I’ve lived and/or worked in 10 states scattered across the country. Arizona was and remains the most complicated. The same state that elected the first openly gay mayor of a large U.S. city is also the state that did not want a federal holiday for Martin Luther King Jr.

Perhaps the cultural pendulum swings so drastically because the population shifts depending on the time of year — shoutout to you snowbirds.

Whatever the season, though, Arizona is not a liberal epicenter like New York. To get news like we saw this week — where an Arizona grand jury indicted 18 allies of Donald Trump, including Mark Meadows and Rudolph W. Giuliani, over their efforts to overturn the 2020 election — takes more than dislike of Trump or Republicans.

It takes facts.

And it should be no surprise to find that kind of evidence in Arizona, where election denial arises from a long history of other racist power grabs.

Let’s think back to 2020 in Arizona, even before the election drama. This was the same year when Scottsdale City Council member Guy Phillips, appearing at an anti-mask rally, made a joke with the dying words of George Floyd as police killed him: “I can’t breathe.”

That kind of brazen racism is not unique for the area.

Scottsdale is a former sundown town that is nearly 90% white. Black people made up less than 2% of the population.

After pushback Phillips apologized, blaming the remarks on adrenaline, whatever that means. As if resisting mask requirements required a teaspoon of racism to be effective.

At the time of his remarks, my family had just moved to the Phoenix suburb, and I was beginning to think we had made a terrible mistake. On multiple occasions I was called the N word by drivers in pickup trucks with large Trump flags flapping from them.

Overt racism played well with a lot of voters. Months after mocking Floyd’s death, Phillips not only made it out of the primary but also ended up dangerously close to being reelected. Colton Duncan, Republican Kari Lake’s campaign manager when she ran for governor, retweeted a racist post about Native Americans on Indigenous Peoples Day in 2022. Lake herself has talked about going to war with Mexico over the migrant crisis. This year she is leaning into the racist “replacement theory” rhetoric as she runs for Senate against Rep. Ruben Gallego.

She launched her campaign in Scottsdale, by the way.

That’s not to suggest all of Maricopa County is filled with people who are racists. Only that the largest county in the state has a lot of them. Enough to sustain political careers of people who have said and done some vile things. This is the state that gave us Sen. Barry Goldwater, who opposed the Civil Rights Act. Arizona also attempted to pass “show me your papers” legislation.

It’s a cloud that continues to hang over the area, a constant reminder that how far we’ve come is not nearly far enough. And underneath that cloud of racial grievance, a group of citizens chose to make a stand for Trump, the king of racial grievances. It’s little wonder out of all the states to challenge the election results, no state worked harder through multiple recounts and lawsuits than Arizona. In fact, Lake still suggests the election was stolen even after the indictments reiterate that simply is not true.

What has been true is Arizona politics swinging between the unacceptable and the remarkable. After it was discovered the mayor of Tempe was gay, recall efforts were kicked into high gear. One of the key people to help fight them off? Republican Sen. John McCain — who resisted having out LGBTQ+ members in the military.

From the outside that makes little sense. But after living in Arizona, and witnessing the constant tug-of-war between progressive and conservative policies, the one thing that is clear is neither political philosophy defines the state. There is hatred, there is love, and then there is truth. The indictments may be characterized as a liberal attempt to punish Trump. It’s not that simple. Arizona isn’t liberal or conservative. The same goes for these indictments.

@LZGranderson

Tennessee teachers and staff will be allowed to carry concealed handguns on public school grounds under legislation signed into law by Gov. Bill Lee on Friday.

Lee, a Republican, had announced his support for the proposal just the day before while flanked by top Republican legislative leaders who had helped shepherd the bill through the GOP-dominant General Assembly.

“What’s important is that we give districts tools and the option to use a tool that will keep their children safe,” Lee told reporters.

TENNESSEE NEARS LAW BANNING ADULTS FROM HELPING MINORS FIND, RECEIVE SEX REASSIGNMENT CARE

As the idea of arming teachers began to gain support inside the General Assembly, gun control advocates and families began swarming to the Capitol to show their opposition. During the final vote, protesters chanted “Blood on your hands” and many members of the public who oppose the bill harangued Republican lawmakers after the vote, leading House Speaker Cameron Sexton to order the galleries cleared.

According to the statute, which becomes effective immediately, parents and other teachers will be barred from knowing who is armed at their schools.

A principal, school district and law enforcement agency would have to agree to let staff carry guns, and then workers who want to carry a handgun would need to have a handgun carry permit and written authorization from the school’s principal and local law enforcement. They would also need to clear a background check and undergo 40 hours of handgun training. They couldn’t carry guns at school events at stadiums, gymnasiums or auditoriums.

The legislation is the biggest expansion of gun access in the state since last year’s deadly shooting at a private elementary school in Nashville where shooter indiscriminately opened fire and killed three children and three adults before being killed by police.

