Hasn’t Made Peace

Joe Arpaio Still Hasn’t Made Peace With His Own Demise

Why is the 92-year-old former Maricopa County sheriff running for mayor of his hometown? Maybe because he can’t stop.

Tim Murphy

When former president Donald Trump appeared at Dream City church in Phoenix in early June, he was visited on stage by a ghost from his past.

“Do you remember you had your sheriff, Sheriff Joe?” Trump said, looking off toward the crowd. “Is he here? I used to love that guy. Where is Sheriff Joe?”

From somewhere in the auditorium’s lower level, 92-year-old Joe Arpaio, the former sheriff of Maricopa County, shuffled his way slowly up toward the podium. “I didn’t know he was here—come here, Joe,” Trump said. He extended his arms dramatically as Arpaio approached, hugged him tightly, and kissed him on the cheek. Arpaio said a few words, wished Trump a happy birthday, and walked gingerly back toward his seat.

“Grab that railing, Joe!” Trump said. “Because you don’t want to pull a Biden.”

Arpaio made it down the stairs safely. But he has not exited the stage. Although neither he nor the ex-president mentioned it, Arpaio is running for office this year, after a tumultuous fall from grace and a criminal trial of his own. In 2022, after losing two straight campaigns for sheriff; getting convicted of contempt; receiving a pardon from Trump; losing another campaign for Senate; and burying his wife of 63 years; Arpaio ran for mayor of his hometown of Fountain Hills, a master-planned city of 25,000, nestled in the foothills of the McDowell Mountains about 45 minutes northeast of downtown Phoenix. He lost by 200 votes, claimed fraud, produced no evidence, never conceded, and just kept on running. 

During his 24 years as chief law enforcement officer in America’s fourth-largest county, Arpaio defined what it meant to be an anti-immigrant sheriff—inviting national media and Republican politicians to come and tour his massive outdoor jail, “Tent City,” where inmates donned pink underwear and lived without air conditioning. He ordered a volunteer posse to investigate the provenance of President Barack Obama’s birth certificate, arrested a critical newspaper editor, and let Steven Seagal drive a tank into someone’s home. His early endorsement of Trump helped solidify the TV star’s standing as the loudest voice in a party of nativists. Arpaio spent years turning the on-the-ground reality of America’s immigration politics into a media-friendly spectacle of performative cruelty. But he has reached the end of the road. On Tuesday, the man who helped define an age of border insecurity will be on the ballot for what might be the final time, in a three-way open primary against the town’s current Democratic mayor and another Republican challenger. 

When I learned all this, I had what seemed like the only reasonable question: Why can’t this old man stop running?

Arpaio’s private office in Fountain Hills occupies a large suite on the first floor of the Ava Investment Building, which is named for his wife, Ava, who passed away in 2021. The couple ran a travel agency out of the complex for years. For a time in the 1980s—before the Challenger explosion, and before Arpaio came out of retirement to run for sheriff—they were attempting to break into space-tourism market by selling tickets on a 57-foot-long, 20-foot-wide vessel called the Phoenix E. Today, his office, filled with framed photos, plaques, and odds and ends from his decades in federal and local law enforcement, serves as both a living-history museum and a campaign headquarters. There are coasters with a photo of a racehorse someone named for him; yellowing newspaper clippings spanning decades; and a framed copy of Trump’s clemency decree.

It was quiet on the day I visited in late June. An aide stayed mostly out of sight, periodically fetching some printed-out press release the boss called out for, while Arpaio sat behind his desk, in front of a bobblehead of himself. We were interrupted only once, when a man stopped by to donate a bag of freshly picked cherries. It was done in such a matter-of-fact way, no one seemed to question it.

The simple explanation for why Arpaio is running for mayor, he told me, is that Ava had once suggested the idea. The longer explanation is that after being booted from office in 2016, Arpaio has run for everything else and lost. In 2018, he ran for Senate and finished third in the Republican primary. In 2020, he sought his old job as sheriff and lost in the primary to his former chief deputy. In 2022, he ran for mayor, spent an astounding $160,000, and lost again. Candidates typically make their campaigns about the future, but when I tried to ask Arpaio about his current race, he repeatedly returned to the past.

“Fox blackballed me, right after I left office,” he told me. “And the only reason they blackballed me, which you’re not gonna put in there—in fact, you have a boss?” 

Yes, I told him; I have editors. 

“They’re gonna throw this in the garbage,” he said. “Nothing. Because I’m gonna mention something and you’re sure gonna edit it out. Because I mentioned the birth certificate.”

Arpaio insisted that he had assigned his “Cold Case Posse” to investigate the legitimacy of President Barack Obama’s birth certificate in 2011 with the intention not of finding evidence that Obama was ineligible for the office but of clearing him. But the more information they produced, he said, the more unavoidable the reality. Finally, he had sent their work to Rome, where some “experts, great people” had looked it over for him and confirmed that Obama’s document was fraudulent. The birth certificate investigation hadn’t just cost him his prime perch in right-wing media. It was also, he suggested, the reason he ended up in so much legal trouble.

