Tuesday evening, a block from the Phoenix Convention Center, behind a wall of heaving protesters, stood seven people—six men and one woman—clad in camouflage battle fatigues and red bandanas, carrying semiautomatic weapons. They were local members of the John Brown Gun Club, a local branch of a nationwide group called the Redneck Revolt. “Whose side are you on?” a woman asked them, from a safe distance. “We are an anti-fascist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist community defense organization,” one of the group answered. He added they oppose Donald Trump and prefer not to be called a militia. Next question: What about the guns? Another Club member, red-bearded and wearing hollowed-out ear studs, explained: “It’s a way to empower people who feel marginalized.” There was an AR-15 rifle strapped to his chest and a .45-caliber pistol in his holster. He told me his name is “Irish.” “The less information the fascists have on us, the better.”

Welcome to Arizona, where paranoia runs deep and even the lefties tote guns. Aside from one voluble anti-Islam troll, the swollen crowd of demonstrators gathered downtown was almost entirely opposed to the president. And many of them seemed to expect a clash. Ninja-looking antifa guys toyed restlessly with their unfurled black flags, while thousands of sign-toting protesters stood across the street from the Convention Center, jeering the many more people in line to hear the president speak. A Phoenix cop with the department’s Community Response Squad, one of scores of police who had been deployed, stood and smirked while a hostile videographer called him an “asshat” and told him, for no obvious reason, to go f--- himself. The rally stayed peaceful—for a while, at least—but a charge of tension hung in the arid, 108-degree air.


It had been tense here for most of the past week. Ten days ago, a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, culminated in deadly violence when an apparent neo-Nazi sympathizer rammed his car into a crowd of counterprotesters. In the days that followed, the president stunningly equivocated, laying blame both on armed hate groups and those who demonstrated against them. Trump, whose remarks were almost universally condemned, decided to double down, and one of the most damaging controversies of his still young presidency was born. Rather than retreat to the TV room of his New Jersey golf club and finish his summer vacation in relative quiet, Trump announced he would be staging a way-too-early 2020 campaign rally. And he wouldn’t be staging it just anywhere.

The rally, like no political event in recent memory, seemed like a reckless and self-serving act that threatened to ignite an already combustible political environment. In late July, former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio—the Trump ally and immigration hard-liner—was found guilty in federal court of criminal contempt. The judgment emboldened Arpaio’s opponents and galvanized his fiercest defenders, among them the state’s many self-styled border militias. Meanwhile, Arizona’s two Republican senators have emerged as two of the president’s most vocal Republican critics; John McCain single-handedly felled the president’s health care legislation, while Jeff Flake wrote a book that tarred his own party for abetting behavior by Trump that should have drawn its censure.

In the days leading up to Trump’s rally, the city really seemed to await the president’s appearance in a state of pregnant dread. I spent a few days prior to Trump’s arrival taking the temperature of the place. I chowed with a motorcycle gang, I interviewed politicians, and I shot the breeze with one of Joe Arpaio’s lawyers. The prevailing sentiment, even among the president’s fans, was: ugh. Phoenix’s Democratic mayor, Doug Stanton, urged the president to delay his rally, later adding at a grim news conference that Tuesday would be “be a difficult and trying time” for the city. Trump didn’t respond, even as fears of violent confrontation rose with rumors that close to 40 anti-Trump groups—from immigrant rights stalwart Puente to the trollish Cosplayers Against Trump—would attend the rally. In turn, pro-Trump “peacekeeping” organizations pledged to exercise their right to bear arms. And no one really knew what the secretive antifa were planning, just that they would be there. “The only place he could have gone that would have been worse,” says Deedra Abboud, a Democratic challenger to Senator Jeff Flake, “would have been Charlottesville.”

Then, as if nerves weren’t already raw enough, Trump suggested he might pardon Arpaio and endorse Flake’s opponent, a fringe candidate named Kelli Ward. Though he declined to issue the pardon on Tuesday, he hinted it was coming later, explaining, “I won’t do it tonight because I don’t want to cause any controversy. But Sheriff Joe should feel good.” And while he didn’t reiterate his support for Ward, his delighted tweet about her candidacy was all but an official imprimatur. The speech itself was everything his campaign rallies had become known for, except this one was delivered as president. Trump spent much of his address complaining about the media, mocking the size of the crowd protesting outside, relitigating his response to the Charlottesville debacle and even vowing to shut down the government if necessary to pay for a border wall.

A man gestures toward police, asking them to shoot him, during a contentious standoff following a Trump rally Tuesday in Phoenix. | M. Scott Mahaskey/POLITICO

Just minutes after the speech ended, as if in an act of emotional release, the uneasy calm that had prevailed beforehand gave way. Police, apparently provoked by protesters, retaliated with tear gas. Sickly yellow plumes wafted over the city’s downtown, as a wall of cops in riot gear slowly advanced on a thinning crowd of a couple hundred.

