Trump and his supporters have directed the phrase at Liz Cheney, who voted with Donald Trump 93% of the time Brian Kemp, who’s conservative achievements as Georgia governor include a heartbeat bill banning abortions after six weeks, a voter ID law restricting absentee ballots, and one of the quickest ends to pandemic lockdowns in the country and former Attorney General William Barr, who has long defended Trump and said he would vote for him again if he were the party’s nominee.Įven Sen. This doesn’t include the many other instances of the acronym in statements published through Trump’s Save America PAC or Truth Social account in the months after he was banned from Twitter. The label was aimed at state election officials in Philadelphia governors in Georgia, Massachusetts, Maryland and Arizona and congressmen who accepted the results of the 2020 presidential election. Under the traditional definition of RINO, Trump’s comments would seem to imply Bowers’ betrayal of core conservative principles and Republican policy, but Bowers’ legislative record says otherwise, having presided over legislative sessions where election integrity, tax cuts and border security were the main focus.īetween 2020 and the first week of 2021, the former president used the term RINO 32 times in his Twitter posts. “I will not play with laws I swore allegiance to,” he said in the committee hearing. That morning, Trump released a statement saying, “Arizona Speaker of the House Rusty Bowers is the latest RINO to play along with the Unselect Committee.”Ī month later, at an Arizona rally, Trump endorsed Bowers’ primary challenger for Arizona Senate, David Farnsworth, calling Bowers a “RINO coward.” 6 committee, recounting a phone call he received from former President Trump and his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, in which they insisted on the existence of widespread voter fraud and encouraged Bowers to use his authority as Arizona House Speaker to convene a special legislative session to decertify Biden’s 2020 win in the state.īowers refused. On June 21, Bowers testified before the Jan. “Nowadays it just means you don’t agree with Donald Trump,” he said. In a phone interview, Bowers put it bluntly. “This was applied to people who were more liberal Republicans, who weren’t taking the positions that conservatives agreed on - on abortion, gun control or on the role of government,” said Richard Davis, BYU professor emeritus of political science, of the term RINO.īut this clear ideological connotation seems to have disappeared. In this environment, Republican politicians sought to establish their ideological purity by marking some partisans as “not conservative enough.” The RINO acronym became popular in the early 1990s as the Republican party platform became increasingly fixed around a set of specific issues. “But what we’ve seen in the last two years is that the term has no relation to policy and what it’s really about is whether the Republican stands by Donald Trump or not.” Traditionally, RINO and similar terms, like “me-tooer” during the New Deal era, were used “to indicate that a Republican is deviating from conservative views,” Continetti said. While the term RINO has been used for decades to insult Republicans who didn’t follow party orthodoxy, its meaning has transformed in the Trump era to be largely centered around the former president’s personality and personal agenda, according to Matthew Continetti, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of “The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism.” “It’s always been a slur, a slap to somebody if they don’t agree with you.”ĭespite his restraint, Bowers has been the frequent recipient of the RINO label since testifying before Congress in late June about his experience resisting pressure from the former president and his allies to decertify President Joe Biden’s win. 6 investigation, first entered Arizona state politics in 1993, the acronym RINO (Republican In Name Only) had only just begun to be hurled between politicians. When Bowers, who recently gained national attention as part of the Jan. But Russell “Rusty” Bowers has never been one of them. There have always been mudslingers in politics.
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