Former president donald trump came for the speaker of the Arizona Republican Party House of Representatives, rusty roundabouts, with a petty attack on Monday, but used a lame name slur that was more laughable than searing.
Trump called Bowers “rusty” (get it?) and “weak” and “wrong about everything” in a dig at Truth Social.
Trump then explained: “He is Rusty, just like steel rusts and weakens.”
(Photo: Screenshot/Truth Social/Donald Trump)
He was responding after Bowers criticized Trump in an ABC News interview on Sunday, saying I would never vote for him again. and that Trump “has no idea what courage is.”
Bowers, a lifelong Republican and once staunch 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’s attorney, Rudy Giuliani, told him to throw out electoral votes because Joe Biden, who had won the presidential elections in the state, because in the 2020 Arizona elections “200,000 illegal immigrants” and more than 5,000 “dead people” had voted. But despite repeated requests from him, Bowers said Giuliani never provided him with a single name of a fraudulent voter.
There was no evidence “that told me: ‘You have a question. Deny your oath. I won’t do thatsaid Bowers, who called the Constitution “inspired by God.” He told the House panel: “I don’t want to be a cheating winner.”
Trump in his Monday post criticized Bowers’ “count” as “pathetic.” Bowers doesn’t count votes in his state.
When pressed by a reporter after the January 6 hearing testimony, Bowers reluctantly said that still vote for trump if he were the Republican presidential candidate.
But that has changed now.
“I will never vote for him, but I won’t have to,” Bowers said. “Because I think America is tired and there are absolutely forceful, qualified, morally defensible, righteous people out there, and that’s what I want.”
He called Trump a “demagogue” that maintains loyalty through “violence and intimidation”.
“Sometimes I’ve thought that someone born the way they were, raised the way they were, has no idea how difficult a life is,” Bowers said. “And what people have to go through…in the real world. You have no idea what courage is.”
After his testimony, Bowers was censored by his own party. faces a difficult main challenge by Trump-backed former state senator David Farnsworth as he attempts to join the state Senate after reaching his term limit in the state House.
“If I do this, it will be a miracle,” Bowers he told NBC News last month.
This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.