Perhaps none of this was surprising. Trump’s unhelpful speech, to say nothing of his mere presence in Arizona, suggest the president has embraced, as he did in 2016, a political strategy of willful, planned chaos.



***

Donald Trump’s first campaign stop in Arizona occurred in July 2015. A month earlier, announcing his candidacy, he had painted a grotesque picture, accusing Mexicans of wantonly leaping the border to commit rape and crime. In Phoenix, the same subtext was at work. Arpaio appeared onstage to introduce Trump, after which Trump introduced a man whose son had been killed by an undocumented immigrant. “The silent majority is back, and we’re going to take our country back,” Trump promised, in closing. Several times during his primary campaign, he returned to friendly territory in Arizona. The crowds were always large, and the aftermath was often ugly. In March 2016, a protester at a rally in Tucson was kicked and punched as he was escorted out. Same deal in September 2016, at a rally in Prescott.

Immigration scaremongering wasn’t always an Arizona political tradition. Arpaio was sheriff in 2005, when a border vigilante named Patrick Haab rounded up a truckload of undocumented immigrants at gunpoint. Arpaio at the time was better known as an animal rights crusader than an immigration hawk, and he denounced Haab’s freelancing. “Being illegal is not a serious crime,” he said. “You can't go to jail for being an illegal alien.” Meanwhile, County Attorney Andy Thomas sensed a political opportunity and rallied around Haab, to great success. “Sheriff Joe saw how Thomas got the better press,” one of Arpaio’s lawyers, Jack Wilenchik, told me. “Up until then, it wasn’t his thing.”

As Arpaio transformed the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Department into an immigration enforcement vehicle, the state legislature underwent a similar metamorphosis. In 2010, the state passed the country’s most draconian immigration law, SB 1070, which mandated that police officers check the immigration status of a criminal detainee, if there was reasonable suspicion they had entered the country illegally. The debate surrounding the issue—which dominated Arizona politics for several years—spawned a coarser, edgier brand of activist culture. On the right, the infamous Minutemen took it upon themselves to trawl the border for illegal crossings; when that group dissolved, a number of other paramilitary groups were there to take their place, including the Oath Keepers, Arizona Border Recon, and Arizona Border Defenders.

On the left, a change begin to take place, too. During a massive anti-SB 1070 protest in 2010, says Sal Reza, a veteran Phoenix organizer, he noticed a number of black-clad anarchists who might today be identified as “Antifa,” or anti-fascist, groups. “These guys came in with bottles full of stones; then they would throw it at the police, then hide in between us,” Reza told me. Groups of varying degrees of credibility began to surface, many of them counterpunching against perceived racial threats and discrimination. Earlier this year, the John Brown Gun Club gained visibility for its members' stone-faced appearances at a “Make America Great Again” rally and an anti-Islam demonstration. They named themselves after the violent anti-slavery insurrectionist of the 1850s, and, as their namesake was, they are heavily armed. Last spring, a reporter asked the group’s leader Beth Payne, a veteran of local anarchist group Carpe Locus, if JBGC’s 47s were real. “They do make AirSoft guns that look like real guns,” she said. “But it seems like a stupid way to get shot by a cop, waving a gun that’s a toy.” So, yes.

The obvious backdrop to all this was race. The state’s Hispanic population has tripled since 1990. And the state’s politics are beginning to shift accordingly, from red to blue. In 2016, Arpaio was ousted from office by a Democratic challenger. Ditto the longtime Republican county recorder, Helen Purcell. Wilenchik says he senses certain white Arizonans feel the state slipping from them. Recently a woman called him with an unusual request for representation: She wanted to sue Walmart because an operator had answered the phone in Spanish. “Honestly, every time I see someone put out the statistics that by 2050, whites will be a minority, I cringe,” says Deedra Abboud. “I think that’s a big problem that people have in a place like Arizona,” she added, fearing a backlash.

Protesters gather outside President Donald Trump's Phoenix rally Tuesday night. | M. Scott Mahaskey/POLITICO

It hardly seems accidental that Trump’s first trip to Arizona as president is taking place during a moment of intense racial discord. With cultural and political resentment already simmering in Arizona, Trump’s arrival seemed all but guaranteed to bring it to a boil.



***

Arizona achieved statehood nearly 50 years after the conclusion of the Civil War. This being a nostalgic country, there are nonetheless three Confederate monuments in the greater Phoenix area. Naturally, two of them were defaced last week. One, off a dusty junction 35 miles east of the city, was erected by the Daughters of the Confederacy in honor of Jefferson Davis. It was literally tarred and feathered. The other, at the state Capitol in Phoenix, commemorates Confederate troops. It was splattered with paint.

