The one Nevadan who is in the best position to help stop Donald Trump from sabotaging the global economy and shattering the financial stability of Nevada households is Nevada’s only Republican in the Republican-controlled Congress, Rep. Mark Amodei.

Politico reported Friday that Amodei’s fellow House Republican, Don Bacon of Nebraska, plans to introduce a House version of a bipartisan-backed Senate bill empowering Congress to cancel tariffs ordered by a president.

The Senate version of the bill was announced Thursday by Iowa Republican Chuck Grassley and Washington Democrat Maria Cantwell, and four more Senate Republicans have signed on as co-sponsors so far.

Congress reining in Trump on tariffs (and, for a change, protecting and preserving the legislative branch’s role in the U.S. government) is a tremendously tall order. Even if Congress passed it, Trump would veto it, and then a whole lot more Republicans would have to find the spine to stand up to Trump and help form the two-thirds majorities in both houses needed to override a veto.

Yes, that many Republicans defying Trump seems unthinkable.

But then, just less than a week ago, the notion that the stock market would see one of its worst weeks ever just because of the crackpot obsessions of one 78-year-old man seemed unthinkable too.

When the markets plummeted upon opening Thursday, Bacon was already reportedly mulling some sort of House action to rein in Trump on tariffs. I emailed Amodei’s office asking if he had been in conversations with other House members about taking action to reassert congressional authority over tariff policy and whether Amodei agreed (as Bacon had put it) that “Congress should take back its tariff authorities.”

In a statement provided by his office Friday, Amodei ignored the question. Instead, he tossed around some Trump talking points and brushed off “Wall Street wigging out.”

“We’ll be closely monitoring key indicators of economic stability,” Amodei added, “such as job reports, inflation, and consumer spending, but nobody said this was going to be instant gratification, and as the President said, ‘We’re dealing with a very sick patient.’ Under Biden, we saw the largest trade deficit in U.S. history, and the status quo is simply not sustainable. We need significant changes to steer our country toward self-reliance.”

A couple things:

First, really, Amodei? “Nobody said this was going to be instant gratification”? Fine, let’s give Amodei the benefit of the doubt and assume he was talking about “instant gratification” as a result of Trump’s tariffs. But let’s also not forget that while campaigning Trump promised that “Starting on Day 1, we will end inflation and make America affordable again,” as well as “Prices will come down. You just watch: They’ll come down, and they’ll come down fast.” Trump has been promising nothing but instant economic gratification for the last, oh, three years. And so far he’s delivered exactly the opposite of that.

Second, when Amodei says 2024’s trade deficit is the largest ever, he’s presumably referring to a dollar amount, which is the dumbed-down way of looking at it. Each and every year countless measurements are the largest in history, like the world’s population, for instance, or, say, the sum total of inane hyperbole spewed by Republican members of Congress. Rather than a dollar amount, a far more concrete and informative assessment of the trade deficit is determined by measuring it as a percentage of GDP. In 2024 the trade deficit was 3.1% of GDP, while in 2006 it was more than 5%. But thanks for bringing it up, congressman.

Meanwhile, to reiterate, Amodei failed to answer the question he was asked, which essentially boils down to whether he too, like at least a half dozen of his fellow Republicans in Congress (Bacon and five senators), is ready to take the U.S. Constitution seriously and reestablish the legislative branch of the United States government as, you know, a going concern.

Courts are slow, and the Supreme Court is stuffed with Trumpers. Congressional Democrats are sidelined (and many of them, including Nevada ones, have demonstrated a willingness to pretend everything will be fine). And Republicans have majorities in Congress, though to clarify, they don’t really control it; they’ve surrendered their control to Trump.

But assuming Trump can be reined in, a number of congressional Republicans are going to have to participate in the reining.

Some of the damage Trump has already inflicted on the economy, the rule of law, national security, international cooperation, science, human rights, the First Amendment, the system of checks and balances that underly the Constitution, democracy, and the practical workings of the federal government is so severe that fixing what he has broken will take years, assuming it’s fixable.

It’s tempting to write off Amodei, in the expectation that he’ll just continue to pretend this is all normal while supplying rote apologies for Trump laced with aw shucks quips and mealy-mouthed let’s-wait-and-sees.

But over the years Amodei has demonstrated on occasion there might be more to him than that. Since he’s the state’s only Republican in Congress, Nevada better hope there is.

