Totes adorbs. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Nevada failed politician Adam Laxalt became the chair of Never Back Down, the PAC that would become a central part of the Ron DeSantis presidential bid, in April.
A month earlier in March, a couple national polls had found DeSantis actually leading Trump. They were outliers – most polls even then showed Trump ahead. But DeSantis hadn’t officially announced his candidacy yet, and at the time it seemed that maybe, possibly, Republican voters, when given a choice, would turn away from Trump, because of, well, all the things.
Of course it all went downhill for DeSantis and his campaign from there.
Laxalt, a naval training roomie and BFF of DeSantis, left his position as chair of the PAC this week. Multiple stories over the last several weeks have chronicled the internecine fighting among DeSantis operatives in the Never Back Down PAC, the campaign, and another DeSantis-allied PAC that was recently created. Maybe backbiting among DeSantis apparatchiks, a phenomenon that will rank among 21st century history’s most obscure footnotes, had something to do with Laxalt’s departure – news reports seem to suggest so.
But the far more likely explanation for Laxalt’s departure was a Laxalt calculation of what is in the best interest of Adam Laxalt.
Over roughly the decade that Laxalt has been on Nevada’s political scene, he has made one thing crystal clear: His goal is to be a Big Deal on the national political stage.
If DeSantis became president, Laxalt would have been beautifully positioned to see his dream come true.
The presidential aspirations of DeSantis instead turned into a nightmare. (And the most notable thing the Laxalt-chaired Never Back Down PAC did in Nevada, which is third on the presidential nominating calendar behind Iowa and New Hampshire, was back down; the PAC pulled its resources out of the state in September, effectively leaving the DeSantis campaign with next to no presence here.)
But Laxalt doesn’t seem the sort of guy who would let his ambition get derailed by a little thing like DeSantis belly-flopping.
In other words, the best explanation for Laxalt’s exit from the DeSantis PAC is the simplest and most obvious one: Adam Laxalt, navy man, is abandoning the sinking ship DeSantis so he can seek permission to reboard the Trump.
According to the New York Times, which first reported Laxalt’s departure, Laxalt wrote a resignation letter to the PAC’s board stating that “After nearly 26 straight months of being in a full-scale campaign, I need to return my time and attention to my family and law practice.”
Oh please. Over the last decade, the ratio of time Laxalt has spent in politics to the time he’s spent practicing law – and this is just a rough and probably overly generous guess – is about 100 to 1.
Laxalt was Trump’s 2020 campaign chairman in Nevada, and Nevada’s face of the big lie after Trump lost the state to Biden. On multiple occasions Trump campaigned in Nevada on behalf of both Laxalt’s failed run for governor in 2018 and Laxalt’s failed Senate bid last year.
But then this year Laxalt hooked up with the one guy who, at the time anyway, posed the biggest threat to Trump securing the 2024 nomination.
The Times report says Laxalt will continue to support DeSantis for president. Whatever. The DeSantis candidacy will end by March 5 (Super Tuesday) at the very latest. At which time (if he hasn’t already), Laxalt can be expected to begin making groveling overtures to Trump, apologizing profusely for cheating on him, and vowing endless loyalty forever and ever amen, in the hope that if elected, Trump will give him some quasi-occupational bauble that will allow Laxalt to continue pursuing his dream of being a Real Live Someone in Washington, D.C.
Alternatively, s’pose, Laxalt – the only Republican nominee for governor of the last quarter century to lose to a Democrat – could return to Nevada and run against Sam Brown again (and others) for the Republican U.S. Senate nomination. For some reason I’m reminded of Dean Heller’s desperate last gasp for relevancy during the 2022 Republican nomination for governor so, yeah, cool.
If Trump wins, Laxalt, no matter where he is or what he’s doing, will be the least of anybody’s problems. Unless Trump decides to put Laxalt in charge of one of the giant detention camps Trump is promising to build.
Of course the best case scenario – not just for Nevada but the nation, the planet, democracy, the rule of law, freedom, civilization, human decency, and humanity’s future – is that Trump loses. And Laxalt continues to be what he’s been to Nevadans over the last year – thankfully out of sight and out of mind.
A version of this column was originally published in the Daily Current newsletter, which is free, and which you can subscribe to here.
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Hugh Jackson