'Never going away': what Arpaio's primary loss could tell us about Trump's future
Nothing much surprises Alfredo Gutierrez.
Widely viewed as the patriarch of Latino civil rights activism in Arizona, Gutierrez, now 74, helped Cesar Chavez organize farm workers in California lettuce fields and led immigrant rights marches through the streets of Phoenix. He’s battled institutional white supremacy in the American south-west for most of his life, and his memoir is a primer on the difficulty of eradicating something that is always present but sometimes hides itself.
It follows that Gutierrez was not surprised but “fascinated” when 88year-old Joe Arpaio decided to run again for sheriff of Maricopa county, Arizona – a post Arpaio had held on to for 24 rocky years and lost four years ago amid national outrage over his abusive policing tactics and immigration crackdowns.
Last week, voters in this sprawling county of about 4.5 million people in the Phoenix metro area and the surrounding saguaro-cactus-spiked Sonoran desert rejected Arpaio’s first step in his bid to win back his top cop seat. He lost the primary race to be the Republican nominee for sheriff.
Arpaio’s defeat is viewed by national politicos as a possible indicator of Donald Trump’s diminishing popularity in Arizona, now a purple state in play in the presidential election, with a population that is more than 30% Latino.
But the race was so close it couldn’t be called for days. Arpaio lost by about 6,000 votes to his former right-hand man, a once blindly devoted chief deputy named Jerry Sheridan.
That Sheridan beat his former boss by only one percentage point demonstrates to activists that Arpaio’s conspiracy theories, rightwing populism and sycophantic devotion to Trump – who saved him from a possible jail sentence with his first presidential pardon in 2017 – still resonates with many Republican primary voters.
To Latino activists, who battled Arpaio for decades to reform policing for their community, the outcome holds another interest.
What matters about Arpaio’s failed comeback bid, Latino activists say, is that Arizona’s experience with Arpaio has long presaged what could occur when Trump leaves office – and, by extension, what other countries might expect when their populist leaders, like Jair Bolsonaro, step down.
Manifest Destiny–Maga syndrome
The similarities between Arpaio and Trump prompted activists here to brand Trump as the “national Arpaio” and the “mega Arpaio”.
Both Trump and Arpaio have latched on to strong authoritarian figures (Trump to Putin, Arpaio to Trump). They have both embraced and promoted baseless conspiracy theories, including one that aimed to delegitimize the nation’s only Black president. They have both persecuted and hunted unauthorized immigrants to please a xenophobic base of white voters. They are both hungry for media coverage yet dub even mildly critical stories “fake news”. And they both bristle when reporters point out allegations of their shoddy leadership.
Should Trump lose the election, some predict he – like Arpaio – will retreat to the far-right fringe of the Republican party – only to become reinvigorated and re-emerge from time to time in a bid for electoral legitimacy, relying on a base of racist voters for a Hail Mary victory, activists say.
Salvador Reza, a longtime neighborhood organizer in Phoenix, calls it the “Manifest Destiny-Maga syndrome”.
“That’s what got Trump elected and that is what gives Arpaio his following too,” Reza said.
What’s more, Trump’s policies, once institutionalized, will be difficult to eradicate, Arizona activists warn. They say they have fought for years to rid the county sheriff’s office of what they view as Arpaio’s legacy of institutionalized white supremacy that targets people of color.
“The racist culture of 24 years con
tinues in the sheriff’s department,” said Carlos Garcia, a 37-year-old Phoenix city council member who led Puente Human Rights Movement, a Latino-led civil rights group that battled Arpaio for years.
Garcia’s chief complaint is that Paul Penzone, the Democratic sheriff who replaced Arpaio in 2016, still follows Arpaio’s policy of allowing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents into jails to remove unauthorized immigrants and put them on the path to deportation. The agency has removed at least 5,000 immigrants from Maricopa county jails since Penzone took office in 2017.
Activists also point to a recent report that signals lingering problems with biased policing. The report says Penzone’s deputies are more likely to stop and search Hispanic and Black motorists than White motorists.
Penzone, through his campaign spokeswoman Sophie O’Keefe-Zelman, maintains he does not tolerate the “costly, illegal and disgraceful practice of using badges to harass and intimidate people of color sanctioned by the previous administration”. Penzone has vigorously reached out to the Latino community to build trust shattered by Arpaio, has complied with 90% of federal court orders meant to correct Arpaio’s unconstitutional policing and has “expanded traffic studies” to figure out whether “disparities may exist” in stops and detainments of drivers of color, O’Keefe-Zelman said.
Many county residents voted Arpaio out of office in 2016 because they were fatigued by his trademark showboat cruelties, such as forcing some inmates to live in tents and wear pink underwear. And they disapproved of Arpaio’s legal troubles stemming from unconstitutional policing and unconstitutional jails.
Paul Charlton, a Republican attorney in Phoenix who took Arpaio on in court, pointed out the Democratic sheriff had not, like his predecessor, “imprisoned people in violation of the constitution”.
Maria Castro, a Latinx activist who was 13 when Arpaio first unleashed swarms of deputies into Latino neighborhoods in search of undocumented immigrants, spent her teenage years worrying her mother, an undocumented immigrant, would be deported.
Castro and other activists used Arpaio to register first-time Latino voters in 2016. Voting was seen as “an opportunity to get rid of this monster”, she said. But with federal agents still in Penzone’s jails, she said, many firsttime voters felt “let down by Penzone “and may not give him the support he needs to beat a Republican candidate”.
‘I gave it a good shot’
Over the phone, Arpaio said he might not run for office again. He said the same thing when he lost the sheriff’s race to Penzone. Two years later, he ran a Republican primary race for a US Senate seat and lost.
In his latest attempt at a comeback, he had spent the last few weeks tooling around the county in a rented RV with a giant photographic image of himself and Trump plastered on the side, along with the words “Make Maricopa County Great Again”.
As the state endured a frightening coronavirus surge, Arpaio posed without a mask for social media videos, chatting away with sunbaked nonagenarians and any person of color he could find.
“I gave it a good shot,” Arpaio said. “That’s the way it is. I have lost before. I sure didn’t jump off a bridge. I kept active.”
The former sheriff characterized allegations that he had institutionalized white supremacy in the sheriff’s office as “ridiculous”.
“Every hour on the hour they call me a racist,” he said of Latino activists. “They don’t know what they’re talking about. They will say anything to take me down. I have a lot of Hispanic support. Tremendous support.”
Latino activism pushed Arpaio out of the mainstream and into the fringe, Garcia, the city council member, points out.
Now voter displeasure over Trump’s handling of the pandemic and civil rights protests seems to be pushing Trump into the fringe.
If Trump were to lose the election, Gutierrez predicts, “in order not to become an angry old forgotten man he still has to go out there and speak to these racist hordes that clearly exist. He can’t allow those folks to become quiet”.
Because Trump, like Arpaio, “is never going to go away”.