A version of this column was originally published in the Daily Current newsletter, which is free and which you can subscribe to here.

Nevada Current is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Nevada Current maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Hugh Jackson for questions: info@nevadacurrent.com.

“When he was campaigning Trump told you he was going to raise tariffs, so he’s doing what he campaigned on,” is a thing people say.

Fair enough.

When he was campaigning, Trump also promised “Starting on Day 1, we will end inflation and make America affordable again,” as well as “Prices will come down. You just watch: They’ll come down, and they’ll come down fast, not only with insurance, with everything.”

Trump also promised that “drill baby drill” would not only “unleash” energy production in the U.S. As he insisted repeatedly at his campaign appearances in Nevada last year, lower energy costs rippling through the economy as a result of drill baby drill was also the centerpiece of his strategy for lowering prices on all other goods and services.

After falling consistently from its peak in the summer of 2022, the price of gas nationally has been been more or less stable for months, and now is within a nickel of what it was both the day Trump was elected and the day Trump was inaugurated.

In Nevada, the price of a gallon of regular is actually about a dime higher than when Trump was inaugurated.

Oil prices are projected to decline slightly this year, not because of drill baby drill, but because Trump’s tariffs and their accompanying televised presidential hissy fits are a drag on the economy. Trump met with oil industry executives Wednesday. They love the prospect of Trump cutting their taxes and regulations. But to no one’s surprise, except perhaps Trump’s, in these economic and geopolitical conditions, they (and their shareholders) have almost zero interest in drill baby drilling.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average has fallen by 5.5% since Trump’s inauguration. The S&P 500 has lost nearly 8% of its value. The Nasdaq Composite Index has dropped by more than 12%. A Deutsche Bank analysis the other day noted that under Trump, U.S. stocks are recording the second-worst post-inauguration performance in nearly 90 years.

“When I take office your 401 (k) or IRA will start losing money very quickly, almost like nobody’s ever seen before” was not among Trump’s campaign promises. But he delivered on it anyway.

And what about the charismatic megafauna of Trump Nevada-specific policy promises, holy sacred No Tax on Tips amen?

Budget-wise it’s among the smallest of the numerous tax cuts he promised (the lost revenue from No Tax on Social Security income is humongous by comparison). So it might be included in the tax cuts for the rich and corporate that Trump and congressional Republicans are poised to pay for by cutting Medicaid (which will hurt Nevada more than most states, by the way).

At the same time, if tariffs send consumers into a spending tailspin, and tourists (and not just international ones) stop coming to Las Vegas, a lot of folks who might have hoped to catch a No Tax on Tips break may find that the presence or absence of federal taxation of tips is the least of their problems. If it wasn’t already.

Oh, and speaking of Social Security, Trump repeatedly promised while campaigning that he wouldn’t touch it. Yet he’s also enabling and parroting Elon Musk’s attempts to undermine what Musk calls a “Ponzi scheme.”

When he was campaigning Trump also promised to be a dictator on day one, punish his enemies, and concentrate unprecedented and, according to multiple lower federal courts, unconstitutional authority in the executive branch at the expense of Congress and the judiciary.

Voters knew that was coming, too.

And whether despite that or because of it, a majority of Nevada voters joined a plurality of voters nationally to let Trump have at it.

In stark contrast to his thus-far barren promises that prices will come down and tremendous wealth will wash across the land, Trump has made substantial progress toward fulfilling his promises to establish authoritarian rule while sidelining an obeisant legislative branch and attacking an often game but structurally plodding judicial system.

Now all Trump need do to solidify his regime and its lawlessness going forward is convince voters that a ramshackle wreck of a third-rate economy is a small price to pay for the privilege of being ruled by Trump the Grand Authoritarian and his cadre of cold-blooded henchmen and creepy oligarchs.

What are the odds voters will buy that in the 21st century? Judging from the last 10 years or so, fifty-fifty sounds about right.

A version of this column was originally published in the Daily Current newsletter, which is free and which you can subscribe to here.

Nevada Current is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Nevada Current maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Hugh Jackson for questions: info@nevadacurrent.com.

Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are shredding the U.S. Constitution, scrapping the rule of law, creating misery and chaos not just in the U.S. but worldwide, and transmogrifying a constitutional democratic republic into a punitive authoritarian kleptocracy.

And Nevada Democratic Rep. Steven Horsford is sticking with the “DOGE caucus” anyway.

