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Do Republicans disapprove of Trump's meeting with Putin? 'They couldn't care less' Read more The challenger, Corey Stewart, a far-right elected official in northern Virginia, repeatedly praised Donald Trump and attacked his opponent as “weak” and “an ultra-liberal”, automatically opposed to every action of the Trump administration. Tim Kaine repeatedly called Stewart “a 100% Donald Trump first guy” while describing himself as a “Virginia first guy”. At the end of a week which began with Trump’s controversial meeting with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki and continued with the president’s hectic attempts to clarify his position on Russia, there were strident disagreements about the Mueller investigation and US relations with Moscow. Stewart referred to the special counsel’s work as “a witch-hunt” and described Russian interference in the 2016 election as “alleged meddling”. Kaine raised Stewart’s past associations with white supremacists such as the Wisconsin congressional candidate Paul Nehlen and his campaigning for Roy Moore, the losing Senate candidate in Alabama last year who was accused of sexually assaulting underaged teenage girls. Moore denied those allegations and Stewart stood by him, saying: “We had 40-year-old allegations. In the debate, he repeated that he has disavowed Nehlen, a sometime challenger to the House speaker, Paul Ryan. On Saturday, Stewart attacked Kaine for standing by Leslie Cockburn, a Democratic congressional candidate in Virginia who co-wrote a book the New York Times called “Israel-bashing for its own sake”. Kaine said: “You can be critical of someone’s foreign policy and not be an anti-Semite”.