A GOP mayor in Arizona said he now doesn’t “recognize” his party while speaking at a campaign rally for Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris in Glendale on Friday.
Mesa Mayor John Giles — who in 2022 was censured by a GOP committee after he endorsed Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) over Blake Masters, a challenger backed by former President Donald Trump — said his party has been “taken over by extremists that are committed to forcing people in the center of the political spectrum out of the [Republican] Party.”
“So I have something to say to those of us who are in the political middle: You don’t owe a damn thing to that political party,” the Republican said at the rally, which attracted an estimated crowd of over 15,000 people.
“In particular, you do not owe anything to a party that is out of touch and is hell-bent on taking our country backward. And by all means, you owe no displaced loyalty to a candidate that is morally and ethically bankrupt.”
The remarks from Giles, who has previously applauded Democratic President Joe Biden’s White House and once warned that Trump wouldn’t leave office if he were to win a second presidential term, arrives just days after the mayor called the current GOP ticket the “greatest threat to American values and institutions” that he’s seen in his life.
Giles is a co-chair of the Republicans for Harris campaign committee and, in an op-ed published last month, said the Republican Party has a “moral and ethical responsibility to restore faith in our democratic institutions.”
“I would say in the spirit of the great Sen. John McCain, please, please, please join me in putting country over party and stopping Donald Trump and protecting the rule of law, protecting our Constitution and protecting the democracy of this great country,” Giles told the Glendale crowd.