What is Worse for Democracy? Sharks or Lies?
Donald Trump came to Las Vegas last week talking about sharks, ocean fires, worker pay and stiffing contractors.
He did not have the rally in his hotel - which does not have a casino in it because even in the mid-aughts Trump couldn’t pass the rigorous background checks to get a casino license in Nevada. Because of that, it presumably has plenty of space to hold a few thousand people.
Instead, he held the rally in 110+ degree heat at Sunset Park which is near where I grew up, and not far from where I live now. I drove by Sunset Park on Sunday morning, where I saw a few thousand white people milling around with MAGA gear. Not realizing Trump was coming to town, I made a wry note that it must be some sort of white supremacist convention.
Alas, I was correct.
The Trump campaign later claimed that 20,000 people showed up. Um… no. Not any more than Trump’s inauguration had the largest turnout ever.
The Renaissance Festival it was not.
It took two hours for Trump to take the stage, which made people and electronics melt. When the teleprompters predictably went down, Trump had a fit, telling the crowd he wasn’t going to pay the teleprompter company.
“I don’t pay contractors that do a shit job, and that’s a shit job.”
Look, my computer literally shut down in the midst of a livestream I was doing of my mother’s headstone unveiling on a typical August day in Las Vegas. I didn’t condemn my mother to hell because she happened to die in the summer. Shit happens. Go with it. Or go inside. (Inside is a perfectly good alternative for a rally; less so for a headstone unveiling.)
Trump also told the crowd that he supports not taxing tips - a clear play for the working class (mostly Hispanic) voting population that are the backbone of resort employees. The Culinary Union, which is incredibly powerful in Vegas, and which represents most of these employees, answered Trump with a big no.
I’ve listened to bits and piece of the speech Trump gave, and while I cringe at the substance - if you can call it that - what makes me more concerned is his speech patterns.
Listen to this:
He’s sounds like your drunk uncle at Thanksgiving.
Or maybe your uncle who has not been the same since he had a series of mini-strokes. Or perhaps a big stroke.
In March, Newsweek interviewed a bunch of mental health experts, who posited that Trump might have dementia.
“New York psychologist Suzanne Lachmann said Trump, [who just turned 78], would ‘seemingly forget how the sentence began and invent something in the middle’ resulting in ‘an incomprehensible word salad’—a behavior she argued is observed ‘frequently in patients who have dementia.’”
In which case, the former president would have done better holding his rally here in the Frank Gehry designed Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health. It’s one of my favorite pieces of architecture ever, and it’s in my hometown. Though I have never, yet, had reason to visit it.
There are lots of other spaces that Trump could have had his rally, scattered in neighborhoods around Las Vegas.
Here’s one, across from my house:
This doesn’t include the quarter of a mile of desert to the left of this shot.
And here’s one, down the street from the coffee shop where I write:
These were taken less than two miles apart from each other. And, I assure you, there are more within a 2-mile radius. I do not live in a rural area. These kinds of open spaces dot every neighborhood in Las Vegas.
And yet, our governor, Joe Lombardo, and the editors of the only local newspaper left in town, the Review Journal, seem as oblivious to this as Trump is to how electric boats and cars work.
Lombardo, in the conservative quest to get more land in Nevada, wrote an editorial in the New York Times arguing that it’s the federal government’s fault that housing and rental prices have gotten so high. He completely ignores that corporate landlords are under investigation for colluding to raise prices across the country, which I wrote about last week. He also ignores all these open spaces.
There is plenty of land to build affordable housing. But there are lots of roadblocks - from regulators and developers - that make it hard to do so.
Lombardo ignores a lot in his Times editorial. Like how we would get water to new developments. Lake Mead has been rising, after years of precipitous fall. And it looks good for the future, despite warmer temperatures.
Still, we have to be careful.
New land would benefit ranchers and miners in Nevada. It is the argument of the Bundy family, who just assumed they could use federal land without following rules. It is what started the Malheur Wildlife Refuge takeover in 2016. White supremacist western ranchers were angry because a father and son in Oregon were punished after they cut through a fence in order to graze their livestock on federal land.
The “we need more affordable housing” is simply a canard for, “We’ve wanted this land given to the state for years and this is the excuse we’re using now.”
Lombardo also elided the truth in his Times piece by blaming rising prices on inflation. As I’ve pointed out many times, it’s not inflation, it’s corporate greed. But corporations are Lombardo’s constituency (as they were Democat Steve Sisolak’s constituency before that), so he’s not going to tell the truth if it will hurt them.
Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey has been holding hearings on greedflation, and his office put out a report last year that lays it out clearly. Corporations are making record profits off of charging us more, then blaming the government.
Too many people in the U.S. - and too many journalists in the country - ignore the real story.
There have been exceptions. Casey’s own state’s Penn Capital Star did not ignore their Senator’s work.
Oddly, neither did Fortune Magazine (which is paywalled, so all you get is a picture).
There are too many reports these days about the fact that people are confused about what’s going on politically. That is on purpose. More reporters need to show that confusion is the goal of one side - and the increasingly natural state of Donald Trump. More of us need to figure out how to write clearly about complicated issues, and not accept lies as just political rhetoric.
Meanwhile, I will keep writing. So I don’t end up going crazy.
Stay strong everybody. Keep in touch with reality. Don’t hold parties in 110 degree weather.