Trump Appoints Fake Elector As Campaign Advisor In Nevada, A State He Still Claims He Won In 2020

Donald Trump named election denier and indicted fake elector Michael McDonald as senior advisor to his Nevada campaign earlier this week, signaling that the battleground state will continue to be an area of Big Lie fixation if the Republican loses the state in November.

McDonald was one of six Republicans accused of falsely certifying the results of the 2020 election in Nevada in favor of Trump, despite the fact that Joe Biden won the state by more than 30,000 votes. A Nevada state court dismissed the criminal indictment in June of this year, but in response, Democratic Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford has pledged to appeal the decision.

As recently as last month, Trump, during an interview with the Las Vegas Review-Journal, repeated lies about the 2020 election in Nevada, claiming that he won the state: “And I really believe that bad things happened. … I really think we did incredibly, and we, somehow the vote wasn’t there. But I believe we won very strongly, by a lot.”

On Tuesday, McDonald, who has been chairman of the Nevada Republican Party since 2012, told the Las Vegas Review-Journal, in response to Monday’s announcement, that the role is “not just a title” but that it’s a “badge of honor to be able to be in this position, to be here for him [Trump] and the Trump campaign.”

In a statement following the announcement, Biden-Harris 2024 Nevada Communications Director Maddy Pawlak called the move out for what it appears to be: “Donald Trump is so fixated on his 2020 election loss that he’s now appointing one of his fake electors from that election to run his campaign in Nevada.”

“Just last week on the debate stage, Trump refused to answer, three times in a row, whether he would accept the results of the election, and this latest hire in Nevada makes it clear Trump is solely focused on regaining power,” Pawlak added. “Trump already tried to overturn one election, and Nevadans need to come together to defeat him and protect democracy.”

And in a statement to TPM, Stephanie Justice, regional press secretary for the Democratic National Committee, described McDonald as “just one example of the yes-men that Trump intends to surround himself with if elected to a second term: people who will follow Trump’s lead as he dismantles our democracy piece by piece and obliterates the boundaries of executive power.”

This isn’t the first sign that Trump and his allies are thinking ahead on how to deal with the possibility of losing in the fall. In May, the Republican National Committee and the Nevada Republican Party filed a case against the Nevada Secretary of State, alleging inconsistencies with the state’s voter rolls.

A federal judge dismissed the case last month, saying the plaintiffs lacked standing to file the challenge. The case, and similar cases like it, are merely a way for election deniers to sow seeds of distrust in the election system and set themselves up to cry voter fraud, if things don’t go their way in November.

“The ultimate goal of these lawsuits is to lay the foundation for later claims that the election results can’t be trusted because the voter registration rolls can’t be trusted,” director of voting advocacy and partnerships at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center Jonathan Diaz previously told TPM. “And it’s all about creating this atmosphere of doubt and uncertainty.”