Lee initially asked lawmakers to keep guns away from people deemed a danger to themselves or others in response to the shooting, the Republican supermajority ignored that request.

Many of the Covenant families had met with Lee and lawmakers hoping to persuade them to drop the idea of arming teachers. In the final days of the legislative session, Covenant families said they had collected nearly 4,300 signatures from Tennesseans against having public school staffers carry weapons on school grounds.

“There are folks across the state who disagree on the way forward, but we all agree that we should keep our kids safe,” Lee said Thursday.

It’s unclear if any school districts would take advantage if the bill becomes law. For example, a Metro Nashville Public Schools spokesperson, Sean Braisted, said the district believes “it is best and safest for only approved active-duty law enforcement to carry weapons on campus.”

I have badly underestimated Donald Trump. Thursday was the day that his justices — it turns out that they are indeed his justices on the Supreme Court, just as he claimed — got it through my thick head: Trump is not just competent but masterful. He is not just capable, he is supreme.

Because Trump is clumsy at his alleged crimes, surrounding himself with flagrant thugs, telling obvious lies, leaving prolific trails of damning evidence, offering ridiculous defenses for indefensible conduct, I had long concluded that he is incompetent at crookery along with his other manifest failings. That’s true as far as it goes. But for all his mad greed and compulsive lawlessness, for all his sleaze and stupidity, crime is ultimately not Trump’s game. Trump is nothing like a master criminal. But he is a master of something far more sinister and complex: corruption.

Crime is a largely private endeavor. Corruption is public. It seeps into the muscle and sinew of democratic society and institutions; it devours from within. The Supreme Court, drunk on arrogated power, cut loose from rudimentary ethics, has been eaten alive by it. But the court is just one plot of a vast terrain that Trump has conquered — not with crime, but corruption.

Crime is when you launch a violent attempt to overthrow the republic. Corruption is when you convince an entire political party to pretend they didn’t watch it live on television, or cower from it inside the Capitol while dozens of police officers were being bludgeoned by the mob.

Crime is when you make off with top-secret documents. Corruption is when a MAGA judge can’t find time to schedule your trial, or process the mountainous evidence of your guilt.

Crime is when a U.S. resident is murdered and dismembered by Saudi hit men. Corruption is when the all but acknowledged killer invests $2 billion in your talentless son-in-law’s fund, which other investors shun.

Crime is when you fake business expenses to cover up a payoff to an adult film actress who wants to cash in on your campaign for president. Corruption is when the head of the nation’s greasiest tabloid, a perpetual fount of lies and nonsense, expresses concern that your deeds are too sleazy for him.

Crime is when your lawyers tell the Senate not to convict you in an impeachment trial because you can be charged in court. Corruption is when your lawyers inform the Supreme Court that you are immune from criminal courts and only the Senate can judge you — but, alas, the senators have missed their window.

Trump has already succeeded at corrupting much of what’s corruptible. Government. Elections. Foreign policy. Democracy. Religion. Above all, people, and mostly men. Truckloads, boatloads, tiki-torch-parade-loads, courtloads of weak men all standing in the shadow that Trump casts.

The Republican Party has been corrupted absolutely. House Republicans have combined McCarthyism with Larry, Moe and Curlyism to twist Congress to comically corrupt ends — all to serve the greater degeneracy of Trump. In the Senate, the young hyenas, Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), study Trump’s demagogy and lick their chops, hoping for a turn at democracy’s carcass.

The establishment has utterly caved. Former Atty. Gen. William Barr’s endorsement of Trump this week, after having called Trump unfit, a psychologically damaged incompetent who cares only about himself, was barely newsworthy. What is Barr but another in the long line of weak men, one more debased Republican offering fealty to the grease king? Trump thanked Barr by humiliating him again.

But it was the Republican Supreme Court — mostly men again — that put the shiv a little deeper in democracy’s back this week. Originalists or textualists, all sounded more or less Trumpist as they seriously entertained Trump’s argument that his assaults on the constitutional order are protected by the Constitution itself. There is no way to make honest sense of such a liar’s mash. But Larry, Moe and Curly aren’t just chairing committees in Congress. They wear robes and furrowed brows now, too. And they seem eager to pretend that crimes are just constitutional exercises of power, and that one ex-president is a king.

Richard Nixon, a self-made, and self-corrupted, man who studied geopolitics and government assiduously, never achieved such a broad subjugation of American values and institutions. Trump, the ignorant, n’er-do-well heir to his father’s crooked fortune, has achieved so much more. Trump hasn’t just captured the trenches of conservative America, he has taken the commanding heights. He owns all of it, from the most racist backwater saloon to the Federalist Society clubhouse. They are his corrupted subjects. He is their corrupt and demented king. If he can somehow get through the next few perilous months, he may yet render corruption sacred, and the republic irredeemable.

Francis Wilkinson is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. @fdwilkinson