James E. Garcia, Arizona Mirror

If there’s a through line to the first months of Trump 2.0 it’s the president’s penchant for trying to disappear his critics, enemies and the fast-multiplying targets of his disdain.

It’s classic authoritarian behavior.

Donald Trump is a dictator at heart, and like all “good” dictators, he relishes the idea that he can banish anyone he thinks could get in his way. ...

It’s been nearly four years since I wrote that the “Republican Party may not be dead yet, but it’s probably time to put it out of our misery.”

GOP acolytes probably thought I was being mean-spirited. Looking back, it seems I was being generous.

As it turns out, the GOP isn’t just dead, it’s now morphed into an army of partisan zombies wholly determined to kill democracy. ...

It wasn’t a debate, which is what we all really wanted to see, but we did get to watch the Republican and Democratic candidates for Arizona governor respond, one at a time, to hot topic questions about what they plan to do if they get the job.

Last week’s candidate forum was hosted by the Arizona and U.S. Hispanic Chambers of Commerce and sponsored by the Si Se Vota CPLC Action Fund — which is spending $10 million in this election cycle on a non-partisan campaign to boost Latino voter turnout called Latino Loud.

Arizona’s 2.3 million Latinos now make up a third of the state’s population, and the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials predicts 644,000 Latinos will vote in November. Nationally, 11.6 million Latinos are expected to vote in the midterms....

One of the great stories in Arizona politics involves the recall 10 years ago this month of then-Republican Senate President Russell Pearce, the far-right author of the single most anti-immigrant bill in modern U.S. history, Senate Bill 1070.

More commonly known as the “show us your papers" law, its passage wreaked terror in the immigrant community, sparked a national economic boycott of Arizona, and supercharged an already growing progressive movement whose reverberations are still being felt across state politics today.

One of the people inspired to counter the threat posed by Pearce's political ascent was Randy Parraz, a longtime community organizer and the founder and president of Citizens for a Better Arizona, which formed to drive the 2011 recall effort....

Congressman Ruben Gallego got it right when he recently described his House colleague, Paul Gosar, as “Just an awful human being."

Gallego was commenting on the news that Gosar had posted an altered anime video of himself on Twitter, which he's since removed, that depicted him executing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-NY, by slashing the back of her neck with a sword and nearly decapitating her, and then attacking President Joe Biden — the animated version of “Gosar" freezing a split second before his blades make contact with the president's head.

Gosar, a Prescott Republican and white nationalist icon, later said it all was a big joke....