The DOGE caucus was formed in December by Musk-struck Republican members of Congress who hoped their magnificent Musk would honor some of them by adopting their pet knee-jerk anti-government ideas.

As if the monomaniacal Musk would care about their ideas.

Horsford and several other Democrats joined the caucus too, wanting to believe, or refusing to disbelieve, they could work with Trump and Musk and their Republican congressional colleagues to promote a shared national interest.

Yes, very high minded.

Since then, Musk, enabled by his sidekick Trump, assisted by a team of barely post-adolescent techno tots, and with no recognition of the DOGE caucus’s existence, made a beeline for the aforementioned shredding, scrapping and transmogrifying.

But Horsford told Politico earlier this week that he’s among Democrats who are staying in the DOGE caucus.

“The caucus is about focusing on rooting out waste, fraud and abuse,” Horsford said, in a statement which over-generously characterizes his Republican colleagues’ goals but has nothing to do with what DOGE is doing.

“I joined in good faith and to make sure that we have a voice at the table to protect my constituents,” Horsord continued.

“The illegal activity we’ll handle through the litigation process,” he added.

The litigation process appears to finally be slowing Musk, a little, but whether it is capable of ultimately stopping the world’s richest man’s abusive molestation of a nation remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, there is no evidence that Musk has the slightest interest in what any member of Congress, or anyone else on the planet for that matter, thinks or says.

There is no DOGE caucus table worth sitting at.

‘Working across the aisle,’ normalizing the crisis

Also this week, Nevada Democratic U.S. Sen. Jacky Rosen announced a bill she’s co-sponsoring to let churches and other non-profit child care providers get U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) loans made it out of a Senate committee.

The day before Rosen’s release, and following a report that Musk and DOGE had secured “access to all SBA systems,” a dozen Democrats on the House Small Business Committee wrote to the acting SBA’s administrator because they worry “Musk’s followers intend to block critical SBA services from reaching our nation’s small employers.”

“Beyond the operational impact, this breach endangers the private information of small business owners, SBA resource partners, and employees,” the members of the House added.

Rosen didn’t mention any of that in her release. But she was sure to work in a phrase that is a staple of statements issued from her office —“working across the aisle to pass my bipartisan bill.”

“I was ready to confirm Sean Duffy to lead the Department of Transportation,” Nevada Democratic U.S. Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto said in a press release Jan. 28, “but I cannot vote for him after the chaos President Trump has unleashed with his order to pause critical federal funding to Nevada.”

The chaos Cortez Masto was referencing was that caused by the infamous memo from Trump’s Office of Management and Budget that ordered a freeze on federal grants, loans and other forms of federal financial assistance.

Notwithstanding a pair of rulings from two separate judges putting a temporary halt on the funding freeze, the White House insists that Trump’s underlying executive orders to cut the federal funding “remain in full force and effect, and will be rigorously implemented.”

Trump still intends to, as Cortez Masto put it on Jan. 28, shut off “critical federal funding to Nevada.”

Cortez Masto, along with Rosen, did end up voting against Duffy’s confirmation as Transportation Secretary on Jan. 28.

But two days later they both were among several Democratic senators who voted to confirm Doug Burgum as Interior secretary. And then they voted to confirm Douglass Collins, Trump’s nominee to head Veterans Affairs.

Cortez Masto and Rosen have voted against some Trump nominees during that period, most notably Pam Bondi for Attorney General, and Russ Vought as director of the OMB.

The question is not why Nevada’s senators voted for Burgum or Collins, but why they are publicly normalizing the Trump administration by voting to confirm any of his nominees at all.

Meanwhile, Nevada Democratic Rep. Susie Lee is eager to tell anyone who will listen that the most important thing about her is that she is “the most bipartisan member of Congress.” After Trump’s election, Lee urged her Democratic House colleagues to embrace “a more nuanced”, i.e, less partisan, approach. Rare is the Lee press release that does not contain the word “bipartisan.” She touted her support for at least two such bills this week alone.

And Rep. Dina Titus, along with Lee, Horsford, Cortez Masto, and Rosen, was among the minority of Democrats in both the House and the Senate voting with all the Republicans in both those bodies for the Trump-marketed bill to allow undocumented immigrants to be arrested and detained for non-violent minor crimes.

