Nevada Republicans forsake conservative principles for Trump worship

“From George Washington to Abraham Lincoln to Donald Trump, the presidency has represented limited government and constitutional order…”

Most readers might dismiss that ludicrous statement, which topped a fundraising email sent this week by the Nevada Republican Party, as run-of-the-mill GOP praise for Trump — as thoughtless and lazy as it is obligatory.

But it’s not just that. It also reflects a jarring renunciation of ideals and values that not all that long ago were strongly and proudly held by serious Republicans.

State party chair and Nevada phony elector in chief Michael McDonald, along with the rest of the party’s organizational apparatchiks, appear to suffer from cognitive dissonance so severe they genuinely don’t recognize that Trump’s presidency embodies precisely the opposite of “limited government” and “constitutional order.” Trump derangement syndrome, indeed.

An especially representative sample of Nevada Republican blatant hypocrisy and willingness to disown what they once professed to be their bedrock principles is their acquiescence while Trump has inflicted an enormous tax hike on businesses and consumers.

The U.S. Supreme Court must rule on whether creating a slew of import tax increases without congressional approval, as Trump has done, violates the Constitution’s system of checks and balances and separation of powers. (Note: The court ruled against Trump Feb. 20).

The federal government collected $195 billion from those import taxes — or tariffs, as Trump calls them — last year. But the federal government is projected to collect $418 billion from the import taxes in 2026, and more than $2 trillion between 2027 and 2031, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

That’s a massive tax increase (and almost certainly an inflationary one; as the revenue projections indicate, the tariffs haven’t been fully felt yet).

Trump contends U.S. businesses and consumers don’t pay import taxes because exporters abroad do. 

That’s a fringe theory. A small portion of an import tax burden may effectively fall outside the U.S. if exporters lower their prices. But that’s rare. The overwhelming majority of increased import taxes in 2025 — nearly 90% — were paid not by exporters from abroad, as Trump would have you believe, but by U.S. businesses and consumers, according to a Federal Reserve report last week.

Congress, which the Constitution grants the power of the purse, never approved Trump’s tax increases.

You’d think Nevada Republicans in particular would care about that.

A few years ago when Nevada Democrats controlled the governor’s office and both houses of the Legislature, they enacted a bill not to raise taxes, but merely to keep a tax that was already on the books. 

The Nevada Republican Party was among those howling the loudest about the tax being “illegal” and “unconstitutional” because under the Nevada Constitution new or increased taxes need two-thirds support from both legislative chambers. The vote continuing the tax in the state Senate fell one vote short of that supermajority.  

The state Supreme Court agreed with Republican legislators and ruled the tax had to expire as originally scheduled. The Nevada Republican Party celebrated a “HUGE victory” and the demise of a “sketchy and illegal unconstitutional tax.” 

Now, a few years after squealing about the mere continuation of a tax because it did not have proper legislative approval in Nevada, neither the Nevada Republican Party nor Nevada Republican legislators dare mutter a discouraging syllable about Trump — without proper legislative approval — imposing a tax increase of truly world-historical proportions 

Betraying their own values

A Nevada Republican hasn’t won a competitive U.S. House or Senate race for a dozen years. The two notable victories by a Republican in Nevada over that period, Gov. Joe Lombardo’s in 2022, and Trump’s in 2024, were both despite the Nevada Republican Party, not because of it. The same can be said for most Republican state legislative election wins. And the same will be true if Lombardo wins reelection this year. The Nevada Republican Party is a study in blustering incompetence.

If that were all, well, incompetence isn’t necessarily deliberate or optional, and so might be forgiven. 

But that’s not all. 

The Nevada Republican Party — and this is deliberate — has disowned an allegiance to “limited government and constitutional order” that righteous Republicans used to feel not only in their guts and in their hearts but in their heads. The derangement leading the Nevada Republican Party to turn around and assign those values to Trump, as it did earlier this week, is grotesque. And likely incurable.

It’s also all too common among Republican politicians and organizations not just in Nevada of course but nationwide — though Trump’s tariff policy was resisted earlier this month by a half dozen House Republicans (Nevada’s Mark Amodei was not one of them). 

Republicans would like to absolve themselves of the responsibility of helping to save the rule of law, democracy, and the separation of powers and checks and balances provided by the Constitution —  “limited government and constitutional order,” as the Nevada Republican Party put it in its blasphemous fundraising email. They’re counting on nonpartisans and Democrats to save the country so they don’t have to.

Trump’s disregard for and assault on values is maybe the most ecumenical thing about him; he has no more use for conservative values than he has for leftist ones. And with only the rarest of exceptions, Republican organizations and officials obediently set aside their long-held values and adopt Trump’s situational ones.

If “limited government and constitutional order” survives Trump, it will be despite the Nevada Republican Party.