out Kentucky is like any state that the president has already won. He takes us and our votes for granted, and we let him.
As for our elected officials, President Trump has one demand and one demand only: Fealty.
Refusal of fealty was Massie’s fatal error, and men like Cameron, Barr, Morris, Gallrein and Adams know it.
That ain’t love you’re feeling, boys.
That’s fear.
--30--
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