Ousted Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers characterized Donald Trump and his supporters efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election as fascism and is stunned that its his Republican Party that has declared war on the U.S. Constitution, he told The Guardian in an interview.

The thought that if you dont do what we like, then we will just get rid of you and march on, and do it ourselves that to me is fascism, Bowers said in the interview published Sunday.

The constitution is hanging by a thread, Bowers warned.

The funny thing is, I always thought it would be the other guys. And its my side. That just rips at my heart: that we would be the people who would surrender the constitution in order to win an election. That just blows my mind.

Bowers lost his Republican primary race for a state Senate seat early this month in a targeted retaliation for his refusal to cooperate with Trump and the former presidents attorney Rudy Giuliani to try to toss out Arizonas votes for Democrat Joe Biden in an effort to reverse the outcome of the 2020 election.

Bowers opponent David Farnsworth, who was endorsed by Trump, not only baselessly insisted the election Trump lost was rigged but that it was snatched by the devil himself.

Bowers, a lifelong Republican who served in the Arizona House for 17 years, was one of the most compelling witnesses earlier this summer at a hearing before the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.

He recounted a high-pressure campaign by both Trump and Giuliani, who pushed him in a tense phone call to arbitrarily throw out the states electoral votes for Joe Biden .

Giuliani insisted to Bowers that 200,000 illegal immigrants and more than 5,000 dead people voted in the state, Bowers testified. Bowers said he told Giuliani multiple times that he needed proof and Giuliani had promised to provide it. But Bowers testified that he never received proof, not a single name of a fraudulent vote, he testified.

Not only did the fourth-generation Arizonan find no evidence of fraud in his examination of voting in the state, he said he was not surprised Trump lost the election though by just 10,000 votes in Arizona he told The Guardian.

We were very much aware that a demographic of women, 18 to 40 [year old], college-educated, professional, with small children were not voting for Donald Trump, he told The Guardian.

Bowers voted for Trump in 2020 and campaigned for him. But now he sees Trump supporters adoption of conspiracy theories and bully tactics as a prep game for what was to come.

Bowers is shaken but has no regrets for the stance he took, he told The Guardian.

The GOP is now a party that doesnt have any thought. Its all emotional, its all revenge. Its all anger. Thats all it is, he said.

The veneer of civilization is this thin, he told the newspaper as he held his thumb and index finger close together. It still exists I havent been hanged yet. But holy moly, this is just crazy. The place has lost its mind.

Read the entire Guardian interview with Bowers here .