After 30 years in the service of the Republican Party, Russell “Rusty” Bowers has rarely been so worried: in his native Arizona, midterm elections are marked by the presence of armed lookouts in some polling stations and the conspiracy of his own camp.
In the Grand Canyon region, “civilization hangs by a thread,” alarmed the president of the House of State Representatives at the AFP, almost joining thumb and forefinger to symbolize what he believes separates American society from perdition.
Sidelined by the “Grand Old Party” (GOP) after resisting pressure from Donald Trump to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, won by Joe Biden with just 10,000 votes to spare in Arizona, this conservative Mormon denounces the “lies. “of his political family.
In this Southwestern state, the three Republican candidates for the posts of governor, senator and secretary of state continue to claim that President Biden is illegitimate, despite multiple investigations concluded that there was no fraud.
And the new Trumpist guard is trying to reform the electoral system with a “dangerous law,” points out this 70-year-old political veteran.
On the eve of the mid-term elections, the weather is so bad that some metal ballot boxes – similar to mailboxes – where Arizona can deposit ballots in advance for the November 8 vote are now monitored by anonymous sentries. In Mesa, where Mr. Bowers lives, two armed men in paramilitary equipment were evacuated by the sheriff.
“It is intimidation, regardless of its degree, regardless of the legal protection” that authorizes the port of arms in Arizona, he is indignant, recalling that the stages are already under video surveillance “24 hours a day”.
The current political atmosphere makes him shiver. “If the vote is confiscated or weakened, and violence increases, this gives fertile ground to fascism,” he warns.
“Mussolini’s model”
In Arizona, “the strength of the current party leadership rests solely on popular anger”, he insists, denouncing the Trumpist wing of the GOP which “approaches the Mussolini model”.
For two years, Mr. Bowers has been a personal victim of America’s ever-increasing polarization. His inbox is filled with thousands of abusive emails and death threats since Donald Trump took a liking to him.
The former president called him a “cowardly rhino”, an acronym used to shame those he considers “republicans in name only”, when the parliamentarian testified to the pressure exerted on him to upset the presidential elections, before the commission of ‘ investigation into the assault on the Capitol, January 6, 2021 in Washington.
For weeks, Trumpists have routinely demonstrated outside his windows, sometimes with placards inspired by QAnon’s conspiracy theory accusing him of being a pedophile. The 70-year-old also had to push back a member of a far-right militia, who was placed in front of his house with a gun in his belt.
Despite this, this sculptor father of seven children, a fervent opponent of the right to abortion, regrets nothing. He smiles again as he remembers the call that started it all.
Eventually, Donald Trump and his attorney Rudy Giuliani assured him that an old Arizona law – which he never found – allowed the Republican Assembly to change the voters of the state, charged with formally electing the president after the ballot. in spite of the popular vote.
“I told him: + Mr. Trump, I voted for you, I walked for you, I campaigned for you, (…) but I won’t do anything illegal for you,” says this devoted Mormon. “When they asked me to break my oath to the Constitution, it was like asking me to renounce my religion, my faith, the foundations of who I am.”
In disgrace, Mr. Bowers lost the Republican primary to run for a seat in the Arizona Senate in the November election.
Before stepping down from office, he used his prerogatives as Assembly President to oppose a Republican bill in February that would allow members of Congress “to be able to refuse elections” in Arizona after they are held.
“I stopped it … for this year”, he underlines in a silence that speaks volumes about the stakes of these mid-term elections.
With AFP
