The Long Game

The sun glared off the silver dome of Nevada’s capitol building in Carson City, and inside, Treasurer Zach Conine paced with theatrical urgency. Called on short notice, the conference room was half-filled with reporters already weary from weeks of headlines warning of tariff wars and economic tremors.

Ever the cautious bureaucrat, Corcine didn’t see a battlefield—he saw a crisis. But he didn’t see the whole war.

“This administration,” he said into the microphones, his voice tight with frustration, “is disconnected from the needs of working people. Their economic policies are dangerous.”

He listed grievances like a teacher handing out failing grades–higher construction costs, expensive fruit, rising car prices, jittery restaurant owners, and dropping tourism numbers. It was true—on the surface. The numbers didn’t lie, nor did they tell the whole story. Conine’s lecture made the evening news, echoed by pundits across the state.

But hundreds of miles away, in a sterile room humming with fluorescent light, a man named Devon Garrison, a mid-level analyst for the Department of Commerce, smiled at a screen full of data. The red line was dipping again, but the green line beneath it had started to climb.

Slowly. Steadily.

For all its noise and bluster, the Trump Administration had one quality, often overlooked and rarely attributed to it–patience.

During a quiet policy meeting far from the cameras, the president’s economic advisors laid out the plan. America, they argued, had become too dependent on foreign supply chains.

It wasn’t just a matter of national pride—it was national security. Tariffs, done right, weren’t just punishment. They were leverage, encouragement, and pressure.

Industries howled. Politicians postured. The press pointed fingers. But in the background, new factories began to rise—small, at first. Steel in Ohio. Microchips in Arizona. A solar panel plant in Texas. In Nevada, a quiet partnership between federal agencies and state business leaders had already begun reshaping supply lines that once stretched across oceans.

The pain Conine described wasn’t unexpected. It was the friction of gears turning after decades of rust.

By late summer, as tourists filled Las Vegas casinos and Reno’s neon streets buzzed with music and slot machines, something curious began to happen. Prices stopped rising. Some even fell. A restaurant chain that had struggled with import costs announced a deal with a new supplier in Utah.

A construction firm broke ground on a new development with domestically sourced materials. Farmers in Nevada who once cursed the tariffs now negotiated directly with distribution firms that used to buy Brazilian.

Conine’s numbers caught up—room tax revenue bounced back, up three percent year over year by October. Taxable sales began to recover.

Slowly. Steadily. And across the state, workers took jobs in new industries born from necessity, not comfort.

The president, never one for subtlety, took to the podium later that year, his tone triumphant.

“They said we were reckless. They said we didn’t understand economics. Well, guess what? We rebuilt what they let rot. And we did it faster than they ever thought possible.”

The crowd roared.

Back in Carson City, Treasurer Conine held another press conference, one quieter. He acknowledged the rebound. He praised Nevada’s resilience. But he didn’t mention the long game. Didn’t mention how a brash administration with the subtlety of a hammer had used that hammer to forge something lasting.

He couldn’t say it.

But the people living it could.

And the data didn’t lie.