Civil rights advocates and attorneys condemn the law for denying due process, and Nevada groups have slammed the state’s Democrats in Congress for caving to anti-immigration fervor whipped up by Trump.

NV Democrats should implement a freeze of their own

After the election, congressional Democrats in Nevada and around the country said they were ready to work with Trump when they can and try to find common ground. Because that’s a thing the defeated party always says after an election. That’s the norm.

That norm is based on the assumption that the United States government is fundamentally going to continue operating as it was designed to, where Congress passes laws, the courts interpret them, and the executive branch implements them. People who dislike the outcome often vow to try to change it via means afforded them in that same governmental structure. But in the meantime, everyone honors the result, because of the rule of law.

Musk and Trump, each convinced of their own extra special godliness, don’t feel bound by the rule of law and refuse to honor it. Rather than trying to fix what they feel is wrong about the U.S. government by scoring victories within the historically and lawfully established system, they’ve opted to trash that system altogether, consequences be damned. In the process they’re deliberately undermining whatever social, cultural, political, legal, rational, and moral cohesion has more or less characterized the nation since the end of the Civil War.

People in the U.S. who don’t support Trump (a majority, by the way), including elected Democrats, are struggling to figure out how the death of law and representative government in the U.S. might be prevented.

Judges have temporarily restrained Trump’s birthright citizenship order and his funding freeze order. Legal filings have temporarily limited DOGE’s access to the Treasury Department’s payment system and paused Musk’s grisly “fork in the road” effort to muscle federal employees into early retirement. There is some promise in, as Horsford put it, “the litigation process.”

But when the highest court in the land has repeatedly shown deference to Trump and even sanctioned his lawlessness, we can’t count on the courts to save us.

Maybe Trump’s jealousy of Musk will finally prompt him to oust Musk from the government (assuming Trump has the guts to do that).

Or maybe a handful — that’s all it would take — of Republicans in the House and Senate will put their nation ahead of Musk and Trump. While that scenario seems unthinkable at this point, the unthinkable is not impossible, as evidenced by what Musk and Trump are doing now.

But one thing that assuredly will not save us is congressional Democrats — still shell-shocked, evidently — “working across the aisle” and vying for a seat “at the table.”

The only reason Nevada’s Democrats should be reaching across the aisle right now is to grab any Republican who they think can be reasoned with and see if they can shake some damned sense — or courage — or patriotism — into them. (Maybe they could start with Nevada’s only Republican in Congress, Rep. Mark Amodei?)

The chance of that succeeding being distant and remote at best, Nevada’s congressional Democrats and their colleagues should implement a freeze of their own: effective immediately, they should stop pretending there is something normal about what is going on.

Because their pretense in turn suggests to the public that something normal is going on.

Musk and Trump will never be subject to the rule of law if elected Democrats continue to insist on allowing the public to think what Musk and Trump are doing is somehow normal, or legal, or sane.

Nevada Current is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Nevada Current maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Hugh Jackson for questions: info@nevadacurrent.com.

“This was not a terrorist attack, it was a wake up call,” reads a line in written notes authorities made public last week from Matthew Livelsberger, the driver of the Cybertruck who killed himself in the vehicle shortly before it exploded in front of a Trump hotel in Las Vegas on New Year’s Day.

The combat veteran’s writings include poignant passages, as when he expressed the need to “cleanse my mind of the brothers I’ve lost and relieve myself of the burden of the lives I took.”

But Livelsberger also expresses warmed-over manosphere tropes and anti-Democratic clichés from the Republican 2024 campaign.

“Masculinity is good and men must be leaders.”

“Thankfully we rejected the DEI candidate and will have a real President instead of Weekend at Bernie’s.”

“Rally around the Trump, Musk, Kennedy, and ride this wave to the highest hegemony for all Americans!”

Those sound pretty much like rote red meat talking points slung around by JD Vance, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Steve Bannon, or whichever Trumpworld podcaster might be trending at any given time.

But other lines in Livelsberger’s notes invoke something less banal, and more violent, envisioning what reads like a January 6 style attack on the nation’s institutions, but on steroids.

“Military and vets move on DC starting now. Militias facilitate and augment this activity.”

“Occupy every major road along fed buildings and the campus of fed buildings by the hundreds of thousands.”

“Lock the highways around down with semis right after everybody gets in. Hold until the purge is complete.”

“Try peaceful means first, but be prepared to fight to get the Dems out of the fed government and military by any means necessary. They all must go and a hard reset must occur for our country to avoid collapse.”

