In the Trump Bestiary

FLORENCE, Arizona — Hours after the Trump circus moved on, crews cleaned up the mess, restoring the Canyon Moon Ranch’s back forty to desolate scrubland. The Jumbotron and sound stage are gone. All that remains of the day is a cluster of colorful Porta-Potties — and what’s in them.

The “Save America” rally on Jan. 15 drew about 15,000 people, half what Florence police expected. Only partisan media took much note. The Arizona Republic in Phoenix covered it in wry “same-old-song” terms. The Arizona Daily Star in Tucson, only an hour south, passed.

Donald Trump shouted his tired stock phrases. He promised a comeback “the likes of which nobody has seen.” It might have been as laughable as Charlie Chaplin’s 1940 classic, “The Great Dictator,” except for the strong possibility that he is right.

Florence and its Pinal County environs offer chilling insight into the Trumplicans’ plot against America. It is not a war, nor is it civil. Only one side is armed and united in a battle plan. It exploits a complacent citizenry to rig the electoral system in swing states, and it is gaining ground fast.

Driving up from Tucson, I heard a radio interview about Arizona’s venomous bestiary: 57 sorts of scorpions, 14 snake species, among others. The tarantula hawk, a two-inch black wasp, stings with screaming, lingering pain that overrides all mental discipline. Now there is worse. 

Red-necked House rats, for instance, chomp away at democracy. Courts dismissed their attempt to overturn 2020 elections. The Maricopa County Election Board ruled that 76 allegations were misleading or false. But they keep at it, banging away at their bullshit battle cry: Stop the Steal.

That is just prep work. Trump is sowing election distrust the way he eroded faith in a truthful press. Trumplicans want partisan electors in 2024. Only decency and tradition have kept the Electoral College from rejecting the people’s choice. These days, America is short on both.

Plenty of Florence townsfolk oppose all this. Quietly. A fair number grimaced or rolled their eyes when I asked about the rally. Few offered details. In a rural county seat of 26,000 where feelings run high, Democrats tend toward discretion over valor.

Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb — 6’3’ and 240 pounds — casts an ominous shadow in body armor, with his trusty assault rifle that can take out a platoon in seconds. At the rally, the Daily Beast reported, toughs hassled a man in a “Biden 2020” t-shirt. Deputies broke it up by taking him away in handcuffs.

A Politico profile captured the essential Lamb. He derides Biden on Fox “News” and Newsmax, making no bones about how he protects citizens from “government overreach.” At a Phoenix anti-vaccine rally, he declaimed: “We’re going to find out what kind of patriots you are. We’re going to find out who is willing to die for freedom.”

Lamb gets scarier than that, and a lot of rural Arizonans these days like that sort of lawman.

Florence sits along the Gila River on what was a pre-Colombian Indian settlement, which until the 1853 Gadsden Purchase was on the Mexican side of the border with U.S. territory. A Civil War veteran founded the town in 1866 as a crossroads for farmers and ranchers.

The Gila is now mostly dry. Newcomers bring nest eggs from colder climes and share hard-right views with rural families. They demonize Mexican “aliens” whose local roots run eight generations deep. Agriculture and housing projects consume fast-dwindling water at an alarming rate.

Pinal County was named for what was a vast expanse of low conifers. Today, Penal is more like it. The funky old Arizona State Prison in Florence is now one of 13 federal and state lockups, including an immigration detention center. Most are run by corporations interested in keeping cells full at minimum expense. An army of guards tend toward gas-gulping SUVs with Trump bumper stickers.

The gingerbread courthouse is now surrounded by all-business prefab buildings. On Main Street, The Station Coffee Company, a church-run gem in the old adobe town hall, serves “liberal” stuff like vegan hot chocolate. When I asked the friendly woman in charge about politics, she handed me a pair of pennies. “Here,” she said, “you can add your own two-cents worth.”

