LAS VEGAS—Colt Ford’s concert may have been the marquee attraction at Stoney’s Rockin’ Country Friday night, but hours before the country rapper took the stage, another traveling show had the club quaking and shaking.
The “I Told You So Tour” headlined by Donald Trump Jr. and featuring an assembly of MAGAverse luminaries, drew on old favorites and new hits—supplied courtesy of the Biden administration—to the delight of about 250 fired-up patrons, who set forth afterward hooting and whooping into the searing setting sun ablaze in resolve to right what they see as a lack of due process and transparency in the 2020 election.
That mission begins, patrons were told, by voting for U.S. Senate candidate and former Nevada Attorney General Adam Laxalt, and for Nevada governor hopeful and Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo, in the state’s June 14 Republican primaries.
Although favored to win their inter-party scrum and endorsed by former President Donald Trump, neither are backed by Nevada’s Republican Party Committee.
Laxalt, in particular, is being challenged by former U.S. Army Capt. Sam Brown, who has the state committee’s backing and financial support from more than 40,000 individual donors, and has whittled a near-40 percent polling deficit back by at least two-thirds in the campaign’s final month.
The winner of the Republican primary will face incumbent U.S. Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) in November.
Lombardo, while clearly the frontrunner amid a gaggle of GOP gubernatorial candidates that once totaled 20, is being stressed by attorney Joey Gilbert in their primary contest’s final days.
In fact, about a dozen Gilbert supporters unfurled a banner for their candidate while chanting “Joey, Joey, Joey” when Lombardo was on stage, prompting the club’s bouncers to give them the boot and whisking them into the parking lot to loiter in the heat.
“It’s folks like that who don’t move the party forward,” Lombardo lamented, claiming Gilbert and his supporters “lack vision” and won’t carry the day against incumbent Democrat Gov. Steve Sisolak in November’s general election.
While Lombardo had the floor for his allotted few minutes, the rally was clearly staged to boost Laxalt’s Senate campaign. Events in Washington D.C., not Nevada, were the focus for nationally-known speakers, including several who’ve been stumping with Laxalt for months. The Stoney’s rally followed an earlier Friday event in Carson City.
Former Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell, an acting director of national intelligence during the Trump administration, introduced the speakers, and the rally ended with Laxalt and Trump Jr. sharing the stage.
In between, former acting U.S. Attorney General Matt Whitaker, American Conservative Union (ACU) Chair Matt Schlapp; former U.S. Department of Defense Chief of Staff Kash Patel of EpochTV’s Kash’s Corner, ‘Stop the Steal’ activist Alex Bruesewitz, and Amanda Milius, director of ‘The Plot Against The President,’ reinforced the importance of getting Laxalt onto the November ballot to defeat Masto—a key victory if Republicans are to retake the Senate.
Patel, who lives in Las Vegas and was introduced by Grennell as “the next FBI Director,” said Laxalt is the only 2022 U.S. Senate candidate who he has endorsed.
Nevada voters need to send him to the Senate “for the country, not just Nevada,” Patel said, citing Laxalt’s national security background and calling him “the best candidate for the Senate in the United States. Go out and find ten people you can talk to” and make sure they vote for Laxalt next week, he said.
Whitaker called Washington D.C. “an island surrounded by reality” that can only get real if Americans elect America First patriots and competent leaders like Laxalt to the Senate and House.
“Make sure Adam Laxalt is the 51st vote in the Senate. We have to do more than we’ve ever done to get him elected,” he said. Voters must “send Masto home, to Washington or wherever she lives.”
Laxalt said he’d work to trim regulations, secure the border, fight crime, and defend parents’ rights.
President Joe Biden is fulfilling his “pledge to kill American energy independence,” he said, which is among the reasons that the nation is experiencing record-setting inflation that is even worse in Nevada at 12 percent.
The Biden administration’s response? “Go buy an electric car,” Laxalt said, adding the only other response from the administration appears to be, “Everything is great. You don’t know how great the economy is. It’s like they’re in an alternative universe bubble.”
He chastised Democrats for allowing an “assault on law and order,” recalling the summer of 2020 of “BLM riots when we saw American cities burn” and the recent threats to assassinate U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brent Kavanaugh.
Laxalt said that Biden’s response to the attempt on Kavanaugh’s life has been “crickets” and noted that the federal government has “still allowed protesters at his home” despite the threat.
Meanwhile, he said, “the border is wide open” and will remain that way unless Republicans retake Congress in 2022 and the White House in 2024.
Trump Jr. called the White House under Biden “the most expensive nursing home in history” and said the “I Told You So Tour” is based on a simple premise: “Guess what folks, as it turns out, Donald Trump was right about everything.”
He said America First voters must “take back the swamp” by installing “my father’s slate” in the Senate and the House.
When “USA, USA, USA” chants arose, Trump Jr. cautioned the crowd: “You guys realize you are now on a ‘watch list’?”
Laxalt said that November is only four months away.
“We got to go to work; leave no stone unturned,” he said. “We are going to have a red wave in 2022. We’re going to see the largest, widest, red wave we’ve ever had in Nevada.”
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