Briefing reporters last week after Livelsberger’s life ended in a rented Tesla in front of a Trump hotel, law enforcement officials said Livelsberger appeared to have “no animosity” toward Donald Trump.

While delivering that briefing, Clark County Sheriff Kevin McMahill and FBI Special Agent in Charge Spencer Evans knew that not only did Livelsberger have no animosity toward Trump, but in fact was cheering on Trump, and Trumpism.

McMahill and Evans left that part out, along with Livelsberger’s calls for uprooting people he didn’t agree with from the government and the military “by any means necessary.”

Law enforcement officials weren’t the only ones glossing over the story.

Media reports on Livelsberger, in Nevada and nationally, have downplayed his Trump-friendly extremism, when they’ve mentioned it at all.

When law enforcement officials suggested the Cybertruck driver hadn’t indicated any malice toward Trump (and when they knew but neglected to mention the driver was actually a Trump fan), it seemed a relevant observation at the time, lest the motive for blowing up a truck made and sold by Trump’s right-hand billionaire Elon Musk in front of a hotel with Trump’s name on it might be seen as a statement of disapproval of both men.

Livelsberger’s action clearly wasn’t that. It might have been an homage to them though.

This week law enforcement provided more passages Livelsberger wrote in in the days leading up to the explosion, which show Livelsberger used ChatGPT to learn how to turn a Cybertruck into a garbage fire, was convinced he was being tailed on his way to Las Vegas, and had intended to carry out his plan at the Grand Canyon Skywalk.

And in one of the quotes authorities released, Livelsberger wrote: “As much as the MSM will paint me out to be some terrorist and monster, I had no intent on taking out anyone but myself if that happens. I am deeply sorry to anyone that gets hurt.”

It didn’t go exactly as Livelsberger intended. Seven people were hurt. Blessedly, their injuries were minor.

And the MSM — the mainstream media — did not paint him out to be some terrorist or monster.

Perhaps had bystanders been seriously injured or killed, the media would be paying more attention to the fact that whatever other things were going on with Livelsberger, one of those things was the radicalization of a Trump sympathizer into a violent extremist.

But as if taking its cue from McMahill and Evans, the media coverage has mostly left that part out.

Well, there have been other salacious or compelling storylines to focus on: a Cybertruck exploding in front of a Trump hotel; “very strange similarities” between Livelsberger and Shamsud-Din Jabbar, who killed New Orleans revelers with a truck earlier on New Year’s Day; the prospect of AI’s new role as an instruction guide for DIY explosive devices; and, of course, the tragedy of a hero’s fall.

Livelsberger left behind statements calling for an armed, violent assault on the nation’s most important public institutions, to be carried out by people of whom he approved. He called for a “purge” of people of whom he disapproved from the nation’s institutions “by any means necessary.” And, according to his journaling, he envisioned it all as a triumphant ride on the “Trump, Musk, Kennedy…wave to the highest hegemony for all Americans!”

And we’ve reached the point where the vast majority of the media doesn’t regard that as a particularly important part of the story, if they mention it at all.

Maybe the media hasn’t taken Livelsberger’s political extremism seriously because it happened in a place the media (and the nation) has a habit of not taking very seriously. Bizarre thing happens in Las Vegas, must be a day that ends in a y, etc. In which case Livelsberger’s hope that Las Vegas would be a prime location to place a wake up call was a miscalculation.

Or with everyone from Mark Zuckerberg to members of Congress from both parties to all the billionaires to pockets of the media surrendering in advance to Trump, maybe wake up calls are just passé anymore.

Portions of this column were originally published in the Daily Current newsletter, which is free and which you can subscribe to here.

Nevada Current is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Nevada Current maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Hugh Jackson for questions: info@nevadacurrent.com.

When two of Nevada’s presidential electors sign the certificate declaring to Congress that Donald Trump is the winner of Nevada’s six electoral college votes next week, they will still be facing charges for sending a fake electoral college certificate to Congress in 2020.

A year ago – three years after the fake electors had signed and sent the phony certificate – Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford filed charges against them in a Clark County court for offering a false instrument and uttering a forged instrument.

The judge in Clark County dismissed that case in June, saying she lacked jurisdiction over events that took place in Northern Nevada.

But Ford Thursday announced that his office had filed charges against Nevada’s six 2020 fake electors in Carson City.

