Lombardo and the Art of Doing Nothing

CARSON CITY, Nev.—Joe Lombardo sits in the governor’s chair in Nevada. The trouble is, you wouldn’t know it unless you checked the stationery. He’s there, alright—hollow-eyed, pen in hand, signing vetoes like a bored substitute teacher crossing out wrong answers on a multiple-choice test.

But governing? That’s a different matter entirely.

See, Lombardo’s got a problem–a gnawing existential dilemma unsolvable with a veto stamp and a tough-guy scowl. The problem is that he is hopelessly, irretrievably out of step with the current political moment.

A Republican governor in a state with a Democratic Legislature is one thing, but a Republican governor not knowing what to do about it. That’s a tragicomic farce.

Once upon a time, men like Lombardo ran things with an iron fist—sheriff, lawman, the guy who told you to shut up and do so, but now boxed in, rendered politically impotent, a cautionary tale of a man who won an election but lost the plot. The GOP wants action, blood, scorched-earth politics. Instead, they got a governor whose signature move is a defeated shrug.

He is the perfect inverse of Donald Trump. If Trump is the patron saint of belligerent executive power—”I’ll do whatever I want, and no one can stop me”—then Lombardo is the ghostly echo: “I can’t do anything, and no one can make me.”

His great triumph? Not becoming entirely irrelevant by a razor-thin margin—a single vote in each chamber prevented a Democratic supermajority from turning him into a figurehead. But let’s not pretend he emerged victorious from some great battle.

It wasn’t a war fought in the trenches. It was a bureaucratic coin flip, saving Lombardo’s career from immediate irrelevance.

And so, he sits, a governor with no signature achievement, no grand legislative wins, no defining purpose beyond not being a Democrat. His veto messages read like someone composing a breakup text while half-asleep—rambling, noncommittal, and entirely unconvincing.

If vetoing bills is the height of his ambition, the least he could do is put some flair into it. It is politics, damn it, not a county clerk’s office.

Oh, but he has tried to do things. Badly. Catastrophically. Do we all remember the school choice debacle? The “Opportunity Scholarships” grift, where a shadowy out-of-state nonprofit pocketed the cash, leaving students in the lurch? That was Lombardo’s moment to shine, his big play to demonstrate leadership—and instead, it collapsed, like a Vegas casino demo job.

Now, desperate to prove he’s doing something, he turns to the budget screw-up. Perhaps a minor arithmetic disaster, but revealing in its sheer carelessness. They balance the damn budget. That’s the job. It ain’t optional. Screwing that up is like a firefighter forgetting how to use a hose.

Now we enter Scene Two of Act One of this plodding, uninspired administration. The Trump campaign looms like an incoming hurricane, and Lombardo will find himself needing to navigate Medicaid battles, school funding nightmares, and a political machine that expects him to deliver something.

He’ll be on the ballot this fall, asking Nevada’s voters for another four years of–whatever this is. And the only real question left is: What is the point?