It’s not as eloquent as “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” but give Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar (D) credit for his candor in this pugnacious political season.
With the Department of Justice (DOJ) peppering his workplace with subpoenas in an effort to pry unfastened control of the state’s constitutionally protected accountability to run its own elections, Aguilar lately obtained a letter saying he was the goal of an FBI investigation. Bullies love to apply strain to those they think about they can intimidate, but I’m not so sure it’s working in Nevada.
Aguilar, a Democrat, responded to the letter by telling a Reuters reporter, “I am not scared of these fuckers.”
There it is. Start printing the T-shirts.
“I am not scared of these fuckers.” The secretary of state lacks FDR’s rhetorical aplomb, but he knows how to cut to the backside line. That’s a good factor, because I think he’ll be getting a lot of apply in the battle to defend Nevada’s election course of. A current ballot byThe Washington Post, ABC News and Ipsosfinds roughly 70 p.c of registered voters from both events believe the election end result will be honest, but Trump won’t settle for a loss of control.
After The Indy reported first in September that Aguilar’s workplace had obtained its seventh voter-related subpoena from the DOJ, the administration’s elections fraud charade intensified. It came in the wake of the dismissal of an administration lawsuit against Nevada for refusing to flip over an unredacted copy of its voter rolls, including partial Social Security and driver’s license numbers.
As Trump’s recognition has plummeted, even with loyalists in his MAGA base, the “election security” canard has grown louder. Republican state officeholders who know higher will be challenged to put Nevada’s sovereignty over their celebration’s conspiracy theories.
By their actions, they’ll remind Nevadans who they actually work for. Because the administration’s bugaboo voter fraud claim is an argument without legs. In a well timed report lately revealed at UNLV by Brookings Mountain West and The Lincy Institute, the evaluation of documented voter fraud instances in the Mountain West from 1998 to 2025 confirmed just 11 instances in Nevada out of practically 9 million votes forged.
Lest anyone think the findings were concocted by some liberal think tank’s analytics, the report used knowledge collected by The Heritage Foundation, the conservative mega-think tank accountable for Project 2025.
The report is not a political gotcha. It’s sport over.
But that’s just the drawback. Lying about widespread voter fraud would not need information. Big lies never do.
All they need are enough people in positions of authority to repeat them. That’s half of what makes Aguilar’s line important. “I am not scared of these fuckers.” Because worry is fuel to the large liars.
Look no further than Aguilar’s opponent as he campaigns for re-election. Republican Jim Marchant, endorsed and lavished in reward by the president, is so loyal to the lie that he could be the Robin to Trump’s election-fraud Batman. Flying under a tattered MAGA “Stop the Steal” banner in 2022, Marchant ran competitively against Aguilar, dropping by less than 3 p.c of the vote.
This time, Aguilar has loved a massive fundraising lead. Marchant has relied on his relationship with Trump in a time of high-gasoline costs and every day chaos wafting from the White House. Over the years, Marchant has promoted the conspiracy that Dominion Voting Systems machines were rigged, that paper ballots in a state with 2 million registered voters was the only means to secure the election and expressed great confidence that Nevada’s elections have been fraudulent since 2008. When he lost a race for Congress in 2020 to Steven Horsford, Marchant — you guessed it — claimed he was the sufferer of widespread voter fraud – just like his hero in Washington.
Trump has a lot using on the end result of the 2026 election. He seems notably delicate about the state of play in Nevada and lately gave Marchant a double shot of atta boys and accolades.
In the Reuters interview, Aguilar reminded the DOJ bullies that the scare ways weren’t working. He said, “These individuals can do as much as they want to try to intimidate us, but what it’s going to do is make us harder in our positions and make us fight back even stronger.”
And then he delivered the defining line for Nevada Democrats in the 2026 marketing campaign.
John L. Smith is an creator and longtime columnist. He was born in Henderson and his household’s Nevada roots go back to 1881. His tales have appeared in New Lines, Time, Reader’s Digest, Rolling Stone, The Daily Beast, Reuters and Desert Companion, among others.