Former sheriff Joe Arpaio is running for Senate in Arizona

Joe Arpaio lost his job as sheriff of Maricopa County, AZ, in the 2016 election — even as the state of Arizona swung by 3.5 points to Donald Trump. But in 2018, Arpaio is back and running for US Senate — hoping that his close association with Trump, and a newly wiped-clean criminal record, are going to help him Make Arizona Great Again.

Arpaio told the Washington Examiner’s David Drucker on Tuesday that he’s running for the seat currently held by Sen. Jeff Flake, a Trump critic who’s retiring. Rep. Martha McSally (R-AZ) is considered the favorite in the GOP primary for Flake’s seat. Meanwhile, conservative challenger Kelli Ward is also looking likely to get in the race. Arpaio could displace Ward as the first choice of the Trumpist wing of the party, and his name recognition, especially among fans of the president, is likely to be extremely high.

Arpaio has Trump to thank for his political second act: In August last year, the president pardoned Arpaio for contempt of court (a charge he was federally convicted of for continuing to engage in aggressive immigration enforcement in defiance of a 2011 court order) before he’d even been sentenced.

Arpaio is still fighting civil suits over his immigration policy, but in the meantime he’s taken the step of formally declaring his candidacy for Senate.

The sheriff’s close relationship with Trump is key to his insurgent cred. In Flake’s announcement of his retirement, he called Trump “dangerous to democracy”; it’s a sentiment fellow Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) has shared.

Part of the reason the Arizona Senate race is becoming so crowded is that McCain is battling brain cancer — raising the possibility that he’ll vacate his seat and create a second opening, and race, in 2018. If that happens, Arpaio might find himself with an opening to become the front-runner in a race to replace his long-time political enemy McCain.

Joe Arpaio helped create the Donald Trump who won the presidency. In 2018, he’s promising — or threatening? — to help bring Trumpism to the Senate.

In the mid- to late-2000s, the federal government began to ramp up immigration enforcement to an unprecedented degree — by relying on cooperation with local law enforcement. And Sheriff Joe Arpaio was the face of local enforcement of federal immigration law.

He called himself “America’s Toughest Sheriff.” He gave celebrity tours of his famous “tent cities” for housing unauthorized immigrants and gifted guests with commemorative pairs of the pink underwear he made inmates wear. He bragged about the results of his “sweeps” — local immigration raids to round up unauthorized immigrants and hand them over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Those sweeps, in particular, raised questions about how exactly Arpaio and his deputies were determining who to apprehend for immigration offenses — in other words, whether they were just racially profiling Latino residents of Maricopa County. In 2007, he was sued for civil-rights violations by a few Latino residents who were stopped by deputies (and sometimes detained for hours) on suspicion of being in the US without papers, apparently because of their ethnicity.

In 2011, shortly after President Barack Obama’s Justice Department released a report finding that the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office engaged in systematic racial profiling of Latinos, the judge in the racial profiling lawsuit issued an injunction preventing Arpaio from apprehending or detaining anyone purely on the basis of being a suspected unauthorized immigrant or turning such people over to federal agents.

In 2013, Arpaio officially lost the civil suit. But by that point, it had become clear that his department hadn’t actually been complying with Judge Murray Snow’s 2011 injunction. They’d continued to engage in immigration “sweeps,” turn people over to ICE (or, when ICE stopped accepting detainees from Arpaio’s deputies, Border Patrol), and hold suspected immigrants in jail after they’d otherwise be released for federal agents to pick them up.

After a series of hearings about the Maricopa Sheriff’s Office’s failure to comply with the 2011 order, Judge Snow cited Arpaio and a handful of his subordinates for civil contempt of court in 2015. Then, in 2016, he asked the US Attorney’s Office to charge Arpaio and three others with criminal contempt — which someone can only be convicted of if it’s shown they were willfully refusing to obey the court order, not just failing to make sure it was obeyed.

Arpaio claimed that he wasn’t deliberately disobeying Judge Snow’s order, he just hadn’t understood it properly — and besides, any violations were the fault of his underlings. Judge Snow didn’t buy it.

For one thing, witnesses testified that Arpaio and underlings had directed them not to change internal policies after the court order. Arpaio himself, during his frequent media appearances, often said that the department was just doing what it had always done. Arpaio also had attempted to dig up dirt on Judge Snow himself (including having a detective investigate Snow’s wife).

By the time Arpaio was convicted in August 2017, however, there was a new sheriff in town — both in Maricopa County, where he’d been booted from office in 2016 (thanks in part to the county’s growing Latino electorate and in part to fatigue with Arpaio’s legal troubles) and in the United States, where Trump had been installed to take the same sort of tough-talking, disdainful-of-niceties, law-and-order approach to immigration around the country that Arpaio had taken in Maricopa County for all those years.

Sheriff Arpaio played a key role in validating Donald Trump, whose candidacy was initially seen as a joke, as the champion of hardline immigration policies and the cultural anxieties that came alongside them.

Trump’s first truly major campaign rally, in August 2015, was in Phoenix with Arpaio and some of the “Angel Moms” (mothers of people killed by unauthorized immigrants) he would continue to co-opt as a candidate and president. Arpaio formally endorsed Trump in January 2016 — before a single primary vote had been cast. He took a gamble, and he won.

So it makes sense that Trump, who has some apparent loyalty to people who supported him back when he was one of 17 Republican presidential candidates, would think warmly of Arpaio. But the endorsement isn’t really the basis of their simpatico. It’s just an acknowledgment of the political truth that Trump is engaging in exactly the same brand of politics that Arpaio pioneered a decade earlier.

As politicians, they used tough-on-crime rhetoric and breaches of “political correctness” to give the impression of sticking up for law and order; as government executives, they exercised their power to the greatest possible extent, without a ton of attention paid to the rule of law.

Like Trump, Arpaio communicated toughness through big, theatrical stunts — raids conducted with armored vehicles, the pink underwear, the tent cities — that often happened to violate the rights of their targets. (The tent cities were ultimately shut down after being cited as violations of the Eighth Amendment prohibition against “cruel and unusual punishment.”)

His “law and order” policies weren’t successful as anti-crime measures (911 response times went up hugely during the heyday of Arpaio’s sweeps), but succeeded in terms of targeting and victimizing the intended people.

In Arizona — a state with a fast-growing Latino population, but also a substantial population of older white residents who had often moved to Arizona from places that hadn’t had many Latinos — anxieties about demographic and cultural change were acute, and Arpaio capitalized on them. By the mid-2010s, those anxieties had percolated through much of the rest of the country as well, and Arpaianism was ready to go national — in the form of Trump.

But when it came to the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office obeying the laws as well as enforcing them, Arpaio was, at best, uninterested. His internal-affairs office, as Judge Snow found, was more a task force to pursue grudges than an effort to root out misbehavior among deputies.

He’s been cited for systematic abuses of power in trying to get his enemies brought up on criminal charges — including local judges, members of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, and the former mayor of Phoenix.

In other words, his August conviction for contempt of court didn’t come out of the blue. It was a predictable consequence of the way he’d run his department — guided by a philosophy that as long as law-enforcement officials were grabbing headlines by going after undesirable people, the public wouldn’t care so much about how it was done.