Former President Trump on Thursday announced his endorsement of Blake Masters, who is backed by conservative megadonor Peter Thiel, in the Arizona GOP Senate primary.
In a statement released through his Save America PAC, Trump praised Masters as a “great modern-day thinker” and pointed to Masters’ boosterism of the Big Lie of a “stolen” 2020 presidential election.
“Blake knows that the ‘Crime of the Century’ took place, he will expose it and also, never let it happen again,” Trump said while pushing election fraud falsehoods. “It is my great honor to give Blake Masters my Complete and Total Endorsement!”
After touting Masters’ resume in the statement, Trump also took the opportunity to take swipes at Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, another candidate in the GOP Senate primary. The former president has griped about Brnovich for supposedly not pushing the Big Lie hard enough in the battleground state.
“Mark Brnovich is such a disappointment to me,” Trump said. “While he understands what took place in the 2020 Presidential Election, and that it was Rigged and Stolen, he only views it as something he would like not to see happen again.”
Although Masters’ bid in the Arizona GOP Senate primary marks his first time running for office, he served on Trump’s 2016 transition team alongside Thiel. Masters previously served as president of the Thiel Foundation.
Masters recently drew attention for being among high-profile Republicans to voice a version of the “Great Replacement” theory in the wake of a white man targeting and fatally shooting Black shoppers at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York last month. The conspiracy theory, popular on the right and often pushed on Fox News and by conservative lawmakers, baselessly claims that a liberal elite is systematically “replacing” white Americans with non-white people through immigration, interracial marriage and violence.
A few hours after the Buffalo shooting, Masters posted a video of an interview with conservative pundit Ben Shapiro, in which Masters said he was “bold enough to admit the obvious, which is they’re doing this so that someday they can ‘amnesty’ these people and make them voters who they expect to vote Democrat.”
Masters has described himself as a “nationalist” who believes that country is run by “psychopaths.”
