Politico reported earlier this month that Donald Trump "appear[s] to have made peace" with the Club for Growth, but the hard-line group's on-again, off-again hostilities with Trump are still causing trouble for at least one of its endorsed candidates.
A rival super PAC called Conservatives for American Excellence is airing an ad in North Carolina's 6th Congressional District blasting former college football player Bo Hines as insufficiently conservative.
"Now after claiming to be MAGA, he's backed by the same D.C. losers that spent millions attacking President Trump," the narrator intones as the screen shows a Truth Social post of Trump castigating the Club as "political misfits, globalists, and losers."
While it's not clear whom, if anyone, the PAC supports in the busy March 5 GOP primary, the outfit has so far spent $430,000 hitting Hines. The Club, by contrast, has aired spots slamming another candidate, former Rep. Mark Walker. But it's another hopeful, lobbyist Addison McDowell, who has actually secured Trump's backing, and he's airing a new commercial featuring footage of Trump praising him at a recent rally.
But while it takes brickbats in North Carolina, the Club is happily using Trump's endorsement to its advantage in another House race taking place in Texas on the same day. In the GOP primary for the state's 26th District, where Trump and the Club have taken the same side, a new spot from the group features audio of Trump imploring voters in Texas' 26th District to support Brandon Gill, a far-right media figure and the son-in-law of conspiracy theorist Dinesh D'Souza.
The Club, like many conservative groups, opposed Trump during the 2016 presidential primary, only to refashion itself into an all-out MAGA enterprise after Trump claimed the White House.
But Trump and Club head David McIntosh had an ugly falling out during the 2022 Senate primary in Ohio, with Trump pulling for conservative talking head J.D. Vance and the Club sticking with former state Treasurer Josh Mandel. The Club reignited its old feud, running ads reminding voters that Trump had endorsed Mitt Romney four years before, a move that once again left the Club in the MAGA doghouse.
That doesn't seem to be the whole story behind the renewed falling out, however. Shortly before Vance won the nomination, Rolling Stone wrote that one of the fomenters of this rekindled discord was then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who used his access to Trump to trash McIntosh.
Carlson reportedly argued that the Club's chief was untrustworthy because of what the story called "an embarrassing and 'chronic' personal sexual habit." The magazine refused to provide any details about this salacious claim, but it relayed that Trump "spent a notable amount of time gossiping and laughing about the prominent Republican's penis."
The Club spent 2023 trying to block Trump from claiming the presidential nomination again, but it appears to have finally accepted failure. Trump and McIntosh, Politico's Alex Isenstadt wrote earlier this month, met for dinner at Mar-a-Lago. There's no word if Trump used the occasion to mock any of McIntosh's private parts.
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