Trump’s political godfather
Joe Arpaio, America’s most controversial sheriff, talks to ‘Off Message’ about what he taught Donald Trump about politics.
.. They share a boot-on-throat rhetorical style, a focus on kicking out illegal immigrants and kicking the ass of America’s enemies, and both love bashing the whiny “political correctness” of minority groups. Arpaio hit on the formula first — adding a Korean War veteran’s fondness for accumulating .50-caliber machine guns and other military ordnance — but he is too media-smart to walk into the trap I set by suggesting Trump is stealing his shtick.
.. In Arpaio’s view, controversy is a useful tool, a way of elevating the causes he cares about (guns, law and order, immigration, the epidemic of wimp-ism), but it’s also not just a means but an end, the only way to grab the attention of a national media and political establishment that would otherwise ignore him. “I’m controversial,” he added with a shrug. “You wouldn’t be here talking to me if I was a nothing, I don’t think.”
.. In 2013, the county board of supervisors paid $3.75 million to a pair of New Times editors who said they were falsely imprisoned after writing about the sheriff’s real estate transactions.
.. the mob had its own ethics too. … They will never kill a child or a cop, OK?
.. Arpaio pushed the idea — thus far alien to law enforcement officials probing the muddled motives of the shooter — that Omar Mateen may have gunned down 49 people in an anti-Latino frenzy.
..Joe Arpaio is literally a poor man’s Donald Trump — same approach, different bank account
.. Arpaio, even his enemies concede, is an engaging guy with an intuitive sense of seizing the moment — and he thinks Trump, responding to a stagnant economy and a widespread sense that the immigration problem is out of control — has the same knack. “Timing is perfect right now for a guy like him,” he told me. “Timing is everything, and he hit on the right timing.”
.. But local analysts noted a telling shift — support had slipped among educated whites who had previously backed him but were now turned off by his stridency and age.
.. “When they can’t get you for anything else, it’s a famous word, ‘racist,’” he said. “Do you think it bothers me? It doesn’t really bother me. I know in my heart what I am, so they can call me anything they want. … [I’m] probably one guy that really doesn’t [discriminate], you know, and I’m not going to say my best friend is black. … No, no, no. And even in my family, I have a black and I have Mexican. I got all these family — but I’m not going to say that. I guess you could still have that and say you’re a racist, you know, but no. I know what I am. Come on.”