“I got my own little idea about this,” he said. “I may be going against the grain, but I think it wasn’t the illegal immigration they wanted me out [for]—of course, they wanted me out on all that, but I think it was the birth certificate. They knew I had the evidence. Now, getting rid of me—I won’t be sheriff anymore, I won’t have a gun and badge, I’m going to go fishing, I’m going to forget everything. I think it was the birth certificate, and nobody wants to talk about the birth certificate. I shouldn’t even be talking to you about it.”

The problem with this theory of the case is none of this was true. Not the birth certificate part, of course—Barack Obama was born in Hawaii. But not the rest of it either. The Department of Justice began investigating his department during George W. Bush’s administration, before releasing a report in 2011 finding that Arpaio’s office was serially violating the civil rights of Latino residents. The case that ultimately led to Arpaio’s prosecution started with a 2007 class-action lawsuit filed by Latino residents who alleged they had been racially profiled during traffic stops. He and his subordinates serially ignored a 2013 court order to stop the unconstitutional behavior, and, according to Judge G. Murray Snow, “engaged in multiple acts of misconduct, dishonesty, and bad faith,” which ultimately led to his 2017 conviction on a misdemeanor charge of contempt of court. He was facing a maximum of six months of prison when Trump pardoned him later that year. 

But Arpaio was insistent on rebranding his own legal issues and electoral defeats, not as the comeuppance of a bad cop, but as the product of a great conspiracy. He considered himself a canary, of sorts, for Deep State retribution.

“Everything they did then, they’re doing to Trump—it’s almost like a pattern,” he said.

Besides the legal issues, the thing he was most bitter about was the way people talked about his age. “They say ‘he’s too old,’” Arpaio said. He pointed at his head. “There is nothing wrong with my mind.” He kept trying to get me to tell him that he looked young. “I don’t look my age,” Arpaio said confidently. “There’s no one in the universe who will believe my age.” He took out a letter from his physician and had me read it. He believed that when elected as mayor, his active lifestyle and cogency could serve as an inspiration to other old people. “I want them to think, wait a minute—if he can do it, we can do things instead of looking at the pool and television.”

“Even Trump says he thinks I’m 73,” he said. “I should show him my birth certificate!”

Later, I checked the tape of the Dream City speech. Trump said that Arpaio was 170.

Arpaio does have plans for what he would do as mayor, although they are colored, somewhat, by the fact that the person proposing them is most famous for running an outdoor jail in Phoenix. Arpaio explained that he tries to “de-emphasize public safety” in his campaign literature because he’s worried about being put “in a box” because of his law enforcement background. (Nevertheless, one of his proposals is to create a town police force.) One of his top goals was to breathe new life into a town with an aging Sun Belt population. He thought that it needed “more babies,” although it wasn’t clear how exactly he would bring that about. One suggestion, which was not directly related to the babies idea, was to bring in a nightclub. Reminding me that he had once lived in Boston (“I knew Red Auerbach…I’m a big Celtics guy”), he suggested that the seafood restaurant in Fountain Hills could import lobsters. Another plan was to get a nearby casino, which is run by the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation, to give the city more money.

Then there was the fountain itself—the city’s namesake, which sits inside a 100-million-gallon man-made lake on a 29-acre eponymous park. The fountain can reach a height of 560 feet. But it wasn’t what it once was, he said. It was powered by three pumps, but under the city’s current mayor, Ginny Dickey, only two of them usually run, which meant that the water reached a maximum height of just 330 feet. 

“That makes me angry,” he said. “I want that to go all the way up. We were number one. Now Dubai is number one. Now we’re number five.” His plan was to turn the third pump back on, costs be damned.

A few days later, I met up with the incumbent mayor, Ginny Dickey, at her office on the second floor of the city hall. She had come from a breakfast with the local chamber of commerce. The 68-year-old Dickey, a former banker and school board member, had first moved to the area in the early 1980s and served on the city council for eight years before being elected mayor in 2018.

Dickey and Arpaio had gone head to head two years ago, and their relationship was cordial but hardly warm. Living in the same community as America’s most media-hungry sheriff could be a source of annoyance. In 2013, she noted, residents had staged a protest after Arpaio and Seagal—with cameras in tow— conducted a simulated mass shooting at a school in town. She said that Arpaio was always trying to talk to her about how they are both Italian. Dickey did not seem to give his big ideas for the town much credence. When I mentioned that Arpaio was proposing to ask a tribal casino for more money, she sounded like she had just watched a dog attempt to parallel park.

“That’s cute,” she said.

Dickey had suggested we check out the fountain, which runs for 15 minutes at the top of every hour. It was a short walk from city hall down a newly redeveloped boulevard with boutiques and nice restaurants. At 10 a.m. on the dot, the water rose and rose and kept rising. At its peak—according to the town’s official site, where it hosts a 24-hour livestream—it spouts higher than the Washington Monument, Notre Dame, the Great Pyramid of Giza, and Old Faithful. When it’s windy, no one within a few hundred feet is safe from the spray. We were standing by the side of the road clinging to the shade of a small tree, while the mayor was being eaten by ants. I mentioned that Arpaio had suggested turning on the third pump.

