Former President Donald Trump speaks as Nevada Republican gubernatorial candidate Joe Lombardo, right, listens during the America First rally at Treasure Island Friday, July 8, 2022.
Friday, July 8, 2022 | 9:28 p.m.
Former President Donald Trump brought a tough-on-crime message to Las Vegas during a campaign stop Friday in support of Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo, the Republican nominee for governor, and Adam Laxalt, the former Nevada attorney general who is the GOP nominee for the U.S. Senate.
The 45th president, in a speech at Treasure Island, said crime was “scourging” the country.
“If you want to end the killing, if you want to crack down on criminals and thugs laying waste to our communities,” Trump said, “then this November you need to vote the Democrat socialists out of office.”
In front of a crowd of about 300 supporters, with many wearing T-shirts in support of Lombardo or Laxalt, Trump urged people to vote for them and other “America First” candidates. He endorsed Laxalt, who was his Nevada campaign co-chair in 2020, near the beginning of Laxalt’s campaign and endorsed Lombardo in April two months before the Republican Primary.
Trump called Nevada a “cesspool of crime” and called for immediate action.
Nevada is ranked No. 5 in the U.S. Crime Index, behind only Washington D.C., South Carolina, New Mexico and Tennessee. But violent crime in the state has gone down over the last five years, according to Nevada Crime Statistics. In 2021 there were more than 1,400 violent crimes than 2020, and so far 2022 has seen about 60% less crime than 2021.
Lombardo said since he became sheriff in 2015, crime in Clark County had gone down except for in 2021. His statistics are correct, according to Nevada Crime Statistics. Clark County’s violent crime rate has gone down in the last five years, although the murder rate increased in 2021.
“Defunding the police” was also a popular subject during the rally, with Lombardo, Laxalt and Trump lambasting Democrats’ attempts to reallocate police resources.
“What we’ve seen in the last few years with anti-cop rhetoric is this demonization of police. It’s so demoralizing,” Laxalt said before Trump’s speech during a panel discussion with Lombardo, Steve Grammas, president of the Las Vegas Police Protective Association, Myron Hamm, director of corrections for the Las Vegas Police Protective Association, and Tom Homan, former director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Lombardo called his gubernatorial opponent, Democratic incumbent Steve Sisolak, a “defunder of the police.” He was referring to Sisolak’s opposition in 2014 as a Clark County commissioner to the More Cops sales tax initiative, which would have raised the sales tax rate on retail purchases in Clark County to 8.15 percent from 8.1 percent to fund more police. The tax was approved in 2015 with Sisolak's support.
Sisolak also helped increase state police funding, which is up 11% since he took office. And he said he would advocate for a salary increase for state police in the 2023 Legislature if he was reelected.
Trump said “radical Democrats” launched a full-scale assault on the rule of law and law enforcement in 2020 by defending Black Lives Matters protests across the country that ended in “dozens of Americans killed and more than 2,000 police officers injured.” He invoked the name of Metro Officer Shay Mikalonis, who was paralyzed from the neck down after being shot during a BLM protest in June 2020.
Trump, in part, blamed immigrants for crime across the country, especially since Joe Biden took over the presidency.
“Every day, criminals, murders and sexual predators are crossing over (the southern border),” he said. “They’re sending the worst of the worst into the United States of America.”
That includes drug smugglers, Trump said.
“I did a really good job with drugs on our border,” Trump said. “I worked really hard on it for four years plus. We had great success.”
A 2020 study conducted by University of Wisconsin–Madison, however, found “considerably lower felony arrest rates among undocumented immigrants compared to legal immigrants and native-born US citizens and (found) no evidence that undocumented criminality has increased in recent years.”
Trump advocated for stricter penalties for drug dealers that mirror that of China’s.
“They have what’s called ‘quick trial,’” Trump said. “Where a dealer when caught goes to trial quickly and if guilty is immediately executed.”
Hinting at running for president in 2024 while also continuing to falsely claim he won the 2020 election, Trump told the crowd he "ran twice and won twice and might have to do it a third time.”
In Nevada, Trump lost to Joe Biden by more than 30,000 votes in the 2020 election.
In addition to judges — including ones appointed by Trump — dismissing dozens of election-related lawsuits filed by Trump and his supporters across the country, the Nevada Supreme Court unanimously ruled there was no credible evidence of election fraud in the election here. Additionally, Republicans dropped a case they brought in federal court in Nevada that alleged fraud in the 2020 presidential election.
The Nevada secretary of state’s office, run by Republican Barbara Cegavske, also spent 125 hours investigating the claims that the Nevada Republican Party brought forward and could not find widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election in Nevada.
Democratic Attorney General Aaron Ford, too, investigated the fraud claims. His probe found just one person, Donald Kirk Hartle, a registered Republican, who voted more than once in the 2020 election.
Trump ended his speech encouraging people to vote for Lombardo, Laxalt and other “America First” candidates.
“We will all together make America great again,” Trump said. “We will liberate our communities from the scourge of crime. We will protect the innocent. We will deliver justice to the guilty. And we will defend our beliefs in every city, every suburb and every community all across our land.”
Nevada Republican candidates up and down the November ballot attended the rally: Sam Peters running for Congressional District 4, Jim Marchant for secretary of state, Michele Fiore for treasurer, Sigal Chattah for attorney general and Stavros Anthony for lieutenant governor. Regent Byron Brooks also attended.
Democrats protested across from Treasure Island during the rally, calling the campaign event “clownery” in a statement.
“After spending the last year trying to cover up his record of corruption while letting crime spiral out of control in Clark County, Joe Lombardo is now desperately counting on Donald Trump to help his struggling campaign,” said Nevada Democratic Victory spokesperson Mallory Payne in a statement.
“I think that Donald Trump and Joe Lombardo are out of touch with what's going on in the state of Nevada, clearly,” Sisolak said. “But he's tied himself to the MAGA movement and you know some of the extreme policies of the Trump administration.”
Incumbent Democratic Sen. Cortez Masto’s campaign spokesperson Josh Marcus-Blank said in a statement, “Laxalt continues to spread Trump’s lies even though they’ve been proven false, and he’s already planning lawsuits to overturn this coming election if it doesn’t go his way. Laxalt is desperate to gain power, even if he has to break the rules, and this rally is another reminder of why Nevadans rejected Laxalt, Trump and their dangerous policies for three elections in a row.”
