October surprise

Welcome to this week’s Reno News & Review.

When a billionaire, who owns the state’s largest newspaper, and a governor, who loves to give away money to his corporate cronies, team up to rob hundreds of millions of Nevada taxpayer dollars, I feel it’s important to raise a voice of dissent. The Raiders stadium deal is bad for Nevada, and every legislator who voted in favor of it needs to be voted out of office.

We’ve got more coverage of this historic bamboozle throughout the issue. But I want to thank our designer Meg Larkin for the excellent job she did with our cover illustration. She did a great job of turning a harebrained concept into a striking realization. Similarly, our peerless news editor, Dennis Myers, did great work putting together a meticulous feature story.

In other news, Election Day is finally almost here. It’s disheartening how negative some of the local races have been. For example, I recently received a nasty mailer from Victor Salcido’s campaign that was so full of vitriol directed at his opponent, Jenny Brekhus, that it clearly demonstrated that Salcido is unfit to serve on Reno’s city council.

On the other hand, the presidential campaign has been so entertaining that I’ll miss following it. But I’m not sure Donald Trump ever really had much intention of winning. I mean, sure, when the race was close, he probably started to believe in his own image as a fascist savior, but I think his presidential bid was always motivated by something else.

His recent rhetorical pivot away from actually trying to win the election to instead complaining about the “rigged” system reveals his real motivation: His presidential bid is a publicity stunt to launch a new media company.

His background is partly in TV, after all, and his current roster of campaign advisers includes Steve Bannon of right-wing Breitbart News, and he’s even been meeting with Roger Ailes, the former head of Fox News. (I first encountered this theory in a column by the New Yorker’s John Cassidy.)

And the prospect of a Trump News Network is almost as terrifying as a Trump presidency.