A MAGA congressman from Arizona is comparing GOP poll watchers being trained by the Trump campaign to SEAL Team 6 snipers, insisting that these “boots on the ground” must be prepared to counter a “desperate” opposition that will “do whatever it takes to hold on to power.”
The congressman, Eli Crane, represents a large swath of northern Arizona. He is a Navy veteran who was deployed with the SEALs, and later created a business selling bottle openers fashioned out of giant 50-caliber rifle shells, a company that was featured on Shark Tank.
A first term congressman, Crane is a member of the extreme-right Freedom Caucus, and was one of eight GOP members who precipitated the ouster of Kevin McCarthy as speaker of the House. He refers to Matt Gaetz as a “brother” and recently received Donald Trump’s “Complete and Total endorsement!”
Crane is also a conspiracy theorist. He is an avid election denier who has long refused to accept that Trump lost the 2020 election, claiming “massive amounts of fraud.” Crane has recently received national media attention for his baseless insinuation that the Trump assassination attempt may have been a plot orchestrated by “people in our government.” (Crane’s office did not immediately return 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 Stone. The Trump campaign is attempting to mobilize 100,000 MAGA volunteers to monitor polling locations around the country, supposedly to document irregularities.
Poll watching can be a routine part of a fair election. But it also has a dark history of crossing into voter intimidation. In Mesa, Arizona, in 2022, for example, masked vigilante poll watchers staked out ballot drop boxes, wearing tactical gear and toting guns. Marc Elias, a top Democratic elections lawyer, has warned that the Trump campaign is seeking to create a “massive voter suppression operation.”
The call was part of a “National Day of Election Integrity Virtual Training” organized by the Republican National Committee and attended by Trump campaign Arizona officials as well as dozens of MAGA activists. Crane touted the call as part of taking back “our country from the Radical Left!”
Far from attempting to lower the temperature of the political debate, Crane used incendiary language from the jump, warning the audience that “our opposition” would do “whatever it takes to hold on to power.” Crane pointed conspiratorially to the recent “assassination attempt on our president” as a sign of “just how desperate the opposition is becoming.”
The congressman spoke to the poll watcher trainees as if they were military recruits, calling them the new “boots on the ground.” Crane insisted the Trump campaign’s election integrity effort “reminds me so much of my old job when I was in Special Forces, in the SEAL teams,” citing the teamwork required.
“We had snipers. We had breachers,” Crane, said while also highlighting the behind-the-scenes support of communications technicians and surveillance drone pilots. “If everybody else didn’t do their job, you wouldn’t get to the proper target,” he said. “You wouldn’t be able to hit it.”
Crane recalled that the stakes of such teamwork — “many different people with so many different skill sets, all contributing toward the same mission” — were life and death, and that failure meant “you wouldn’t be able to come home to your family.” Crane then declared, bizarrely, of the work of monitoring polling sites in November: “This is the same thing.”
