Opinion: Maricopa County Supervisor Bill Gates has PTSD after enduring three years of threats and harassment, and the reaction from some of his fellow Republicans has been, well, it’s stunning.
Laurie Roberts
Arizona Republic
Over the weekend, The Washington Post published a moving and intensely personal account of the cost of being a Maricopa County supervisor in the three years since Donald Trump lost Arizona.
Gates is one of the few remaining mainstream Republicans left in office in Arizona.
One of the depressingly few who has been willing to stand up to the intense pressure employed by Trump and his mob — people who branded this lifelong Republican a traitor and called for his arrest and threatened his life and published where he lived and called for his daughters to be raped and sent his family into hiding more than once.All this, because he refused to cave to their demand that he embrace the Big Lie that Trump was robbed.
The reaction from some of Gates’ fellow Republicans to his story has been … well, it’s been astonishing. A real eye opener about the apparently unlimited capacity of some human beings to behave like complete and total jackasses.Bill Gates is getting help for PTSD Gates recounted his story to the Post’s Yvonne Wingett Sanchez — the fear and the anger, the feeling of betrayal that triggered headaches and insomnia and turned him into someone his own wife didn’t recognize.
“This has been a family journey,” Gates said, his voice cracking. “We’re all working through this together. But we had to understand that we couldn’t do this on our own. We had to reach out for help.”
Gates has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and has been getting therapy for the last year.
So you can imagine the reaction pouring forth from his fellow Republicans, some of them once friends and allies, as they read of his struggles.