Ford filed the forgery charge in Carson City Thursday “as a preemptive measure to ensure that the statute of limitations on this charge does not lapse.”

“My office still believes that Clark County is an appropriate venue for this case, and will continue to seek a ruling from the Nevada Supreme Court” to that effect, Ford said in a statement.

Ford said his office will continue to try to overturn the Clark County judge’s ruling that the charges had been filed in the wrong venue, but in the meantime “we are preserving our legal rights in order to ensure these fake electors do not escape justice.”

The fake electors’ actions constituted “direct attempts to both sow doubt in our democracy and undermine the results of a free and fair election,” Ford said. “Justice requires that these actions not go unpunished,” he said, adding “this is not going away.”

Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in Nevada by 33,596 votes in 2020.

Two of the Republican presidential fake electors from 2020 – Nevada Republican Party Chair Michael McDonald and Clark County Republican Party Chair Jesse Law – are also listed as presidential electors this year, according to the Nevada Secretary of State’s office.

The other four 2020 fake electors are Jim DeGraffenried, Duward James Hindle III, Shawn Meehan, and Eileen Rice.

In addition to McDonald and Law, the other four presidential electors in 2024 are Bruce Parks, Kathyrun Njus, Robert Tyree, and Brian Hardy.

Their meeting to cast Nevada’s electoral college votes – unlike those falsely filed by fake electors in 2020 – will be legitimate. Trump defeated Kamala Harris in Nevada by 46,008 votes in 2024.

Electors in Nevada and all the other states meet as the Electoral College on Dec. 17.

Nevada Current is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Nevada Current maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Hugh Jackson for questions: info@nevadacurrent.com.

“Virtually 100 percent of the new jobs under Biden have also gone to illegal aliens. Did you know that? A hundred percent.”

That was one of the false claims Donald Trump asserted during an address in Las Vegas Sunday that was predominantly about immigration but that veered wildly in multiple directions, including insulting his teleprompter provider, mulling the prospect of being killed by an electric boat as opposed to a being killed by a shark, and reading a poem about a snake.

To reiterate, his claim is false. One hundred percent of new jobs created during the Biden administration were not taken by migrants who crossed the U.S. border illegally, for a lot of reasons, not least being that it would be statistically impossible.

The White House likes to say that 15 million jobs have been created since Biden became president. But 9 million of those were jobs that had been lost during the pandemic and came back. An argument can be made that policies enacted by Biden and congressional Democrats were crucial to bringing those jobs back, especially as quickly as it was done. But let’s play a Trump-friendly devil’s advocate and say the administration can only claim 6 million new jobs have been created under Biden’s watch.

About 2.5 million migrants who crossed the U.S. border illegally were released into the U.S under the Biden administration. Perhaps another estimated 1.6 million “gotaways” got into the U.S. by circumventing the authorities, potentially bringing the total to a little more than 4 million, including children.

That’s more than the number who entered the U.S. while Trump was president. But not enough to fill 6 million jobs – new jobs, by the way, that were spread broadly across several employment sectors, including hundreds of thousands of professional and technical positions, many of which would require accepted certifications that would make hiring of undocumented workers highly unlikely.

Here are some of the other false, curious, or just weird things Trump said in Las Vegas Sunday, in no particular order:

On the Nevada Republican U.S. Senate Primary. Trump has not endorsed in the contest featuring Sam Brown and Jeff Gunter, and Trump didn’t endorse either candidate on Sunday. But one of his random, scattered rants about his teleprompter not working properly reminded him of a faulty teleprompter during an Ohio rally earlier this year. That train of thought in turn led him to swerve into noting the Republican candidate he endorsed in the primary for U.S. Senate in Ohio (Bernie Moreno) will be facing “a senator named Brown” (incumbent Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown).

“You have a man named Brown right here, you know. Very good,” Trump said, without clarifying who that “man named Brown right here” was, or if he had a first name, or why Trump had mentioned him.

On wage growth for Black workers. Under the Biden administration, “Real wages of African Americans and the workers of all over the world that came here legally – they’re down six percent,” Trump said. Trump’s impression that the Middle Passage was a form of legal immigration aside, his assertion about real wages, to borrow a phrase Trump led his crowd to chant on more than one occasion Sunday, is “bullshit.”

