Trump Comes For Arizona Rep. Rusty Bowers With Feeble Name Insult
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
Former President Donald Trump came for Arizona’s GOP House speaker, Rusty Bowers, with a mean-spirited attack Monday, but he used a lame name insult that was more laughable than searing.
Trump said Bowers was “rusty” (get it?) and “weak” and “wrong on everything” in a dig on Truth Social.
Trump then explained: “He is Rusty, just like steel gets rusty and weak.”
(Photo: Screen Shot/Truth Social/Donald Trump)
He was firing back after Bowers blasted Trump in an ABC News interview Sunday, saying he would never again vote for him and that Trump has “no idea what courage is.”
Bowers, a lifelong Republican and onetime steadfast Trump supporter, powerfully testified in June against the former president in televised hearings before the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.
Bowers recounted how Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani told him to toss out electoral votes for Joe Biden, who had won the presidential election in the state, because “200,000 illegal immigrants” and more than 5,000 “dead people” had voted in Arizona’s 2020 election. But despite his repeated requests, Bowers said Giuliani never provided him with a single name of a fraudulent voter.
There was no evidence “that would say to me, ‘You have a doubt. Deny your oath.’ I will not do that,” said Bowers, who said the Constitution is “divinely inspired.” He told the House panel: “I do not want to be a winner by cheating.”
Trump in his post on Monday slammed Bowers’ “counting” as “pathetic.” Bowers doesn’t count the votes in his state.
When pressed by a reporter after the Jan. 6 hearing testimony, Bowers reluctantly said he would still vote for Trump if he were the GOP presidential nominee.
But that’s changed now.
“I’ll never vote for him, but I won’t have to,” Bowers said. “Because I think America’s tired and there’s some absolutely forceful, qualified, morally defensible and upright people, and that’s what I want.”
He called Trump a “demagogue” who maintains loyalty through “thuggery and intimidation.”
“I have thought, at times, someone born how he was, raised how he was — he has no idea what a hard life is,” Bowers said. “And what people have to go through ... in the real world. He has no idea what courage is.”
After his testimony, Bowers was censured by his own party. He faces a tough primary challenge by Trump-backed former state Sen. David Farnsworth in his bid to join the state Senate after hitting his term limit in the state House.
“If I pull this off, it’s going to be a miracle,” Bowers told NBC News last month.
This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.