It was clear that this was a familiar complaint. Running the pump was expensive. And the city didn’t even have property taxes. Her first opponent, in 2018, had proposed having the pump run all the time.

“I think it adds to the intrigue and the fun to not have it on all the time,” she said. “Maybe someday we’ll put other little [fountains] around it.”

Like her most famous opponent, Dickey believed the community needed to bring in more young people, but it was clear that she had given the matter a good deal more thought. As we sat in her office, she explained that the town’s median age had been rising steeply for decades—it was now 59—and the lack of affordable housing options for families was one of the main reasons why. The city’s housing stock was 96 percent full. She and the council had found the perfect place to begin to change that: An old mall not far from downtown, which is currently anchored by a Target. Retrofitting the complex could provide reasonably-priced housing for 600 people. 

This is the reality of the office Arpaio is running for: It is not a job where you do a lot of stunts. It requires a passion for zoning and spreadsheets and strategic planning—and patience for the people who accuse you of spoiling their paradise. The Target Center, as the plan was known, had inspired furious backlash in some segments of the community.

“Some people are just like, ‘Well, you know who’s gonna live there? Democrats—Democrats who shop at the Dollar Store,’” she said. You could read between the lines what this meant.

Dickey’s literature promised that she offered a choice between unity and “fear.” I had assumed that that was a dig at her infamous rival. But it was actually in response to another group in Fountain Hills—a new PAC called Reclaim Our Town (or ROT). All across town there were ROT-funded signs saying that a vote for Dickey was a vote for high-density housing, taxes, potholes, and roundabouts. (Yes, roundabouts.) In the town’s nonpartisan elections, ROT was aligned with a slate of self-identified Republicans. But it was not supporting the most famous Republican running.

“They’re backing Gerry,” Dickey said, referring to the third candidate in the race, a city councilman named Gerry Friedel, who is also vice president of the Fountain Hills Republican Club. “Joe was kind of upset about it because he keeps complaining about ‘slates.’”

Unless one candidate receives a majority in Tuesday’s election, which seems unlikely, the top two candidates will advance to a runoff election in the fall. It was clear that this race, too, seemed like an uphill battle for Arpaio. In our meeting, he complained that local Republicans were ignoring his candidacy, acting as if he weren’t running, or insisting that he would be a lame-duck if he won. Friedel’s entry suggested that at least some conservatives in Fountain Hills were leaning in the same direction as Republicans in every other primary Arpaio has entered since leaving office. Most people aren’t looking for a 92-year-old former sheriff to turn things around. They, too, would rather turn the page.

But Arpaio has never really made peace with the fact that he’s not the star of the show anymore. I don’t think he’d be running if he had. The biggest draw to the city, in his view, was not the fountain—it was Joe Arpaio, America’s former toughest sheriff. The election could put Fountain Hills on the map, he told me. “All I have to do is drop a dime and I’ll have the TV here in two minutes.” People would come from all over just to see him. I suggested that, based on his electoral history, people would be more likely to stay away, but he wasn’t having it.

This was the essential disconnect at the heart of what may well be his final campaign. Arpaio’s tenure as sheriff had ruined lives and saddled Maricopa County with massive debts. The Associated Press reported in May that the county’s tab for the sheriff’s racial profiling had reached a staggering $315 million. Arpaio’s lawlessness spurred years of political organizing that helped bring about his defeat and ultimately remade the political culture of what is now one of the nation’s tightest swing states. He was not just unpopular; his unpopularity had changed the course of history.

But instead of grappling with his legacy, he seemed to be retreating into the myth that he cultivated in media reports, and with friendly audiences for decades. Ava had once told an interviewer that her husband didn’t really have any hobbies. It was the self-image that surrounded him in his office. In his tenth decade, he is stuck in character, a fading tough guy, shuffling through his playlist in search of a track that his audience wants to hear. It didn’t matter what question I asked; the answer would always lead back to a well-worn riff about the time he arrested Elvis or a drug cartel put a contract on his head. At one point—with a preface that he might be accused of “racial profiling”—he asked me where my “folks” were from. But it wasn’t because he wanted to know; he just wanted to talk about how he’s Italian. All this baseless innuendo about Obama—that was part of the bit too. Did this shtick ever really work? For a while, at least, a lot of people found it useful for they had stories that they, too, wanted to tell.

Before I left, Arpaio offered me a souvenir: pink underwear, inspired by the attire that Maricopa County used to force inmates at his Tent City to wear. Arpaio now orders it in bulk and sells autographed drawers at gun shows to raise money for law-enforcement charities. “Pakistan’s the only country we could find that would do it all—the color, you know,” he said. His voice trailed off. I told him I was going to pass. Arpaio is still playing hits. But the audience just isn’t what it was.