By DEXTER DUGGAN
SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — Donald Trump needs a “flotilla” of help to keep breaking through the ice that locked up Washington, former White House deputy assistant Sebastian Gorka told a few reporters here before he spoke up at a rally for conservative Arizona Republican Kelli Ward, who’s running to replace Never-Trumper Jeff Flake in the U.S. Senate.
Gorka said he has chosen to support only candidates who understood “the powerful political revolution” of 2016, when non-politician Trump was elected president.
More than 120 Ward supporters, gathered at a hotel in this Phoenix suburb on March 29, later heard her cite the importance of “border security and illegal immigration” among her issues. Audience members responded by chanting, “Build that wall.”
Ward, a family physician, said a wall is “an imperative symbol” of “letting people come here the right way.” She’d seen “four tiny, thin strands of barbed wire” as the only border protection in one area, Ward said.
Shortly after this event on Holy Thursday, news broke of an Easter-weekend invasion force of more than 1,200 Central Americans heading through Mexico to breach their way into the United States — the latest of unending waves of defiant illegal aliens seeking entry.
Some reportedly claimed to be seeking asylum, but the only country they deemed suitable for their escape was the welfare state of the U.S.
When Gorka and Ward came out to talk with media representatives before the evening rally, The Wanderer got the first question.
This newspaper asked Gorka how Ward had come to his attention, and why he supported her.
The former White House adviser said, “Kelli Ward is exactly that sort of candidate” who understood the Trump revolution.
Gorka said he thought he had met Ward a few years ago at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference. “She was in the right place at the right time.”
Citing the $1.3 trillion omnibus spending bill — which Trump said he was forced to sign on March 23 — Gorka said Ward’s help is needed in the Senate to deal with the problems.
Describing the upcoming midterm elections as “massively important,” Gorka said Trump in 2016 was “an icebreaker” plowing through an environment “frozen over” by political correctness.
“It’s just insane” what had been occurring, he said, including government orders on what bathrooms people could use.
However, Gorka said, an icebreaker only opens the way through the ice, which immediately starts to reknit itself behind that ship unless political reinforcements follow. “We need that flotilla to come up behind the president.”
The border wall should be seen as a national security issue, Gorka told the media representatives, adding that six members of the violent Latino MS-13 gang had just been criminally charged in distant Maryland, of whom five were illegal aliens.
Before Ward began to address the rally shortly after 7 p.m., a warm-up speaker brought boos from the crowd when he mentioned the omnibus bill spending “$500 million for Planned Parenthood.”
“It all starts right here” to elect the right candidate, he said. A mention of Flake’s name brought more boos.
Arizona’s late-August GOP primary to replace the unpopular Flake — who declined to run for a second Senate term but keeps attacking Trump — also includes establishment-oriented Tucson-area Cong. Martha McSally and former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio. The winner is likely to face left-wing Democrat Cong. Kyrsten Sinema in November.
Ward told the crowd that as a physician, she’s “a trained problem-solver,” someone who can break down complicated problems into manageable pieces.
She said she decided to get into politics as an Arizona state senator because she wanted to do something “when Obamacare reared its ugly head.” More boos from the crowd at this reference to former President Barack Obama’s federalized medical program.
Although she was warned “It’s not my turn” to be a state legislator in 2012, Ward said, “I was very, very effective” once there, with 19 bills she backed being signed into law in her last year, before she resigned in December 2015 to focus on running against incumbent Sen. John McCain in the GOP primary for the 2016 election.
She lost by about 12 points to McCain, but soon announced her campaign against the other Republican Senate incumbent, Flake, up for re-election in 2018. However, in October 2017, a week after radio host Laura Ingraham and former White House strategist Steve Bannon joined Ward for a rally in Scottsdale, Flake abruptly dropped out of that race.
Simply building a border wall isn’t sufficient, Ward told the March 29 rally, because hundreds of border agents are in Tucson — about an hour’s drive north of the border-straddling city of Nogales — but they’re needed right on the border.
