Trump Calls Pat Toomey A RINO. Is This The Break Joe Gale Has Been Waiting For?
Do you think that this Tweet from President Trump, late Saturday Night (July 11), might have caught the attention of an ambitious young Repbulican politician by the name of Joe Gale?
That would be the same Joe Gale who is stll smarting from a 2018 Commonwealth Court decision that blocked his candidacy for Lt. Governor, because he would not have reached the required minimum age to be sworn into that position until after Inauguration Day, 2019.
It’s the same Joe Gale who couldn’t be more pleased with all the attention that has been heaped upon him recently for declaring that Black Lives Matter are “perpetrators of domestic terror,” and are a “radical left-wing hate group.” It’s the same Joe Gale who knows there’s no such thing as bad publicity.
So now that he’s “of age,” and knowing that Pat Toomey is in President Trump’s dog house, Joe Gale might be thinking that he could wear the mantle of being Trump’s protege in a 2022 Republican Gubernatorial Primary fight against Pennsylvania’s junior senator (The Inquirer calls Toomey’s interest in running for Governor, one of the worst-kept secrets in Pennsylvania politics).
Gale got elected Montco County Commissioner in 2015, by calling his Republican opponents in the primary and the general election RINOS. And he used the same strategy to get re-elected in 2019.
Then again, maybe the motivation for Toomey to issue his statement, criticizing Trump’s commutation of Roger Stone, was a transparent beginning of a rebranding effort on Toomey’s part, to not be perceived as a Trump sycophant, a label that Gale would seemingly be delighted to be tagged with.
Trump, who occassional has been known to hold a grudge, also doesn’t need to be reminded that Toomey did not attend the 2016 Republican Convention. What’s more, Toomey did not announce who he was voting for until 7:00 PM, on the night of Election Day, November 8, 2016 (He voted for Trump).
On other hand, the president would be hard-pressed to find a more consistent, ardent and loyal supporter, than Gale.
The Montco minority commissioner was way ahead of the curve in terms of his support of Donald Trump (which has been unwavering). On February 25, 2016 Gale announced that he was endorsing Trump. This was when Ted Cruz was still calling Trump a “Pathological Liar” and “a Narcissist;” Lindsey Graham was calling him a “He’s a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot;” and Marco Rubio was saying Trump was “an embarrassment” who and that Trump was “cultivating a party of fear.”
And in April of this year, Gale declared that he was “‘Proud to stand with President Trump in saying NO to all vote-by-mail elections.”