Consigned to drift through the afterlife of boxing notoriety, former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson showed up at a Donald Trump rally in Syracuse, New York, on Friday offering a bashful wave and meaningless praise in his familiar soft lisp.
“There’s no way in the world I would ever be here if it wasn’t for a president like Donald Trump,” Tyson said.
“Ah, I watched him get in the ring so many times. He was a scary guy,” Trump said, watching as Iron Mike left the stage with his pit-pull steps. The pair are both New Yorkers and go back decades. Who knows how closely Tyson follows the US political scene but if he caught any of the midterm senate debates that aired during the week, one brawl would have caught his eye. The toss-up states of Michigan, Georgia and Texas have been defined by personality-driven contests that are openly hostile and filled with barbed accusation.
But it was the relentless and almost cruel verbal pummelling of Republican candidate Mike Collins by Georgia senator Jon Ossoff that delivered a series of swift, pulverising blows that Tyson might have recognised. For over 40 minutes, Ossoff stood beside his opponent on the stage and repeatedly called him a “bigot” before delivering an argument that was so deliberately paced and sustained that it almost became uncomfortable.
RM Block
“Georgia has voter ID and that’s good. Mike Collins and Donald Trump? They’re still obsessed with turning over the 2020 election. Mike Collins still believes the 2020 election was stolen. Mike Collins has supported Donald Trump’s effort to overturn the election and he wants to give your tax dollars to the violent thugs and criminals who sacked the US Capitol on January 6th.
“Mike Collins is attacking your voting rights. But that’s not a surprise when you consider who Mike Collins is. This is a man who cheered on a group of young men who were mocking a black woman on a college campus with monkey sounds. If John Lewis were marching today from Selma to Montgomery, Mike Collins would be grabbing a billy-club.”
The boxing ring would have at least held the mercy of a white towel. Given Georgia’s complex racial history – cradle of the civil rights movement, as Ossoff contended, yes- but also birthplace, at Stone Mountain, of the 20th-century iteration of the Ku Klux Klan, there was something shocking about the charge.
It was the latest in Ossoff’s knack for delivering a succinct, quotable line that has seen him move, over the course of four months, from the periphery to the forefront of predictions on Democratic presidential candidates.
A day after the debate, it was announced that Trump would visit Georgia at least twice before the November 3rd midterm elections to campaign for the flailing Collins campaign. While other Republican aspirants – including Georgia gubernatorial candidate Rick Jackson – are campaigning without mentioning the president’s name, Mike Collins is tethered to Trump.
If Collins is to flip the seat that Ossoff holds – a seat essential to Democrats’ ambitions to take control of the House – then it will be as an ever-Trumper. In a television interview he gave hours after Wednesday night’s debate, Ossoff said that Collins championing Trump was predictable.
“No, I wasn’t surprised because bless his heart, Mike doesn’t have too much of a mind of his own,” he told Jen Psaki.
“He’s been doing the president’s bidding thoughtlessly now for a year and a half,” Ossoff said, before sliding into campaign mode, reminding viewers of high prices, spiralling healthcare costs, coffee up 30 per cent, ground beef up 30 per cent.
In mid-September, a Quantus Insights poll had Ossoff leading Collins by four points. This week, a series of polls has the Democrat opening up anything from an eight- to 11-point lead. It was reported that the Republicans had begun to reduce their television advertisement bookings within the state. Ossoff has amassed a formidable campaign war chest, with some $40 million available from a total campaign fund of twice that.
Trump’s appearance in Georgia, along with his renewed pledge for $5,000 for every American voter should the Republicans hold the balance of power, will reposition the senate race as a de facto vote between the president himself and the emergent prosecutorial star of the Democratic Party.
Georgia is the state that will torment Trump after he leaves office. Although he defeated Kamala Harris there two years ago, he continues to brood over the 2020 election loss to Joe Biden by fewer than 12,000 votes, leading to his infamous phone call to Georgia’s secretary of state demanding that he “find” votes.
Now Ossoff, considered a vulnerable re-election prospect when Trump returned to office on a wave of Maga ebullience in January 2025, has emerged as a chief thorn in his side, merciless not only in his coursing of his opponent in the Senate race, but also of Trump himself.
In flightier moments, Ossoff has drawn comparison to the late JFK – mainly for his youth and preppy-conservative wardrobe. If he possesses, within his performative repertoire, his version of Kennedy’s regal sunniness or Obama’s folksy turns, the Georgia senator is keeping it under wraps.
For the moment, Ossoff’s message has been delivered with a steely, sombre gravity to reflect the prevailing mood. He is presenting himself as an antidote to what he would present as the frivolity and unseriousness of the Trump administration.
Having finished with his immediate opponent in the debate, he offered equally sharp appraisals of leading figures within Trump’s administration. On Pete Hegseth’s announcement that the execution of Nidal Hassan, who killed 13 people in a 2009 shooting rampage at Fort Hood, would be publicly livestreamed, Ossoff said: “I think Pete Hegseth is, frankly, a deeply unwell person who seems to relish this kind of brutality. All the while he is running a department that is falling into chaos. The guy cannot run the United States military competently and is spending his time on this obscene medieval spectacle.”
Critiquing Marco Rubio’s address in Athens, he described it as an attempt “to try and soft launch his presidential campaign”.
“These people are not focused. JD Vance and Marco Rubio are already looking past Donald Trump, jockeying for position in the future Republican primary while the administration’s obscene policies failures have made the world and our country less safe and are immiserating the American public in a cost-of-living crisis.”
Ossoff dismissed the idea of running in the 2028 election back in April but his profile has begun to fill the political sky since then. If the polling numbers alchemise into a comprehensive victory, then the speculation about his future will intensify.
For now, he remains locked into a riveting and ugly regional election framed not just by the prevailing cost-of-living issues but the spectres of race and white supremacy. This week’s debate was preceded by a report in The Daily Beast, amplified by Ossoff, that two of Collins’s campaign leaders have ties to American Patriots USA, founded by Chester Doles, a former Ku Klux Klan leader.
It’s an unpromising scenario for Trump as he prepares to visit the Peach State.
“I think the last thing that Georgia Republicans want right now is for Donald Trump to come to Georgia,” Ossoff said of that visit. “If he wants to come to Georgia, that’s fine with me.”
Early voting begins in Georgia on Tuesday.
