Mort Rosenblum: Ciscomani twists the truth, dodges voters

and analysis of the writer:

Blue and red faded into a pleasant purple haze at the Book Festival authors’ dinner. Maureen Dowd took a few bites out of Donald Trump in her keynote speech, just low-hanging fruit. Politicking was not on the menu. And yet...

A table away, I saw my own fragile link to American democracy. “We the people,” essentially, is each citizen’s representative in the people’s House. Juan Ciscomani is mine. When he stood up to gladhand after dessert, I walked over.

Upon hearing I was a constituent, he reached for my hand and beamed. When I added that I was also a reporter, his smile lost its wattage. “You guys...” he began, and it went downhill from there.

The tell of a faithless, or clueless, politician is a penchant to lump all “journalists” into a single collectivity. Especially if a winner-take-all president demands absolute loyalty to his monarchical rule.

Determined to hear him out, I asked for an interview before I returned to France. He said his press aide would make that happen. Quelle surprise: it didn’t. And so I’m left with what I see, hear, read and remember.

Ciscomani won by 10,822 votes, about the same number diverted to the Green Party also-ran. The race could have gone to Kirsten Engel, a Democratic environmental lawyer with opposite views on almost everything.

He now takes heat among half the people he is also sworn to serve. Following House Speaker Mike Johnson’s orders, he avoids personal contact with voters to issue truth-twisting pronouncements via newsletters and at carefully selected events.

This is Arizona, where we all know about cold-blooded species with forked tongues. But Ciscomani typifies Republican elected and appointed public servants across the board. The bigger picture is harrowing.

Muzzling actual journalists as “enemies of the people” in favor of partisan toadies is the first step toward turning democracy into demagogy.

My working life was mostly at the Associated Press, traditionally the main global source of impartial news. Before Trump, the White House Correspondents Association assigned it a front-row seat at briefings. Presidents came and went. AP stayed put.

News agencies and networks sent seasoned Washington reporters to press conferences after meetings in their bureaus to frame crucial questions about domestic and foreign policy. If a president evaded them, others in the room circled in like coyotes.

Trump barred AP from White House briefings and his (our) Air Force One because it insisted on calling the Gulf of Mexico what it has been labeled for four centuries. “Gulf of America” is laughably absurd in the real world and in much of the United States.

After Trump and JD Vance yelled at Volodymyr Zelensky, the first “question” went to a bonehead from “Real America’s Voice,” Margorie Taylor Greene’s boyfriend. He railed at the Ukrainian leader for not wearing a suit, which disrespected Oval Office dignity.

He missed the fact that Zelensky, in his best black tunic, has worn fatigues for three years in solidarity with nearly 50,000 combatants killed to fend off an invasion by the Russian despot Trump lauds for being such a good friend.

Zelensky smiled. When Ukraine is at peace, he said, he will wear a suit. Looking at the bonehead, he added, “perhaps one better than yours.” Meantime, Elon Musk hovered in the background in a T-shirt, urging the debt-ridden government to colonize Mars.

Virulent letters to the Star focus on Social Security, Medicaid, veterans’ care and basic essential services. One said: “I will remember his spineless capitulation in the next election.” Another: “Why is Ciscomani so betraying? It’s because of his slavish devotion to Trump’s greasy tax cuts for the filthy rich so they can buy bigger yachts.”

On Wednesday, Jean Tittle’s op-ed described how he ignored constituents at the Quail Creek Republican Club where he was invited to speak. She said he slipped through the back gate past a waiting reporter and protesters, then sped in behind a police car.

She noted the Republican strategy to shun townhalls and demonstrations by people they represent, and she concluded: “We must resist and expose their cowardly ‘back gate’ paths of least resistance.”

In their Arizona rallies, Bernie Sanders and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez excoriated billionaires-first policies. Their assertions were harsh but accurate. Ciscomani later dismissed them all as lies, offering no facts or data to counter them.

I had just returned from the Texas frontier and wanted to ask him about immigration. Rep. Tony Gonzalez, whose district includes 800 miles of the 1,954-mile border, backs Gov. Greg Abbott’s extreme measures to repel asylum-seekers and punish migrants.

Ciscomani, born in Sonora, echoes blatant untruths about a bogus border emergency that worries even many Americans of Mexican or other origins. Refugees and migrants live in constant fear even with legal status to await hearings that are now in limbo.

In contrast, I recalled my interviews with Rep. Raúl Grijalva, born just inside the border to Mexican immigrants. He fought hard for policies based on reality and U.S. law. AOC told crowds he was only congressman to welcome her activism in the staid House.

Trump’s revisionist history is pushing a purple Arizona deeper in red. In states far from the border, his blood-libel slurs whip up fear and loathing that divert attention from his assault on democracy.

Raúl Castro came from Mexico, like Ciscomani. He studied law, moved from Pima County courts to be Arizona governor, then served as U.S. ambassador in El Salvador, Bolivia and Argentina. I spoke with him shortly before his death in 2015.

Previous Democratic presidents were hardly soft on immigration. During Barack Obama’s crackdown, Castro stopped crossing at Nogales because of hassles coming home. He died at 98, not long after heading to a birthday celebration in Tucson.

Radiation from a recent heart procedure triggered an alarm at a highway checkpoint. Border Patrol agents left him standing by the car in blazing sun, without water, for half an hour.

The “border crisis” needs good-faith bipartisan solutions to keep out people rejected after screening yet allows in the millions of skilled professionals and laborers America’s economy needs to thrive. Joe Biden negotiated a promising first step. Trump blocked it.

I’ve crossed countless borders, including at the old Berlin Wall and others into harsh dictatorships across the world. By comparison, Emma Lazarus’s welcoming words on the Statue of Liberty are now shameful hypocrisy.

Ciscomani’s dinner remark labeling all journalists as “you guys ...” is what I assumed it to be. In Trump’s orbit, reporters are supposed to echo uncritically the master’s voice. Those who do their jobs to inform the electorate are “fake news.”

Governments have always been plagued with waste, boondoggles and corruption. That’s why the Constitution carefully lays out checks and balances. As the world got complex, inspectors general and special prosecutors helped voters curb wrongdoing.

Trump blasts past anything America has seen. Even if he left office today, irreparable damage has been done. Reform requires laser surgery, not a chainsaw massacre. Just blocking that tax cut for the rich would save more than twice the targeted $2 trillion.

He “primaries” principled Republicans, thumbing the scales with big-donor money. That packs the House and Senate with Ciscomanis, whose aim is to cling to their jobs, heedless of the people they represent. That is how democracy dies.

I am now heading back to France and beyond across an ocean that has never been so wide. My columns will reflect why there is no longer a difference between domestic and foreign news. My news reporting and analyses are at mortreport.org.