President Donald Trump is visiting Las Vegas on Saturday amid a national furor over his administration’s handling of immigration.
Nevada is one of the nation’s most important states in 2018’s midterm elections, with a Senate seat, the governor’s office and two competitive House seats on the ballot.
Trump will raise money for Sen. Dean Heller, perhaps the nation’s most endangered Republican in November’s midterms.
He’ll also speak at the Nevada Republican Party’s convention and attend a roundtable to help sell the tax cuts he signed into law last year.
The Nevada trip comes after Trump was in Minnesota on Wednesday. Next week he’ll campaign in South Carolina for Gov. Henry McMaster ahead of the state’s primary runoff and in North Dakota for Rep. Kevin Cramer’s bid to unseat Democratic Sen. Heidi Heitkamp.
The trip shows the extent to which Trump and Heller have repaired their relationship.
Heller was a Trump critic during the 2016 election. Last summer, he famously stood with Brian Sandoval, Nevada’s popular outgoing moderate Republican governor, and declared his opposition to Trump’s bill repealing parts of Obamacare.
The two broke the ice on an October flight to Las Vegas after the mass shooting there. Heller, meanwhile, has been a staunch advocate for Trump’s other policies – particularly tax reform.
Democrats will be counter-programming with their own state convention in Reno, featuring Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and highlighting the party’s Senate candidate challenging Heller, US Rep. Jacky Rosen.
Warren will also stop in Henderson, near Las Vegas, for an evening event with Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto.
Democrats say they’ll use the day in part to highlight the Trump administration’s practice of separating children from their parents at the border after they’ve entered the U.S. illegally, and the failure of the Republican-controlled Congress to pass an immigration bill that protects the young undocumented immigrants – sometimes called DREAMers – who had been protected from deportation under former President Barack Obama through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which Trump ended.
Trump signed an executive order Wednesday intended to end the family separations but it’s unclear how families already divided will be reunited.
