Donald Trump has claimed that Nevada was stolen from him in the 2020 presidential election, in part due to the state’s former Democratic governor, despite the fact he lost by thousands of votes.
The former president has lost the state in the previous two election cycles, conceding it to Hillary Clinton in 2016, and Joe Biden in 2020, where he lost by 34,000 votes.
The margin to Biden was larger than the 27,000 votes Trump lost to Clinton by in 2016, but that didn’t stop the president from claiming without proof that he somehow won in Nevada and the electoral votes were stolen from him.
Speaking to the Las Vegas Review Journal ahead of a rally in Sunset Park, Las Vegas, on Sunday, Trump said the second loss had come despite his belief he had “won strongly.”
“I won the primaries big, and I actually thought I won twice, and some bad things happened,” he said.
“You had a Democrat governor, and I really believe that bad things happened because we were in a very strong position.”
“And so when you say lost, I don’t know what the definition of lost is, but I think we’re going to win it big [this time].”
Nevada’s governor at the time was Steve Sisolak, a Democrat. Sisolak was replaced by Joe Lombardo, a Republican, in 2023.
Trump did not elaborate on what “bad things” had happened in the 2020 election.
The former president went on to praise Lombardo, saying: “We have a great governor, we have a great attorney general, lieutenant Governor, and they have a lot to do with it, and I think we’re going to win very big.”
The Lieutenant Governor of Nevada is currently Stavros Anthony, a Republican. Its Attorney General is Aaron Ford, a Democrat.
“I really think we did incredibly but somehow the vote wasn’t there but I believe we won, by a lot,” Trump told the Review Journal.
At the Las Vegas rally supporters braved 103F temperatures outdoors, causing six people to be hospitalized and 24 others to be treated for heat-related problems.
Despite the horrid conditions, attendees were rewarded with jokes about their deaths and complaints that it was Trump himself who was really suffering.
“I don’t care about you. I just want your vote,” he frankly told his audience, also suggesting they would prefer mass suicide to a second Joe Biden term.
