Trump dominated Arizona’s political scene throughout 2016

Regional News

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Donald Trump loomed over every facet of American politics in 2016, and Arizona was no exception.

As with any presidential primary, prominent Arizona politicos rallied around their preferred candidates, and Arizona gave Trump some of his most prominent early supporters. State Treasurer Jeff DeWit became the first statewide elected official in America to endorse Trump, and later served as chief operating officer for his campaign, switching to a prominent role on his transition team after the election. Former Gov. Jan Brewer threw her support behind Trump in February, becoming one of his most prominent endorsers.

Trump’s candidacy roiled Arizona’s Republican establishment, just as it did in most other states. Even after the real estate mogul dominated Arizona’s presidential preference election by a whopping 18 percentage points in March, some Republicans from the “Never Trump” camp sought to deny him the state’s delegates at the Republican National Convention. The delegate battles that played out in numerous states came to Arizona in April, as rival Ted Cruz’s slate took the majority of the delegates at the Arizona Republican Party’s convention, sparking outrage among Trump’s top surrogates.

Several Republican delegates from Arizona resigned their positions rather than vote for Trump at the national convention in Cleveland. And a handful of other Republicans from the state joined a nationwide effort to wrest the nomination from him, a movement that fizzled out at the convention.

U.S. Sen. John McCain, whose feud with Trump dated back to the earliest days of the presidential campaign in 2015, tepidly supported the Republican nominee. But the 2008 GOP presidential nominee occasionally found cause to publicly rebuke him, as when Trump criticized the parents of a Muslim soldier who’d been killed in Iraq, or when he questioned whether an American-born federal judge’s Mexican heritage should bar him from hearing a lawsuit against his Trump University.