It’s Joe Arpaio’s Party Now

McKay Coppins: “Former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio has the kind of résumé that in some other, hard-to-remember era would have consigned him to the fringes of American politics.”

“Now, he wants to be the a United States senator—and he believes the political climate has never been better for a candidate like him.”

“In a phone interview Wednesday, Arpaio told me the national GOP had moved sharply in his direction in recent years. All that gauzy post-2012 talk of Republicans reaching out to Latino voters and championing ‘compassionate’ immigration reform seems like a distant memory now—replaced by a climate in which the godfather of the birther movement can become president by promising to keep Mexican rapists out of the country with a massive border wall.”