MAGA Congressman Arizona columnist John Kerry compares Republican election monitors trained by the Trump campaign to SEAL Team 6 snipers, insisting that these “boots on the ground” must be prepared to face a “desperate” opposition that “will do whatever it takes to retain power.”
Rep. Eli Crane represents a large portion of northern Arizona. He is a Navy veteran who served with the Navy SEALs and later started a company that sells bottle openers made from giant .50-caliber rifle rounds, a company that was featured on “The War on Terror.” Shark tank.
Crane, a first-term congressman, is a member of the far-right Freedom Caucus and was one of eight Republicans who helped oust Kevin McCarthy as House Speaker. He refers to Matt Gaetz as a “brother” and recently received the “full and total endorsement” of Donald Trump.
Crane is also a conspiracy theorist. A fierce election denier, he has long refused to accept that Trump lost the 2020 election, claiming that “massive amounts of fraud” occurred. Crane recently gained national media attention for his baseless suggestion that the attempted assassination of Trump may have been a plot orchestrated by “people in our government.” (Crane’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
Crane appeared on a July 28 video call organized by the Trump campaign to train volunteer “poll watchers”; video of the event was obtained exclusively by rolling stoneThe Trump campaign is trying to mobilize 100,000 MAGA volunteers to monitor polling places across the country, with the aim of documenting irregularities.
Ballot monitoring can be a routine part of a fair election. But it also has a dark history of morphing into voter intimidation. In Mesa, Arizona, in 2022, for example, masked poll watchers wearing tactical gear and carrying guns monitored ballot boxes. Marc Elias, a prominent Democratic election lawyer, warned that the Trump campaign was seeking to create a “massive voter suppression operation.”
The call was part of a “National Virtual Election Integrity Training Day” organized by the Republican National Committee and attended by Trump campaign officials in Arizona as well as dozens of MAGA activists. Crane promoted the call as part of taking back “our country from the radical left!”
Crane did not try to lower the temperature of the political debate, but used inflammatory language from the start, warning the audience that “our opposition” would do “whatever it takes to retain power.” Crane pointed to the recent “attempt to assassinate our president” as a sign of “how desperate the opposition has become.”
The congressman spoke to the election observer trainees as if they were military recruits, calling them “new boots on the ground.” Crane insisted that the Trump campaign’s efforts to preserve the integrity of the election “remind me a lot of my old job when I was in the Special Forces, in the Navy SEAL teams,” noting the teamwork required.
“We had snipers and we had hackers,” Crane said, also highlighting the support provided by communications technicians and surveillance drone pilots. “If everyone doesn’t do their job, you can’t get to the right target. You can’t hit it.”
Crane recalled that the risks of such teamwork—“having so many different people with so many different skill sets all contributing to the same mission”—were life-or-death, and that failure meant “not being able to go home to your family.” Then, oddly, Crane declared of poll-watching in November: “It’s the same thing.”