Also, Ward said, she doesn’t want the agents being “the welcome wagon” and handing out bus tickets to travel anywhere in the U.S. for the illegal crossers.
Drawing cheers when she said, “The status quo has got to go,” Ward soon noted that her GOP foe McSally was selected by Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and likely Democrat foe Sinema was picked by Democratic Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer.
However, Ward said she thinks Arizonans are perfectly capable of selecting their own U.S. senator.
Gorka, coming on stage after Ward had spoken for about 23 minutes, picked up her theme of border agents being kept away from the border.
Ward “is a woman who gets things done, just like somebody else I know,” Gorka said, alluding to Trump.
“. . . I want to talk to you about my old boss. . . . This woman is exactly the same in love of country and wanting to get things done,” Gorka said.
The “Make America Great Again” slogan isn’t about Trump, he said, but about “your children’s future.” Thanks to the presidential victory of “this rank outsider” Trump, America was prevented from going over the cliff, Gorka said.
If novelist Tom Clancy had written a book 20 years ago favoring repeal of the Second Amendment to the Constitution that protects firearms possession, that would have sounded unbelievable, Gorka said, but former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens had just advocated that very repeal.
“We just have to push back,” Gorka said. “. . . We’ve had Americans dying in faraway lands to protect these freedoms” guaranteed by the Founders.
Ward told the crowd that when she grew up in West Virginia, all her family were Democrats, and the Democratic Party helped working people. But the Democrats have left the working class behind, she said, and people responded by leaving the Democrats.
Concluding his remarks, Gorka said, “You must not give up, never, ever give up,” because the stakes are too important. “. . . We must never be cowed and never give up.”
McSally’s Masquerade
A vivid illustration of the clout that the Arizona establishment has to fight against Ward and support McSally was published in the March 25 Arizona Republic, the state’s largest daily and establishment voice.
The entire top half of that issue’s broadsheet-size editorial page boldly featured an editorial signed by the newspaper’s editorial board that defended the “moderate” politicians it favors when they intentionally mislead voters on border issues in order to defeat conservatives.
The editorial was headlined, “In primary, McSally pulls a McCain.” That meant McSally is falsely talking tough to win now, just as McCain did.
In McCain’s famous 2010 commercial growling to “complete the danged fence,” the senator simply “was outflanking a razor-sharp fanatic named J.D. Hayworth,” the Republic grinned now.
Hayworth was a conservative former GOP congressman who strongly opposed McCain’s and the Republic’s chaotic porous-borders policies — policies that even today have illegal invasion forces marching through Mexico to demand entry here.
Beneath a photo of McSally that accompanied the March 25 editorial, the Republic indulgently said McSally’s tough talk “was simply a political calculation.”
The Republic editorial said that “in primary season in Arizona, the battles are fought in the lowlands of the extreme right. In the past, that has meant moderates like John McCain and Jeff Flake have masqueraded as hard-liners on immigration. . . .
“Now it’s McSally’s turn” to masquerade, the Republic said, even though she “is your fairly standard establishment Republican. . . .”
The front page of last week’s hardcopy Wanderer, dated for April 5, reported on this editorial.
The Wanderer asked Ward media spokesman Zach Henry on March 29 about the Republic saying that deception regarding border issues is acceptable to defeat conservatives. “I really have no comment on that,” Henry replied. “. . . . If that’s what they were insinuating, that’s really disappointing.”
Finally, even The Wanderer received a little “fake news” publicity following the Gorka-Ward rally.
The alternative weekly Phoenix New Times posted an item by a staff writer who was described as an honors graduate of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism — who seemingly wasted some if not all of her time trying to learn skills at that prestigious school.
Reporting on the rally, she included reference to the press table, calling The Wanderer “an obscure Catholic newspaper.” She couldn’t even correctly describe the notebook I used, although she had been almost as close to it as to her own fingers.
I had my customary light green steno pad of six by nine inches, although she claimed it was “a legal pad” — which is commonly understood to mean about 8 and one-half by 14 inches, usually large, clumsy yellow sheets. That strikes me as a cumbersome method for trying to take notes at news events.
Fake news indeed.
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