President Donald Trump ripped into a Georgia lawmaker who changed his party affiliation from Republican to Democrat, calling him a “total loser” in a late-night social media tirade.
After serving as Georgia’s lieutenant governor from 2019 to 2023 as a Republican, Geoff Duncan announced this week that he is switching parties and is now a Democrat.
“Failed former Lt. Governor Geoff Duncan, of Georgia, is a total loser. Was never able to get anything done, all he ever did was complain,” Trump wrote at about 1 a.m. Friday in a Truth Social post. “We didn’t want him in the Republican Party any longer, so I’m told he became a Democrat. Good riddance Geoff. You don’t even have a chance!!!”
ADVERTISEMENT
The former Georgia state representative has been a sharp critic of the president since 2020, when Trump pressured Georgia’s Republican leaders to overturn former President Joe Biden’s victory in the state.
“Donald Trump has been running a Ponzi scheme of propaganda for the better part of a decade and it’s finally catching up to him,” Duncan told the Daily Beast in a statement. “Like most Ponzi schemes, they collapse under their own weight and this situation will be no different.”
Duncan declined to run for re-election in 2022, and in 2024, he spoke at the Democratic National Convention, endorsing former Vice President Kamala Harris in the presidential race. In a mostly symbolic move, the Georgia Republican Party voted in January to expel him from the party over his endorsement.
But in an op-ed for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution explaining his decision to become a Democrat, Duncan wrote that his journey to switching parties “started well before Donald Trump tried to steal the 2020 election in Georgia.”
“My decision was centered around my daily struggle to love my neighbor, as a Republican,” he wrote.
He blasted the GOP’s policies on healthcare, immigration, and gun control as incompatible with that moral imperative, and criticized the president’s “Big Beautiful” budget bill for cutting Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, which he said would hurt hungry kids in Georgia.
“We should all be looking for ways to love these kids better than continuing to send them to school hungry under the guise of an income tax break,” he wrote.
Duncan is one of several former officials who have switched from Republican to Democrat this year, The Hill reported.
Since Trump took office in January, the Republicans have lost their edge in overall party affiliation, despite Democrats also facing record-low approval ratings.
Earlier this month, the latest Gallup survey showed 46 percent of U.S. adults identified as Democrat or Democratic-leaning, versus 43 percent of U.S. adults who identified as Republican or Republican-leaning.
The shift was driven by independents leaning Democratic, according to Gallup.