Beyond voter suppression and gerrymandering, candidates who deny Biden’s victory are running for positions that oversee elections in 21 states, and Arizona is the looniest of the lot. You couldn’t make this shit up.

Secretary of state Katie Hobbs is a Democrat with an apolitical job. The election she ran withstood repeated recounts by “Cyber Ninjas,” a Florida conspiracy nut’s shadowy firm hired by the Senate president. He claimed to find bamboo traces that proved fake ballots were imported from Asia.

Hobbs is now running for governor. Trump’s choice to replace her is Mark Finchem, a former firefighter and cop in Michigan, who moved to Arizona in 1999 where he sold real estate before entering politics. He represents a wealthy Tucson exurb in the Arizona House. 

Finchem, who favors a black cowboy hat, is an Oath Keeper and QAnon supporter. In 2013, he accused Barack Obama of trying to impose “totalitarian dictatorship.” He was in Washington to fan flames at the Jan. 6 insurrection, which he nonetheless blames on leftist provocateurs. 

Five Republicans are running in the gubernatorial primary. Trump backs Kari Lake, a long-time anchor on the Fox affiliate in Phoenix, who snuggled next to him at the rally and gushed praise. She ended her speech with this:

“Do you think God would put weak people here for these times? God didn’t make mistakes like that. He put us here because we are strong, and he wants us to save this state, to save this country.”

As the crowd chanted her name, she clutched her bosom, moist-eyed. “I love you, too,” she said repeatedly, pointing at the noisier cheering sections. She seemed to be channeling Eva Peron, the self-proclaimed champion of los descamisados, the shirtless.

In Argentina, I covered Isabel Peron in the mid-1970s. She did her best to ape Evita, and it worked. She made it to the presidency. Her Steve Bannon-type puppet master launched an official terror campaign that expanded into the Dirty War. Just saying.

Lake and her primary opponents bang away about the Mexico border, a unifying theme that prompts “Build the Wall” chants. Karrin Taylor Robson, a Phoenix businesswoman in the running, spends lavishly on truth-free TV spots aimed at gullible made-up minds. One ad beggars belief.

Standing by a fence topped with razor wire, Robson claims Biden lets expelled migrants sneak back in. “Look,” she says, pointing at a few men, either legal laborers or detainees, walking slowly down a culvert on the Arizona side in full view of Border Patrol agents — and the camera. 

In Arizona, even Democrats add to the bestiary with a forked-tongued sidewinder. Sen. Krysten Sinema, who with Joe Manchin of West Virginia undercuts her party’s thin majority, is not running until 2024. Still, she trashes Biden in TV ads promising to fight for lower taxes.

The Trumplican strategy is simple: blame Biden for their leader’s own failings and stonewall anything he proposes so they can portray him as a do-nothing old fool. Meantime, they take credit for popular legislation that slips past them.

Rep. Paul Gosar, an insurrection leader, is a night-crawling worm so poisonous that his own family urges voters to defeat him. He voted twice to kill the bipartisan Covid relief bill. It passed, and he made a show of boasting about the $32 million he secured to upgrade Kingman Airport.

The problem, more than transparent fake news, is thinly reported real news that omits immediate past history and details about blatant breach of trust.  Because no one is held to account, even the worst of Arizona’s public servants stand little chance of an enforced stay in Florence.

Rachel Maddow focused on the standoff between Katie Hobbs and attorney general Mark Brnovich. MSNBC’s website summed that up in a headline: “Arizona attorney general too busy kissing up to Trump to deal with fake elector referral.”

Two groups sent notarized bogus lists to Washington alleged to be the names of Arizona’s official electors. One was illegally stamped with the state seal. Hobbs asked Brnovich to prosecute. He promised to investigate. A year later, nothing. Brnovich, among Republicans running for Mark Kelly’s Senate seat, covets a Trump endorsement. 

Kari Lake echoes the Trumplican party line: Hobbs and anyone else who took part in stealing the election should be locked up. Several officials who supervised voting received obscene, gruesome death threats that extended to their families.

