Blake Masters: From Zero to Cringe?

I have certain reservations about Arizona Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters. Others do as well. But a recent video provides irrefutable evidence of one thing about the protege of tech billionaire Peter Thiel: He is cringe — at least sometimes.

Take a look at this video from a documentary about his campaign:

Its two-minute runtime is a brief window into the life of someone who has awkwardly transformed himself into a Donald Trump toady. The video begins as Masters receives a call from Trump. In response, Masters is consumed by fanboy giddiness, donning a broad smile and putting the call on speaker. “Mr. President, how are you, sir?” Masters says.

Masters persists in this unbecoming, obsequious attitude throughout the call, during which Trump mixes compliments about Masters’s recent performance in a Senate debate with Democrat Mark Kelly with awkward questions about the status of his campaign and outright criticism.

Of Master’s performance debating Kelly, Trump says to Masters, “He’s terrible and you were excellent.” Masters, thrilled to be noticed by senpai, smiles bashfully and looks askance, simply replying, “Well thank you.”

But not everything went well from Trump’s perspective. “I heard you did great on the debate but a bad election answer,” he says. “You’ve got a lot of support, you’ve gotta stay with those people.”

“Absolutely stay with those people,” Masters quickly responds. Then, Trump elaborates on what he means: Masters will lose this Senate election unless Masters is more insistent about the “rigged and stolen” 2020 election.

As Trump puts it:

If you wanna get across the line, you gotta go stronger on that one thing. Because that was the one thing you got a lot of complaints about. Look at Kari [Lake]! Kari’s winning with very little money. If they say how is your family, she says the election was rigged and stolen. You’ll lose if you go soft. You’re gonna lose the base.

In response to being compared unfavorably with Arizona Republican gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake, who is outperforming Masters in the polls in her race, Masters meekly replies, “I’m not going soft.” Once Trump is off the line, he repeats, “I didn’t think I went soft on the election.”

Another revealing exchange has Trump zeroing in on complications about Thiel’s funding of Masters’s campaign. “Is Peter Thiel helping much or what happened?” Trump asks. It is unclear whether Trump intended to allude to behind-the-scenes struggles involving Thiel’s hesitancy to provide Masters more money after backing him through the Arizona Republican Senate primary in August. But Masters reassures Trump about Thiel. “He is [giving me money now],” Masters says. “A little bit more behind the scenes. I don’t know, I don’t know what happened there. But money’s flowing in now.”

But Trump is not done. “Tell Peter to help you, help help help,” he says. To which Masters replies, “I will. I’ll tell him you said that.”

Whatever the case for Masters, this brief window into his campaign suggests someone who is overly deferential to Donald Trump and to that man’s fantasy about the 2020 election. Consider, in contrast, Arizona Republican governor Doug Ducey’s ignoring Trump’s phone call as Ducey certified the results of the 2020 election in the state.

It also suggests someone overly dependent on the whims of his billionaire mentor and patron. But this has been true from the beginning of his campaign when he told the Washington Free Beacon that Thiel “sees some promise” in him, but knows he will be “an independent-minded senator.” In the same interview, Masters says, “It’s my campaign, it’s not Peter’s campaign.” To the extent that hasn’t been the case, which is debatable, Masters now seems, based on that video, to have a vested interest in making sure it is.

All of this might be forgivable. But to have been complicit in cringe . . . that’s no way to get from zero to one.