WASHINGTON (AP) – President Donald Trump On Thursday, he praised Mississippi’s senator-elect Scott Colom for wooing some of his die-hard MAGA supporters in the final days of the midterm campaign, a rare example of the Republican president’s admiration for a Democrat.
When the president visited Corinth, Mississippi, Last month, while campaigning for incumbent Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, Trump denigrated Colom as a “radical Marxist,” a “phony” and “a shameless fake who pretends to be a moderate.”
But on Thursday, during an appearance on Stephen A. Smith’s “Straight Shooter” podcast, Trump acknowledged that Colom made a bold move by showing up at Trump’s rally to mingle with some of the Republican president’s staunchest “Make America Great Again” supporters.
“I heard him the other day, at a rally there, and we had lines that were 16 miles long, and he campaigned on that line, telling everyone on the line how good a job he did,” Trump said of Colom, a 43-year-old local prosecutor who capitalized on the electorate’s dissatisfaction with the economy in his successful underdog campaign. “I give him a lot of credit for that.”
Colom had walked through the line of Trump supporters waiting to attend the Corinth rally, introducing himself and asking about their concerns.
The move attracted media attention, distracting from Trump’s storm in Mississippi, a state Republicans expected to win easily.
He also followed Colom’s strategy throughout the campaign of criticizing Trump’s policies — particularly the war in Iran that drove up gas prices and tariffs that caused headaches for Mississippi farmers — without personally attacking the president or those who voted for him. Colom had sought to portray Hyde-Smith as an insignificant person in Washington, while promising that he would look out for the interests of his state’s residents.
The Associated Press called it a close race in favor of Colom on Wednesday after local officials spent several days processing absentee and provisional ballots, called affidavit ballots in Mississippi.
With the victory, Colom will become the state’s first black U.S. senator since Reconstruction after the Civil War.
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