At one point, Lake veered deep into Cloud Cuckoo Land. She asserted that Chinese agents pour over the heavily patrolled southern border to join a fifth column that is insidiously polluting treasured American values.

Her speech reflected absurd contradictions and twisted truths that a better-informed nation would dismiss out of hand. Trump let Covid-19 run wild, and he undercut global action to curb it before virulent variants further paralyzed supply chains and drove up inflation.

Truth is incontrovertible. Biden cut unemployment to lower levels than it was under Trump. Stock markets boom in an economic spurt not seen in 40 years. But Trumplicans refuse vaccines, masks and precautions to protect others. Despite Biden’s effective action, he is blamed as Covid rages on.

“We are no longer willing to put up with those shots in the arms, swabs up the nose and those filthy masks…we’re done,” Lake said. “When I am governor, there will be no mandates, no lockdowns.” After a pause, she said she would revise that.

“I wanna lock somebody down, that liar, Dr. Fauci.” The crowd roared as she called bullshit on a world-class epidemiologist who for decades has directed effective action to curb deadly pathogens.

Then she added a tearful promise to protect beautiful unborn children. Trump’s slashed aid and “America First” policies have killed an incalculable number of already-born children since 2017. But except for Mexico and China, the rest of the world seldom comes up in Arizona campaigns.

In 1988, the elder George Bush accepted the Republican nomination, promising “a kinder, gentler America.”  Two years ago, Trump told Playboy: “I think if this country gets any kinder or gentler, it’s literally going to cease to exist.” If business leaders negotiated foreign policy, he said, “we’d have respect around the world.”

At his own inauguration, Trump denounced “American carnage,” and he rapidly produced exactly that. Five years later, the United States is reviled or pitied, where not hated, in much of the world. At home, kind and gentle are not the first adjectives that come to mind.

To and from Florence, I stuck to the Pinal Parkway, a two-lane blacktop through desert splendor not yet lost to mining, thirsty cotton field or encroaching subdivisions. Mostly, I wanted to avoid the I-10 freeway linking Tucson and Phoenix, three lanes each way of traffic hell.

Day and night, fancy big cars, SUVs and pickups hog the fast line, slowing it to a crawl. Drivers behind them weave in and out of the middle lane in a harrowing game of chicken. The slow lane on the right can be the fastest — except when big trucks lumber along as freeway planners intend.

In Europe, a blinking turn signal or a headlight flash reminds slow drivers to move over. You can set cruise control on a crowded freeway and go for miles without having to tap the brakes. That is not smart in Arizona, which has 7 million guns for 7 million people.

This suggests a society susceptible to me-only demagogy. A guy who thinks you dissed him on the road, even if you didn’t, is capable of blowing out your lights. Writ large, that sort of mentality is frightening.

Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater comes up often in Trumplican rhetoric as a conservative model. He leaned far to the right, in fact, but when he swore on a Bible to represent all constituents, his fingers weren’t crossed. He made his case forcefully, then found common ground.

It is hardly just Arizona. I was born in Wisconsin before my family moved west. On trips back, I found people so nice they made your teeth hurt. They chose leaders who did the right thing in a post-war world. Joe McCarthy crumbled after a questioner cut to the core: “Sir, have you no decency?”

Today, Wisconsin’s bestiary includes Ron Johnson, who opposes aid to children. Parents who want kids should look after themselves, he says. That’s not other people’s responsibility. Thinking like that is why America’s schools are abysmal and its streets are increasingly unsafe.

Ignorance produces people who are easy prey when manipulators tar Democrats as godless Marxists who demand undeserved “welfare.” Even rightwing democracies provide health care, free universities and basic benefits — human rights — in everyone’s interest.

Biden has his failings. Democrats are hampered by an activist wing seeking too much too soon. But U.S. elections come down to a choice between two parties. Today, that has never been easier, and it has never been so drop-dead important.

Lincoln, a Republican, said it best: “If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.”