Trump touts endorsed Arizona Senate candidate in new video

Arizona Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters released a video on Monday showing him alongside former President Trump, who repeatedly praised Masters’s candidacy.

Trump endorsed Masters earlier this month in his August primary race against four other Republicans, with the winner facing incumbent Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) in November in what is expected to be a close race.

“Blake Masters is an incredible person, a very smart guy and an ‘America First’ fighter,” Trump said in the video. “I endorse Blake because he will protect our border, he stands for life and he’s strong on election fraud. Frankly, he’s strong on everything needed to keep Arizona first.”

Trump’s mention of Masters’s anti-abortion stance comes in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling on Friday that overturned Roe v. Wade, eliminating the constitutional right to abortion.

In Arizona, providers have stopped providing abortions since the landmark case was struck down, citing a pre-Roe law still on the books that bans most abortions. A separate Arizona law that bans abortions at 15 weeks is set to soon go into effect.

Trump in the video took aim at two of Masters’s most formidable opponents, businessman Jim Lamon and Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich. 

“Mark Brnovich and Jim Lamon on the other hand will only let you down,” Trump said. “Blake Masters has my complete and total endorsement.”

The former president had previously torn into Brnovich for not alleging that mass fraud took place in Arizona’s election in 2020, when President Biden won the state.

Brnovich said in a report this spring that Maricopa County’s 2020 election results had “serious vulnerabilities” but did not allege mass fraud. 

Masters, meanwhile, has aligned himself with Trump’s false claim of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election. 

With just more than a month until the primary election on Aug. 2, the Republican campaigns have gone scorched-earth, with millions of dollars having been poured into the race.

Masters is backed by PayPal founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel, who has pumped more than $13 million into the race.

Lamon had already loaned his campaign $13 million as of the end of the first quarter of 2022. 

Whoever wins the primary will face a tough general election campaign, challenging an incumbent who flipped the seat blue in 2020.

Democrats are hoping to hold the seat in November as the party seeks to maintain its razor-thin majority in the Senate. The nonpartisan Cook Political Report rates the contest as a “toss up.”