Historically disadvantaged groups are disproportionately employed in low-wage jobs. According to a recent Economic Policy Institute analysis of wage and census data, real wages – that is, adjusted for inflation – among low-income workers were 12% percent higher in 2023 than they were in 2019.

“Black men, young workers, and working mothers experienced particularly fast wage growth over the last four years,” the report found.

The Economist (far from a wild-eyed leftist publication) concluded in a separate analysis of federal data earlier this year that “median earnings for Black workers were about 84% of those of white Americans at the end of 2023” – further progress needs to be achieved, obviously – but that is “a sharp rise from the 79% average of the preceding two decades.”

On “suckers” and “losers.” Trump is very mad at Joe Biden, who often notes that Trump in 2018 reportedly skipped visiting a cemetery where more than 2,000 U.S. soldiers who died in World War I are buried, and referred to the deceased Marines as “losers” and “suckers.” The report, originally published in The Atlantic in 2020, was later confirmed by Trump’s then-chief of staff, John Kelly.

“Think of it from a practical standpoint,” Trump said while denying the event in Las Vegas Sunday. “I’m standing there with generals and military people in a cemetery” – Trump is off to an inauspicious start here, as he didn’t go to the cemetery – “and I look at them. I say ‘These people are suckers and losers.’ Now, think of it. Unless you’re a psycho or a crazy person or a very stupid person, who would say that, anyway?”

Who indeed?

On the First Amendment. “I do a great show,” the professional television personality said, referring to his interviews on Fox News. But then “they put on commercials that are just horrible,” evidently referring to commercials paid for by campaigns or organizations that are not pro-Trump. “They shouldn’t be doing that,” he said.

On if he loses to Biden: If he doesn’t win, Trump warned, “you’re headed to World War III. You are closer now to World War III than you’ve ever been, and this is no longer army tanks going back and forth shooting – World War II, World War… There are nuclear weapons the likes of which and the power of which has never, ever been seen before. So again I want to thank you all. I want to thank all the celebrities for being here. We have great celebrities.”

***

At least it was a partly cloudy day, and a bit cooler than it has been. (While I was there, anyway; I left early to beat the traffic, and then caught the parts I’d missed on CSPAN). Still, six people were transported to hospitals, according to the Clark County Fire Department. Hopefully they’re all ok.

Nevada Current is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Nevada Current maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Hugh Jackson for questions: info@nevadacurrent.com. Follow Nevada Current on Facebook and Twitter.

Donald Trump along with the Republican National Committee and the Nevada Republican Party, both wholly owned Trump subsidiaries, sued Nevada Friday saying any mail ballots that are not received by or on Election Day must not be counted.

Nevada law requires mail ballots to be counted as long as they are postmarked no later than Election Day and received by county election officials within four days after Election Day.

The suit is almost identical to one Trump’s Republicans filed in Mississippi(!?) early this year. (Yet again Nevada is the Mississippi of the West, but this time in a different way.)

Yes, Republican advocacy of “state’s rights” has always been situational.

Other nearly identical suits to disenfranchise a segment of the mailing electorate have already been dismissed (by Trump-appointed judges by the way) in Illinois and North Dakota.

Trump & Friends keep filing the suits anyway, and presumably more are on the way in the 19 states and territories that require ballots to be counted after Election Day provided they’re post-marked by or on Election Day.

Even if Trump loses all the suits, they are a vehicle for casting aspersions on democracy and another means to try to dishonestly discredit election results in advance. (As Trump said this week, “If everything’s honest, I’ll gladly accept the results.…If it’s not, you have to fight for the right of the country.” Everyone knows what that means.)

But an additional motive was at work in Trump’s suit in deep red Mississippi: Trump is shopping for a Trumpy federal judge who will make a Trump-friendly ruling that will trigger appeals, maybe go to the Trump-McConnell Supreme Court, and possibly set national precedent and, hence, national law.

In other words, nullify ballots that arrive after Election Day even if they’re postmarked before Election Day in Mississippi, and nullify them nationwide in the process.

Meanwhile, the suit filed in Nevada is only one of many that Trump and Republicans have promised/threatened to file this year in battleground states as part of a concerted and deliberate effort to harass election officials and their employees while maligning and attempting to discredit democracy.

At the very least, the suits will be a time-consuming nuisance for people working in state and local election offices in states across the nation.

