Conservative activists in Arizona have long supplied Mr. Trump with the energy and ideas that formed the foundation of his political movement. In 2011, when the real estate developer and reality television star was testing the waters for a possible presidential campaign, his interest in the conspiracy theories that claimed former President Barack Obama’s birth certificate was a forgery led him to Arizona Tea Party activists and a state legislator. They were pushing for a state law to require that political candidates produce their birth certificates before qualifying for the ballot. Mr. Trump invited them to Trump Tower.
His attacks on undocumented immigrants helped endear him to Arizona voters who had long supported politicians who vowed to crack down on illegal immigration. And a stretch of the Arizona border with Mexico became home to part of Mr. Trump’s unfinished, signature wall.
More recently, because of Mr. Finchem and other pro-Trump politicians, Arizona has been a hotbed of distortions about what happened in the 2020 election. Allies of the former president demanded an audit in the state’s largest county, insisting that the official outcome had been compromised by fraud. But when the results of the review were released — in a report both commissioned and produced by Trump supporters — it ended up showing that he actually received 261 fewer votes than first thought.
Still, the myth lives on. And those who question it quickly become targets of the former president and his allies. They have attacked two prominent Arizona Republicans — Gov. Doug Ducey and State Attorney General Mark Brnovich for their roles in Arizona’s formal certification of its election results.
Mr. Trump issued a statement on Friday, insisting that if Mr. Ducey decided to run for the United States Senate seat occupied by Mark Kelly, a Democrat, the governor would “never have my endorsement or the support of MAGA Nation!”
Mr. Brnovich is running in that Senate primary, and a Republican political group supporting one of his opponents recently ran an ad accusing the attorney general of “making excuses instead of standing with our president” over the 2020 election.