'I am Trumpier than Trump,' boasts West Virginia Senate candidate Don Blankenship

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There are three competitive candidates in West Virginia's GOP Senate primary, which goes to a vote Tuesday, but only one of them — Don Blankenship — has dubbed fellow Republican and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell "Cocaine Mitch" and called McConnell's father-in-law a "wealthy Chinaperson" and then tried to defend the term by speaking of "Africapersons."

Blankenship's style is a bit much even for President Donald "sh--hole countries" Trump, who tweeted early Monday that West Virginians should support Blankenship's primary rivals for the sake of general election viability:

Blankenship promptly took this denunciation as proof that the student has surpassed the teacher. "As some have said, I am Trumpier than Trump, and this morning proves it," he said in a statement responding to the tweet, adding that Trump "is a very busy man and does not know me."

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.