law as he represents rid. what do we see? we see people dying in jails. just flouting the law at every turn. and this seems the me to reflect donald trump s orientation. i grapple with it. i m trying to figure out. i don t have the answer in terms of how many people somebody like sheriff clark speaks for arpaio. but arpaio last week, when it went out, the media coverage was almost unit versally negative. highlighting these issues, the legal issues, the problems. he managed for a generation of politics in arizona in a county that s more than half the statest won five elections. that style does reach maybe a bigger part of electorate than we acknowledge. for better or worse, i think maybe it does. for worse. not for better.
does that haunt them? maybe this guy knows my party s base better than i do. what i m hearing from a lot of my friends on commeapitol hi. it depends what you represent. if you represent a strong trump county, you are scared to death the president will primary you. that s real. he won those counties by a significant margin. if you are a flake or a susan collins or maybe a pat toomey, maybe not. so maybe you don t fear the president as much. based on the focus groups we heard from, i m from pennsylvania, those are my people. and perhaps maybe a pat toomey and some of the others are listening to those type of trump voters saying, he had us at hello here.
it was two-fold. for people who are embarrassed, that embarrassment level went through the roof. they re going to be much more comfortable. the context of it. a guy who began his presidential campaign talking about muslims, who called on a ban on all muslims coming into the united states, the confidence that charlottesville will mark a breaking point when that s the track record. i was going to tell you. i had the luck of being on a little book tour. around the country sometimes. outside of washington. and what i want to emphasize to you, people really get the word nazi. they really get the word fascist. they really get confederate,
he was a terrible sheriff and i think it was a bad signal to send that he gets pardoned. it s one thing to commute the sentence and say he s 85 years old and he shouldn t go to jail. but to pardon him as if there is no guilt? i wouldn t do that but i guess he can. he s been pretty good at keeping his core base together, but his speech in arizona, which was completely unhinged and crazy, and then the pardoning of arpaio on friday night, they were winks to his base that he s still with them, and he s going to do the things he said he was going to do on the campaign trail, despite the fact that it s divisive and really appalling to most of the country. i think the arpaio brand is actually not a bad brand within the republican base. i think it s like sheriff clark. just certain kind of folk heroes, even going back to joe the plumber, that the republican base connects with. even if it was 85 years old,
sentence, proves that he doesn t care about judges orders, as long as a person who s supposed to be abiding bie ining by the long as they stand next to president donald trump, they re okay. instead of talking about again the resources where people can donate or to volunteer, he has decided that he was going to promote sheriff clark s new book, he decided that it was a great idea to dust off what happened during the 2016 election, he went after this idea that mechanicxico was goin pay for the wall. when texans were under water, a natural disaster, this was not presidential, he was basically saying i know there s national attention on me and i m going to promote what i want to promote. i think you interviewed sheriff joe again last year, he had told nbc news last week that he was open, if he was pardoned, he was open to running for office now.