Trump's Latest Endorsement Is a Major Headache for the GOP

In a Monday morning tweet, President Donald Trump came out publicly in support of his favorite vote-suppressor, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, endorsing him ahead of Kansas’ Republican gubernatorial primary on Tuesday.

Kobach is facing off against incumbent Republican Gov. Jeff Colyer, who assumed the role earlier this year after Trump appointed deeply unpopular former governor Sam Brownback to a State Department post. Trump’s endorsement—largely a rehash of the same lameass catchphrases he’s used for other candidates in the past—reportedly came against the wishes of a host of GOP operatives, White House advisers, and the Republican Governors Association. According to the New York Times:

The Republican Governors Association and a number of high-level party operatives counseled Mr. Trump against siding with Mr. Kobach, because polls show he is unpopular with the general electorate in Kansas and would provide Democrats an opening to take back the governorship.

Splinter reached out to the RGA for their reaction to Trump’s endorsement against a sitting Republican governor, and we’ll update this story if they respond.

Kobach, an accomplished voter suppression champion who helmed the president’s boondoggle Commission on Electoral Integrity until its inevitable implosion due to being total bullshit, most recently made headlines for having amassed a fortune scamming small towns with a fake immigration crisis which he claimed he could solve.

In spite of—or perhaps as a direct result of—Kobach’s extreme shittiness, the fact that he has long been a staunch Trump supporter who shares in the president’s anti-immigrant sentiment (he was, at one time, rumored for a Cabinet post) make the president’s endorsement something of a predictable outcome. The question now becomes: Can he win?