It was on this date in 2018, as well as 2019, that “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” first profiled Arizona Governor Doug Ducey, who has been in office now since 2014, who has at least lowered the bar for insane and racist Arizona Governors was already set pretty high by his predecessor, Jan Brewer. Ducey’s career prior to running for office was that he was the CEO of Cold Stone Creamery, the ice cream parlor chain, resigning from that spot in 2007 and then winning office in 2010 as Arizona State Treasurer. Our delay in profiling Ducey for the past year or two came to a quick end due to the above photo, where Gov. Ducey was posing with members of a supposed “Patriot Movement AZ” that’s a white nationalist group, and there’s not just members of the MAGA crowd, but they’re throwing up white supremacist hand gestures for the photo. What makes it even worse was the timing… While Gov. Ducey was meeting with these fringe hatemongers, he was simultaneously refusing to meet with education leaders during Arizona’s #RedforEd teacher’s strike. You kind of get the sense that his priorities are skewed, you know?
That isn’t a one-off, either. As Ducey also spoke before Turning Point USA, another racist and anti-Semitic conservative group in August of 2018, and he answered to criticism over it by claiming that “he didn’t know” they were as bad as they are. How racist is Doug Ducey? He came out strong to oppose removing Confederate monuments in Arizona, even though the Confederacy pre-dated his state’s existence by a few decades. He chose to put this statement out within a week of the murder of Heather Heyer and 20 others being injured in a terror attack in Charlottesville, Virginia, carried out by white supremacists and Neo-Nazis.
This guy is out of touch with the interests of actual people. While there were literally school students camping out right outside Ducey’s office to protest gun violence in schools after the Parkland Shooting back in March of 2018, he was too busy posting on Twitter about free agent players leaving the Arizona Cardinals.
He’s also extreme enough on anti-choice legislation that he signed a law that would require physicians performing abortions in Arizona to attempt to resuscitate any fetus that survives the procedure… which would be amazing because fetuses are physically incapable of surviving outside the womb by definition. Their qualification of if the attempt needs to be made? If the fetus has a heartbeat. That would mean ANY abortion performed at six weeks or beyond… whether or not the fetus has developed other organs to survive. It’s… frankly mad science (and likely to be overturned by the courts).
At this point, you start to get the feeling that Ducey is some kind of spectacular ***hole. That’s probably why he and Donald Trump are fans of one another. Ducey actually praised Trump’s pardon of former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, (yes THAT Joe Arpaio) and in 2018, when Trump demanded the governors of several states deploy the National Guard to the U.S./Mexico border for what amounted to an expensive photo-op to commemorate Trump’s bigotry, Doug Ducey was more than happy to humor the idea and join in the racism. Hell, even without any influence by Trump, Ducey Tried blocking the resettlement of refugees into Arizona in 2018, and has been more than willing to sign whatever anti-immigrant legislation that crosses his desk.
Sadly, it’s on anti-immigrant stupidity that Doug Ducey has almost exclusively campaigned on in 2018, as he runs against Democratic challenger David Garcia. As you might expect from an Arizona Republican running against a Hispanic challenger, Ducey’s campaign ads are a hot bed of race-baiting, and primarily attack Garcia as supposedly wanting “open borders”, and doing everything he can to appeal to aggrieved white xenophobes as much as possible. That led to Ducey coasting to re-election by a 15-point margin in 2018, and now the only thing that was going to see him removed from office is if he follows the trend of Arizona Governors who get impeached through the years. He almost seems like he wants that to be obliged.
In July of 2019, a lot of Republicans were bent out of shape about the relationship between Nike and Colin Kaepernick, who made the great offense of kneeling during the National Anthem to protest police violence, as the First Amendment allows him to do. Well, Nike had announced that it would pull shoes from the market that were Betsy Ross themed around the 4th of July, and the conservative media continued the feud, frothing at the mouth about Nike boycotts. One of the loudest critics was, Doug Ducey, who as part of a day long Twitter thread about it, was threatening to pull financial incentives towards Nike for creating jobs in Arizona. And then, two days later, the Arizona Republic photographed Doug Ducey at a charity event… WEARING NIKE SHOES.
But it has been Doug Ducey’s complete mishandling of the Covid-19 crisis in Arizona that’s truly sent public opinion against him, as he’s been more focused on what the pandemic might do to the economy than what it was literally doing to kill people. His non-existent response to the crisis included press conferences where he made transparent attempts at manipulating scientific data from public health agencies to lie and claim infection rates were slowing when the were drastically going up. Arizona’s high percentage of retirees headed to warmer climates means proportionately it had a LOT of high-risk people… was so inept that eventually he was pressured by some of the mayors of Arizona’s largest cities to at least have their own mask mandates. The cities that executed them of course, saw their curves begin to flatten over the summer. Ducey, however, rolled over like a timid terrier whenever Donald Trump weighed in, whether it was to come to campaign events in the Grand Canyon State, or just pressure about responding to the crisis in general. When, y’know, when he wasn’t attending pool parties without a mask and getting called out on it by constituents on Twitter and acting like he was the victim of a “smear attack” when he was caught.
And as the bodies have piled up in Arizona… the legacy of the Ducey administration looks to be his inept leadership and thousands who died because he couldn’t be bothered to stop being a capitalist for a second and give a f*** about public safety. Mercifully, his tenure comes to an end in 2022, thanks to term limits.
One Year Ago, October 18th, 2019: Doug Ducey (AZ)… 2019 Update
Two Years Ago, October 18th, 2018: Doug Ducey (AZ)… Original Profile
Three Years Ago, October 18th, 2017: Rick Perry (TX)… 2017 Update
Four Years Ago, October 18th, 2016: Rick Perry (TX)… 2016 Update
Five Years Ago, October 18th, 2015: Rick Perry (TX)… 2015 Update
Six Years Ago, October 18th, 2014: Rick Perry (TX)… Original Profile