At the very worst, given the Weltanschauung of the Trump-packed U.S. judicial system, there is always the possibility – in defiance of what thus far has been ruled to be logic, case law, and constitutional interpretation – that the Republicans could prevail and scrap all ballots that arrive after Election Day, even if those ballots were postmarked before it.

Trump and Republicans would genuinely welcome anything that curbs voting by mail – or more specifically, its impact.

Remember all the Nevada Republican howling and squealing in 2020 about how mail ballots were super vulnerable to fraud? And then remember how the only example of mail voting fraud that came to light was the MAGA guy who said somebody stole his deceased wife’s ballot and fraudulently voted on her behalf? And then it turned out the ballot stealer/fraudulent voter was none other than the MAGA guy himself?

That unsavory incident came after years of Trump, customarily without a shred of evidence, falsely asserting that voting by mail was intrinsically fraudulent.

He’s continued making those false claims in 2024. “We have to get rid of mail-in ballots because once you have mail-in ballots, you have crooked elections,” Trump said earlier this year.

But last month Trump changed his tune, and now is encouraging voting by mail.

Why the flip-flop?

Probably for the same reason there is no repetition of 2020-style evidence-free blathering about mail voting being susceptible to fraud in the suit Trump, the RNC, and the Nevada Republican/Fake Electors Party filed Friday.

They’re not suing because voting by mail is, as Trump put it, “crooked.”

They’re suing to curb the number of mail votes that get counted for the simple reason that Democrats vote by mail more than Republicans do.

“In Nevada’s 2020 general election,” the suit says, “60.3% of Democratic voters voted by mail, compared to just 36.9% of Republican voters.”

Perhaps Trump and Republicans shouldn’t have spent the last several years screeching lies about how “crooked” mail voting is.

Dang. Hoist by their own petard. What to do?

Simple.

If you can’t beat ‘em, nullify their votes.

A version of this column was originally published in the Daily Current newsletter, which is free and which you can subscribe to here.

Nevada Current is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Nevada Current maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Hugh Jackson for questions: info@nevadacurrent.com. Follow Nevada Current on Facebook and Twitter.

For months, staff from Republican presidential campaigns and other observers have criticized the Nevada State Republican Party’s presidential caucus, arguing the state party deliberately designed and scheduled the Feb. 8 contest to assure Donald Trump wins Nevada’s delegates to the Republican National Convention.

And for months, state party chair Michael McDonald has denied the allegations.

But at a rally for Trump in Reno Sunday, McDonald abandoned all pretense and confirmed what critics have been saying all along.

“February 8th,” McDonald shouted while introducing Trump at the rally, which was broadcast on CSPAN. “Mark your calendars. That’s the day you show up to caucus for Donald J. Trump.”

“You come out to your location, you walk in with your neighbors, you sit with your neighbors and tell them how great Donald Trump is. And then you cast your ballot for Donald J. Trump.”

Several other Republicans also filed to compete against Trump in the state-run caucus, including Ron DeSantis, Chris Christie, and Vivek Ramaswamy.

McDonald also told the crowd to ignore the Republican primary on Feb. 6, which must be held under state statute.

Trump’s name will not be on the state Republican primary ballot, because Trump didn’t file to compete in it.

Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley is one of three candidates with name recognition who initially filed for the Republican primary. The other two, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott and Trump’s vice-president, Mike Pence, dropped out of the race earlier this year.

Political parties are allowed to determine how delegates to the convention are awarded, in accordance with national party rules and practices. McDonald declared early on that delegates to the convention would only be allowed for candidates who participate in the caucus, not the primary.

Nevada is the third state in the Republican presidential nominating process, after Iowa and New Hampshire, but has received scant attention from any of the candidates, in part because of the confusion caused by the party holding a caucus even though the state must hold a primary.

McDonald’s endorsement of Trump Sunday will likely make Nevada’s Republican presidential contests even less enticing to other candidates or national media.

Earlier this month, Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford indicted McDonald and the five other Nevada Republicans who attempted to award Nevada’s electoral college votes to Trump as part of a coordinated attempt made by the Trump re-election campaign and allies to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Joe Biden won the 2020 election in Nevada by more than 33,000 votes. Nevada Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske, a Republican, reviewed election fraud and irregularity allegations lodged by McDonald and other Nevada Republicans and found no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election.

Nevada Current is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Nevada Current maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Hugh Jackson for questions: info@nevadacurrent.com. Follow Nevada Current on Facebook and Twitter.