Michael McDonald, the chair of the Nevada G.O.P. and a fake elector, said he’d deliver the state’s delegates to Mr. Trump. The party’s caucuses seem set to do so.
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Michael McDonald, the chair of Nevada’s Republican Party, at a campaign event for former President Donald J. Trump in Las Vegas last month. He pledged to stay neutral in the G.O.P. nominating contest.
Before the chairman of Nevada’s Republican Party introduced former President Donald J. Trump at a campaign event last month, he casually referred to a telling private conversation they’d had.
“When I talked to the president, I said, ‘I guarantee you, Nevada will show up, and we will deliver you 100 percent of delegates for the state of Nevada,’” the chairman, Michael J. McDonald, told hundreds of Trump supporters gathered in Las Vegas.
Mr. McDonald’s brazen prediction about the caucuses on Thursday stems from his state’s unusually bifurcated nominating contest, the culmination of Mr. McDonald’s closeness with Mr. Trump — an alliance that led to criminal charges for the chairman — and his stewardship of a state party that has fully embraced the former president’s populist conservatism.
Nevada law requires the state to hold a Republican primary, but Mr. McDonald resisted it. His party will instead award delegates based solely on caucuses held by the party on Thursday night, in which Mr. Trump will be the only major candidate on the ballot.
The lack of drama in part reflects the vicissitudes of politics: Other candidates did decide to participate in the caucuses, and paid the party a required $55,000 for the privilege, but they have since dropped out of the race.
Still, many of them grumbled about caucus rules that the party enacted to benefit Mr. Trump. And Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and the former president’s chief competitor for the Republican nomination, opted for the primary after deciding the caucuses were biased, a criticism shared by some Nevada political observers, who laid blame on Mr. McDonald.
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