Birth of a Trump warrior

The senator didn’t get much of a political honeymoon either.

Mr. Collins had vowed to run against her in the special-election primary if she was chosen, thus beginning a running duel to showcase their fire-breathing credentials. Attila the Hun even appeared in one of Ms. Loeffler’s ads.

She began backing legislation that had little chance of passing but spoke to the Republican base, including bills like the “No Catch-and-Release for Rioters Act,” the “Justice for Victims of Sanctuary Cities Act” and a measure to bar abortion providers from receiving loans for coronavirus relief.

She has repeatedly excoriated sermons delivered by her Democratic opponent, Mr. Warnock, branding him a “militant Marxist radical” — a strained broadside that riled fellow Black pastors — and falsely claiming that his sermons had incorporated the controversial “God damn America” remark from a speech by the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. Even so, while her campaign says Mr. Warnock has been spreading abhorrent views “for decades,” she was willing to appear with him in January at his church, Ebenezer Baptist, during the traditional political pilgrimage for Martin Luther King’s Birthday.

Loyalty to the president has been paramount.

She has claimed ignorance of the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape in which Mr. Trump boasted of groping women. She held a joint event with Georgia’s most outlandish politician, Representative-elect Marjorie Taylor Greene, who during her primary campaign professed support for QAnon conspiracy theories, which claim that Mr. Trump is locked in battle with a clandestine cabal of pedophile Democrats. And Ms. Loeffler has called for the resignation of a fellow Republican, Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state in Georgia, who rebuffed pressure from the president to disenfranchise enough voters to reverse his narrow defeat there.

In a sign of the perils of Trumpist politics, Ms. Loeffler found herself the target of Democratic attacks after a photo appeared of her smiling alongside a former Ku Klux Klan leader at a recent campaign event. The longtime white supremacist, Chester Doles, had posted the photo on a Russian social networking site, and it quickly ended up on Twitter. Ms. Loeffler disavowed Mr. Doles and said she hadn’t known who he was; no evidence has emerged to suggest that she did.

Asked about the senator’s politics, her longtime friend Ms. Marquis said the first she learned of Ms. Loeffler’s anti-abortion position was during her campaign. Ms. Marquis, whose daughter was born with Down syndrome, said she recently wrote her friend to thank her for her stance. In an interview, she indicated that Ms. Loeffler’s politics were center-right, but called back to clarify: “I think she’s more right than center, especially when it comes to right-to-life and the Second Amendment.”