Those monuments, which went blissfully ignored for decades prior to the post-Charlottesville backlash against Dixie iconography, pointed to an unusually fraught environment. Wherever I visited in the run-up to Trump’s rally, I encountered surprising manifestations of pre-presidential anxiety. One evening, I drove to an Elks Club lodge in Tempe, east of Phoenix. Riders USA, a pro-Trump biker gang, was holding its monthly meeting. The group’s public face and spiritual leader is a bear of a dude named Jim Williams; a photo of him flexing with a “Bikers for Trump” sign made the rounds last year. On the agenda, of course, was the rally, for which they would be providing “security” for Trump fans feeling threatened by radical leftists and the like.

There was, however, none of the expected giddiness at the prospect of such juicy confrontations. “Bottom line, what we’re doing tomorrow is keeping the peace,” the group’s president, Kirtis Baxter, a general contractor in his daytime hours. “Be more like Boston, less like Charlottesville,” he said, referring to the peaceful march that took place last weekend. Big Jim chimed in: “We don’t want to give them a reason to say, look at all these hatemongers, looking to stir up trouble.” At one point, a member floated the idea of bringing a political sign. One suggestion: The group was feeling betrayed that Trump hadn’t yet eliminated the Deferred Action for Child Arrivals program—the Obama policy that defers the deportation of undocumented children—and wanted to remind him of it. The idea, though, was quickly shut down. “We need to be focusing solely on making sure that nobody is assaulted,” said one rider. “Everything else would be a diversion.”

A different, subtler fear was at play too. Post-Charlottesville, with the image of torch-brandishing bigots fresh in the national consciousness, Baxter was attuned to the possibility that his band of men and women would get lumped in with the white nationalist crowd. “The neo-Nazis, the extreme right, the skinheads—the antifa of the right, to say the least—has been embolded by Charlottesville,” he said. “The last thing we need is our pictures taken with one of these guys.”

To everyone but the president of the United States, apparently, the toxicity of such an association would be political suicide. I met a group of Trump supporters one afternoon at a Panera Bread downtown. One of them had been affiliated with the Proud Boys, a kind of semi-ironic white nationalist fraternity. Another was an anti-Sharia activist. When we met, though, they insisted at first on speaking only on behalf of their 501(c)(3), the United Liberty Coalition, and billed themselves blandly as “constitutional conservatives.” Likewise, when I got in touch with a member of several local "alt-right"-affiliated groups—the Based Stickmen, and the Fraternal Order of the Alt-Knights—he chalked up the movement’s reputation for racism and misogyny to bad apples.

And then there are those who felt personally endangered by the possibility of a Trump-related conflagration. A few hours after the Panera summit, I planned to attend a campaign event for Abboud, Flake’s Democratic challenger. I realized too late that she hadn’t publicized the address. The next day, at Abboud’s campaign headquarters, which was unmarked by political signage, she told me why. In May, Abboud held an event at a local vegan café, which was promptly protested by … the Based Stickmen and the Fraternal Order of the Alt-Knights. On the day of the rally, Abboud decided to stage a counterprotest a full mile away from the convention center. “I’m very symbolic, you know what I mean? I’m colorful, I’m wearing the scarf,” she said, referring to the hijab. “I don’t want to be another variable that could set somebody off.”

***

Phoenix’s worst fears of partisan or racial violence didn’t ultimately materialize. The city shrewdly blocked off the thoroughfares between the convention center and the areas in which protesters congregated. The sheer labor required to cross the street acted as a deterrent. And even then, there wasn’t much kindling to set off a Charlottesville-like street brawl. There were no white supremacists or neo-Nazis in evidence. Aside from the odd anarcho-communist gun club, there were barely any armed groups either—and that’s in a proudly open-carry state.

When the confrontation ultimately came, it was hard to understand exactly what had triggered it. Around 8:40 p.m., after the conclusion of Trump’s speech, a sizable contingent of Phoenix police clustered near the Convention Center began rolling canisters of tear gas and firing pepper balls at stunned, mostly passive crowd members. The police said they were responding to rocks and bottles thrown at them. I didn’t see it, but a POLITICO photographer says the standoff began when someone chucked a flaming bottle—homemade tear gas, according to one cop—at the police. Thirty seconds later, the police began advancing on a small fraction of the crowd, some of them members of the media, some of them Trump supporters, who hadn’t yet left the rally. There was no antifa to stoke the conflict, and there were no private “security” forces to quell it. A helicopter circled, warning us to get out of the street. Some who didn’t listen received an eyeful of CS gas. Some who did listen got an eyeful anyway. Davaughn Foster, a student at Arizona State, was limping after he was hit—unprovoked, he says—by pepper balls or rubber bullets. He was miffed, and he yelled back at the police, but like the rest of the crowd, slowly backed away. An hour later, the standoff had concluded.

Trump, during his address, had claimed there weren’t many protesters greeting him in Phoenix. If his aim was to taunt, the taunt worked. There were just enough of them to light a fuse everyone else hoped would stay unlit.

