Arizona's Rusty Bowers Comes Out Against A 2024 Trump Bid

Rusty Bowers, the Republican Arizona House speaker who testified before the Jan. 6 select committee about Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election defeat in the state, said he would never again vote for the former president.

“My vote will never tarnish his name on a ballot,” Bowers, a lifelong Republican, said on ABC’s “This Week” in a pretaped interview that aired Sunday.

“I’ll never vote for him. 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,” Bowers continued.

Trump for months has hinted he’ll run in 2024. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has predicted the GOP will have a “crowded field” of presidential candidates.

Despite his damning testimony to the House Jan. 6 committee, Bowers until now remained among Republicans who would not fully break from Trump.

“I don’t want the choice of having to look at [Trump] again,” he told Deseret News in July. “And if it comes, I’ll be hard pressed. I don’t know what I’ll do. But I’m not inclined to support him.”

In June, Bowers told The Associated Press he would still support Trump if he was the GOP nominee.

“Simply because what he did the first time, before COVID, was so good for the county,” Bowers explained. “In my view it was great.”

Just hours earlier, Bowers told the Jan. 6 panel of the intense pressure on him as Trump and lawyer Rudy Giuliani pressed to invalidate the state’s election results. Bowers said the pair never produced any substantial evidence to back up their election fraud claims.

“There was no ― no evidence being presented of any strength ... anything that would say to me, ‘You have a doubt. Deny your oath.’ I will not do that,” Bowers told the panel.

“And so for me to do that, because somebody just asked me to, is foreign to my very being,” Bowers continued. “I will not do it.”

The Arizona Republican has since been censured by his own party. He faces a tough primary challenge by Trump-backed former state Sen. David Farnsworth in his bid to join the state Senate after being term-limited in the state House.

“If I pull this off, it’s going to be a miracle,” Bowers told NBC News last month.

Trump has campaigned for Farnsworth, unusual in a state race, calling Bowers a “RINO,” or Republican in name only.

“Rusty Bowers is a ‘RINO’ 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 told fans at a rally in the state on July 22.

Bowers told ABC News he now recognizes why some GOP leaders still support Trump.

“They rule by thuggery and intimidation,” Bowers told Karl. “They found a niche, they found a way, and it’s fear and people can use fear, demagogues like to use fear as a weapon, and they weaponize everything and we all know it.”

This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.

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