Greetings from sweltering Las Vegas

Reflections from my first Trump rally in several years

As soon as I stepped off the plane on Saturday, I felt a heaviness.

The air is hot and confining here in Las Vegas; it leaves my whole body thirsty, even my eyes and skin; and no offense intended, but I’m just not a Vegas kind of girl.

prompt: Las Vegas as Vanity Fair in Pilgrim's Progress

The glitz and contrived debauchery trigger something embedded in my deep Midwestern Christian-girl wiring that makes me think about Vanity Fair in the classic Christian allegory Pilgrim’s Progress - the glamorous destination filled with the empty promises of worldly pleasures designed to distract the pilgrim from his true mission.

I am very sorry to seemingly disparage an entire city; I know lots of people love living or vacationing here, and that’s more than okay - great actually - that we’re all different. Also, I fully admit this is my hangup.

But I don’t like being here. And I think a big reason why is that, on an almost cellular level, I’m feeling some of what I felt when I was here seven years ago to cover one of the most horrific mass shootings in U.S. history. The juxtaposition of that slaughter against the neon lights and giant fountains felt especially jarring, like a true hellscape in the middle of the desert.

So I’m thinking about that.

This time I came here to cover former President Trump’s rally on Sunday at a Las Vegas park. It was hot - my cell phone showed 100 degrees as I was leaving - and Trump spoke for more than hour, starting right around high noon. Between walking a decent distance from the parking lots, going through security, getting in place before Trump arrived, and then filing out afterward, many of the thousands of people who attended spent hours in the heat. The campaign had warned attendees to be mindful of the Nevada heat, provided water and arranged for fans to be strategically positioned around the park.

Photos by Sarah McCammon

I hadn’t been to a Trump rally years - not since the 2021 Senate runoffs in Georgia just before January 6. And not much has changed. The themes of Trump’s speech were similar: attacks on immigrants, attacks on Democrats, attacks on the press. Trump supporters were just as ardent as ever: I couldn’t help but notice how many elderly people - and some people with wheelchairs or canes - stayed through it all, enduring the Nevada heat.

“If we win Nevada, we win the whole thing,” Trump told the crowd.

And he may be right. A Republican hasn’t won a presidential contest here since President George W. Bush took the state in 2004. And President Biden won by a fairly narrow margin in 2020.

The Trump campaign says it’s focusing efforts on Latino voters, who make up a significant voting bloc here. The Biden campaign, meanwhile, released a statement calling the Vegas rally “a slap in the face to Latinos” and noting Trump’s history of anti-immigrant rhetoric, some of which was on display this weekend.

That’s the latest from Vegas. I’ll be taping an episode of the NPR Politics Podcast later this morning and then heading home.