MAGA has become a violent extremist movement that enforces its beliefs – and its delusions – on America. Those who most frequently feel those threats are Republicans.
In early 2021, Richer was an Arizona Republican official who regularly attended local party events. At the time, he was the newly elected county recorder of Maricopa County. The job was a new level of prominence — he was now the most important election supervisory official in the state’s largest county — but going to Arizona Republican events was routine: the kind of thing that Richer, like any state politician, had done hundreds of times before.
But at one event, the crowd heckled and harassed him. When he tried to leave, they dragged him back in, yanking on his arms and shoulders, to berate him about the allegedly stolen 2020 election. He started to worry: Would his own people, fellow Republican Party members, seriously hurt him?
Maricopa County recorder Stephen Richer speaks to reporters during a news conference at the Maricopa County Tabulation and Election Center on November 10, 2022, in Phoenix, Arizona.
There was a clear reason for the madness. Many of the Republican faithful had recently decided that Maricopa County had been the epicenter of “the steal,” Joe Biden’s theft of Arizona from Donald Trump — and the entire presidential election with it. This wasn’t true, obviously. Richer tried to tell them it wasn’t true, hoping his long track record in the state Republican party would give him some credibility.
It did not. What happened instead reveals a pattern that is quietly reshaping American politics: Across the board and around the country, data reveals that threats against public officials have risen to unprecedented numbers — to the point where 83 percent of Americans are now concerned about risks of political violence in their country. The threats are coming from across the political spectrum, but the most important ones in this regard emanate from the MAGA faithful.
Trump’s most fanatical followers have created a situation where challenging him carries not only political risks but also personal ones. Elected officials who dare defy the former president face serious threats to their well-being and to that of their families — raising the cost of taking an already difficult stand.
As a result, the threat of violence is now a part of the American political system, to the point where Republican officials are — by their own admissions — changing the way they behave because they fear it. For Richer, the price back in 2021 was high — and enough to prevent him from safely participating in his own party’s politics.
The more he tried to convince people that the 2020 results were legitimate, the more hostile the audience became — and not just at this one event. He recalls people at Republican meetings getting in his face, grabbing him, and even banging on his car windshield in the parking lot. Richer kept attending party meetings for three months, hoping that the attendees’ behavior would go back to normal.
But they didn’t. The once-friendly events were emotionally exhausting — and, worse, potentially even dangerous.
“I was a Republican activist. That’s what you do: show up to events,” Richer recalls. But eventually, “you don’t feel comfortable.”
By 2022, when Richer was presiding over the November election’s ballot tally, his office was fortified like a military base: surrounded by armed police deployed to protect him and his staff from threats. He recalls numerous staff members quitting on the spot after heated confrontations — and he was personally targeted by credible threats. When we spoke, he was about to testify in one of three federal cases against people who had vowed to kill him.
“You need to do your fucking job right because other people from other states are watching your ass,” the man allegedly said in a voicemail. “You fucking renege on this deal or give them any more troubles, your ass will never make it to your next little board meeting.”
It’s been well over two years since Richer attended the kinds of Arizona GOP grassroots events where he was once welcome. Today, the institutional Arizona Republican party is dominated by politicians who have embraced Trump’s lies about the election — people like Kari Lake, Blake Masters, and Mark Finchem. The harassment and threats from the MAGA faithful was one weapon in the extremist takeover’s arsenal, working to push voices of sanity out of key party events — breaking even determined ones like Richer.
In Arizona, the Trumpist threat of violence worked. And it worked for reasons that should worry all of us at the beginning of an election year that could decide the fate of American democracy.
Vox documents that threats and violent incidents have been widely documented to be at a much higher rate than the historical background, and have been directed throughout the American political system, especially against Trump apostates.
The death threats aren’t just directed at politicians in Washington. Data has shown extraordinary levels of threats against mayors, federal judges, election administrators,public health officials, and even school board members. It’s hard to know how large the increase is for many of these local positions because no one has been keeping records for all that long. In the past, there was simply no need.
“It’s not even accurate to say [threatening election workers] was rare prior to 2020. It was so rare as to be virtually nonexistent,” David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, told me in 2021. “This is beyond anything that we’ve ever seen.”
Vox, Ibid.
Vox could have included the personal accounts of threats and intimidate from Rusty Bowers, Paul Boyer, Maricopa Supervisors Bill Gates and Clint Hickman, Senator Jeff Flake and countless others right here in Arizona as examples, too. They all have experienced the manifestly violent and uncivil methods by which Trump’s movement has imposed discipline on the Republican Party both during Trump’s Presidency and following his defeat in 2020. Threats are intimidation are not just used against party officials, elected government officials, and civil service employees, but also at their families, including children.
The Republican Party embraced the viper that is the MAGA movement to its bosom in hopes of exploiting it’s venom to grab and maintain power: now they have learned that the viper is as apt to bite them as anyone else – maybe even more likely, since they are the ones handling it: a single mistake can prove deadly. The only way to be free is to let go, but, of course, that’s the moment of greatest danger when. handling a viper.
I truly feel sorry for those Republicans who find themselves now at the mercy of a violent extremist movement, but there are many who should have known better and many more who have left a party they no longer recognize. The only way out is for Republicans to call out for help in destroying the snake to your fellow Americans – you must acknowledge the very real danger the MAGA movement poses to us all, and to our democracy.
