Trump Implores Voters to Back South Carolina Governor on Eve of Runoff

WEST COLUMBIA, S.C. — President Donald Trump pleaded Monday night with South Carolina Republicans to vote for Gov. Henry McMaster in a runoff election Tuesday, warning conservatives that if the governor lost, his failure would be pinned on the president they came to see.

Rallying a cozy high school gymnasium full of supporters for one of his earliest, high-profile backers, Trump said the news media would portray a McMaster defeat as a sign of his own weakness.

“They will say Donald Trump suffered a major, major defeat in the great state of South Carolina, it was a humiliating defeat for Donald Trump,” he said, imploring the crowd to vote.

McMaster failed to win a majority of the vote in the Republican primary this month and is locked in a competitive race with John Warren, a first-time candidate and former Marine. Warren, 39, entered the campaign late, but gained momentum with a series of attacks linking McMaster, 71, to the political status quo in a state capital that has been besieged by a sprawling corruption investigation.

Trump’s decision to inject himself directly into this race just hours before polls open was the sort of risky move that some politicians might not have taken, but, as he explained, he was repaying a debt to McMaster.

The president reminded the would-be voters here that McMaster had been a devoted supporter “from the beginning” — unlike those who, “after the defeat of nine people, they were with me.”

But the president made scant mention of the governor’s 17-month tenure, saying little about South Carolina-specific issues or what McMaster had done for the state since taking over from Nikki R. Haley, whom Trump appointed ambassador to the United Nations.

Trump also showed no sensitivities about one of the state’s largest employers, BMW, complaining that the European Union “sends us BMWs.”

He testified to the governor’s strength, toughness and gentlemanly ways, hailed his wife and let McMaster take the microphone for a moment to bask in a presidential embrace.

Referring to the summer storms that delayed the event and kept Trump’s plane circling in the skies above South Carolina’s capital for over an hour, McMaster delighted the crowd by noting that once Air Force One landed, “the real force of nature got off the plane.”

As is his wont, though, Trump used the vast majority of a 58-minute address to recount his 2016 victory, ridicule his adversaries and narrate a rose-tinted version of his presidency to date. At what was ostensibly an event for McMaster, the president spoke as much about his disregard for late-night host Jimmy Fallon as about the man on the ballot here Tuesday.

There were also references to his wife’s health. Trump dismissed speculation that the first lady had undergone plastic surgery or abandoned him. And he assured the crowd that his hair is his own. (The oratorical detour began with a question: “Anybody here wearing a hair piece?”)

The Catskills-meets-Carolina improv was, of course, what the crowd members expected — and they responded with a few favorite standards of their own: “build the wall,” “lock her up” and a couple of rounds of lusty boos aimed at the media pen at one end of the basketball court.

If McMaster was bothered by the meandering, Trump-centered speech, he did not show it. When Trump concluded, the governor returned to the dais beaming and flashing a thumps-up, in the Trumpian way.

That Trump came at all — enduring weather that prompted him to joke, “I have never taken a longer trip to South Carolina” — was a remarkable political gamble. Trump’s eleventh-hour visit to the steamy suburban basketball court was meant almost entirely to return McMaster’s loyalty, though the president could not help but notice his modest surroundings, joking, “I said, ‘Henry, I don’t work gymnasiums anymore.'”

With no vote in Congress and South Carolina firmly in the Republican column in presidential elections, the governor can do little in return for the president.

While Trump has proved adept at taking down his opponents, he has been burned before when he attempted to anoint other candidates, raising questions about whether his popularity with Republican voters is transferable.

He traveled to Alabama and Pennsylvania in an attempt to lift his party’s candidates in special congressional elections only to see conservative-leaning electorates reject his preferred candidates. And when Trump visited Alabama last fall on behalf of Luther Strange, then a senator, who would lose the nomination to Roy S. Moore, Trump used a similar formulation about how the news media would lay the loss at the White House door.

But McMaster was one of the first elected statewide Republicans in the country to endorse Trump, backing him even before Iowa cast the first votes of the 2016 campaign.

And the governor’s campaign shared polling with White House officials to assure them McMaster was well positioned to win, said Republicans who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.

But it is not clear how much convincing Trump required to return to a state he won by 14 points two years ago.

He has been on a political high here of late. This month, a state lawmaker, Katie Arrington, ousted Rep. Mark Sanford in the Republican primary after claiming the veteran lawmaker was insufficiently loyal to the president. Trump threw his support behind Arrington on the day of the vote and has repeatedly ridiculed Sanford ever since, even belittling him at a meeting of House Republicans. (Sanford was not there.)

And Trump did not get five minutes into his remarks Monday before he began gloating about Sanford’s loss, noting he “wasn’t a big fan.” (The president, though, botched his punchline by referring to “the Tallahassee Trail” instead of “the Appalachian Trail,” the famously false alibi Sanford, then the governor, used to cover his extramarital affair.)

The rally for McMaster was the second Trump administration event for the governor in recent days. Vice President Mike Pence joined McMaster on Saturday near Myrtle Beach, urging Republicans to repay the governor’s loyalty to the president.

Trump’s trip here was only his latest campaign stop. He was in Nevada on Saturday and will be in North Dakota on Wednesday. He is plainly happier enveloped in the warm embrace of his most devoted supporters than attempting to push legislation through a Congress whose divisions between moderate and conservative Republicans rival those between the two parties. Reaching the 46th minute of his remarks, he told the audience that he had a scripted speech prepared for the teleprompters. “You don’t mind I haven’t used them all night, do you?” he asked.