Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers said he will never vote for Donald Trump again, a reversal from last month when he told a reporter he would support the former president if he runs again in 2024.
Bowers testified before the Jan. 6 committee in June about the pressure campaign from Trump and his allies to overturn the results of the presidential election in the state. He was criticized after the testimony when he said he would still support Trump in 2024 if he’s the nominee for the Republican Party.
In an interview with ABC News on Sunday, he walked that back saying he will never vote for Trump again.
“I’ll never vote for [Trump],” Bowers said. “But I won’t have to. Because I think America’s tired and there’s some absolutely forceful, qualified, morally defensible and upright people, and that’s what I want. That’s what I want in my party and that’s what I want to see.”
Asked about his thoughts on Trump’s influence on GOP leaders in Arizona, Bowers said: “Those leaders in Arizona are an interesting group in and of themselves. They rule by thuggery and intimidation. So, you know, they found a niche, they found a way and it’s fear. And people can use fear, demagogues like to use fears as a weapon. And they weaponize everything. That’s not leadership to me to use thuggery.”
The Arizona Republican Party censured Bowers earlier this month and he has been attacked by Trump for appearing before the Jan. 6 committee.
“Rusty Bowers, he’s a RINO [‘Republican in name only’] coward who participated against the Republican Party in the totally partisan unselect committee of political thugs and hacks the other day, and disgraced himself, and he disgraced the state of Arizona,” Trump said at a rally in Prescott, Arizona last week, according to ABC News.
Bowers is term-limited in the state house and is running for Arizona’s state Senate this year against David Farnsworth, whom Trump has endorsed. Bowers said it would take a “miracle” to win the GOP primary because the base is heavily pro-Trump.
Bowers said on Sunday that Trump should never be trusted to return to power again.
“I certainly don’t trust that authority that he would exercise,” he told ABC.
