He's another Republican who won't vote for Donald Trump. "He went after me personally. I can't get past that." Rusty Bowers, the former speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives, isn't the only one turning away from the Republican Party nominee. According to the results of the Tuesday, March 19, primary, more than 125,000 Republican voters in Arizona did not vote for the populist grassroots hero. True, the former president garnered 77% of the vote. But the score of his main rival Nikki Haley, 108,000 votes, raised concerns in the conservative camp. This is 10 times more than the margin by which he lost to Joe Biden in 2020 in the strategic state that Arizona has become.
Russell "Rusty" Bowers, 71, is still paying for standing up to Trump in 2020, when he single-handedly foiled a plot to overturn the outcome of Arizona's presidential election. Punished by his own party after 30 years of loyal service and targeted by a rival candidacy after agreeing to testify before the commission investigating the January 6, 2021 insurrection on Capitol Hill in Washington, the former speaker lost all elective office in 2022. He is in no hurry to return to politics. A member of the Mormon Church and a painter of desert landscapes, he believes that "conflict is not the solution to our malaise or our instability."
At the end of December 2023, Bowers was once again the target of a malicious act. This time it was a false phone alert, in a harassment practice that now has a name: "swatting," in reference to the police unit (SWAT) that specializes in shootings or hostage-taking. "I went home, law enforcement was surrounding the house." The anonymous caller claimed that the owner of the premises had killed his wife. The FBI took over the investigation after noting that several similar, and untraceable, phone calls had been reported around the country at the same time. In mid-March, Bowers was informed of the results. The caller was not one of his enemies in Arizona. "The call came from Serbia," he said. "Multiply that by a hundred or a thousand. It's so easy to divide us."
Bowers believes the Republican Party's drift into an era of "anger and revenge" began with divisions over the fight against Covid-19. As early as spring 2020, hundreds of extremists invaded the Arizona state capital in Phoenix to protest the "tyranny" of masks and lockdowns imposed by Governor Doug Ducey, also a Republican. "The pandemic produced a very destructive dynamic for the stability of the party," said Bowers. "We came out of it in a state of extreme anxiety and dissatisfaction." Four years on, one virus remains to be eradicated, he regrets, that of "fear."
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