Arizona Republican Party asks if Trump supporters willing to die for reelection fight

The party has used violent rhetoric about the election before

The Arizona Republican Party on Monday asked its supporters if they would be willing to die in their quixotic fight to get president Trump reelected after his loss to president Joe Biden, the latest in the party’s increasingly frenzied statements around a contest they lost weeks ago.

The comments came in response to a tweet on Monday from Ali Alexander, a national organizer for Stop the Steal, a group which organized mass demonstrations protesting the election results around the country.

“I am willing to give my life for this fight,” Mr Alexander said.

The Arizona GOP responded, “He is. Are you?

The life-or-death rhetoric comes even as Arizona’s top state officials, including its Republican attorney general Mark Brnovich, have said there was no evidence of meaningful election irregularities. They join officials across the country, where the Trump campaign hasn’t proven anywhere voting issues cost them the election.

Arizona courts have also repeatedly rejected the Arizona GOP’s and Trump campaign’s lawsuits alleging voter fraud and asking for an audit of the state’s election.

The state’s Republican governor and attorney general certified the election results on 30 November for president elect Biden, who won by more than 10,000 votes, the first Democrat to pick up Arizona in the presidential race since 1996.

In response to these losses, the Arizona GOP has taken on a feverish, oftentimes violent tone around what’s happening with what it called a “false election.”

The same night it asked if supporters would die for the president’s campaign, it quoted Founding Father Benjamin Franklin, tweeting, “We must all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”

It also retweeted Arizona GOP congressman Paul Gosar, when he called the election a “coup d’état.”

Violent rhetoric around the election has been a feature of the Trump campaign for weeks, and has produced violent results.

Chris Krebs, the Republican former head of the federal cybersecurity agency, filed a lawsuit on Tuesday saying he got death threats and had to leave his home after one of the president’s lawyers, Joseph DiGenova, said on live TV that “he should be drawn and quartered" and “taken out at dawn and shot.”

After the election, authorities also closed a vote counting facility in Arizona’s Maricopa County, home to Phoenix, to the public and media after a large group of Trump supporters, many of them armed, rallied around the building and chanted the election had been stolen. 

Before election day, the Trump campaign also called for an “army” of volunteer poll watchers to monitor the count, worrying voting rights advocate who thought they might make people nervous to vote.