Michele Fiore stood at the front of the meeting hall at an American Legion Post in the small casino town of Laughlin, Nevada, and told the crowd about the circumstances that had led her to run for Congress. The seat, she explained, is currently held by Republican Joe Heck, who’s leaving to run for the Senate. The Senate seat, in turn, is being vacated by the most powerful Democrat in the chamber, Minority Leader Harry Reid, who is retiring after more than three decades in Congress.
Fiore, 45, had no need to use Reid’s last name or title. Around here, the name Harry was enough. He was born about 40 minutes away from Laughlin and has represented the state for longer than Brooklyn-born Fiore has lived there. A hint of Fiore’s New York upbringing came out as she said the name with an extra-long vowel in the middle: Haarry.
“This area is Joe Heck’s area,” she said. “And Joe is running for Harry’s seat, ’cause Harry’s retiring.” A hallelujah came up from the center of the room.
“Finally!” said Bobbie Burcar, an 82-year-old dealer at one of the local casinos. “I can’t imagine how come he hasn’t been shot before now.”
Fiore laughed and went with it. “I know! I know,” Fiore said. “I can’t believe he lived this long with all these empty mine shafts. Anyway…”
“Good idea!” Burcar interjected.
“You know, they’re abandoned, so it’s not like anyone’s going to be hiking out there, right?” Fiore said. “And there’s a lot of rattlesnakes. So god forbid they did find his body, they’d find lots of poison. So it’d be just perfect.”
During her two terms as a Nevada assemblywoman, Fiore has never been shy about how much she despises Washington and the people who run it. She is known widely for her alliance with the anti-government rancher Cliven Bundy and his family. She traveled to his Nevada ranch in 2014 during an armed standoff with the federal government over decades of unpaid grazing fees. She has forcefully supported the Bundy cause ever since, promoting legislation designed to curb federal power on public lands and often speaking on their behalf. Earlier this year, after two of Bundy’s sons helped stage an armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon, Fiore went there to help negotiate a surrender of the final holdouts after most of the occupiers had been arrested and one of them killed. She told one of the holdouts it was important to avoid more bloodshed: “The only way we’re going to be able to write your story and write your book is if you stay alive.”
Julian Berman
She has also earned the reputation as arguably the most radical, pro-gun candidate running for Congress this year. In an era when the nation faces a seemingly endless string of mass shootings, Fiore has taken positions that set her apart even from most of her fellow Republicans: She advocates the use of guns to fend off the federal government, defend against law enforcement, and even as a way to shut up her own critics.
“Everyone should have a firearm on them. Period,” Fiore said recently. “An armed society is a real polite society.”
In fact, if you know only one thing about Fiore, chances are it probably involves a photo that went viral last year, showing her surrounded by her mother, daughters, sons-in-law, and grandchildren, all posing in front of a Christmas tree and wearing jeans and red shirts. All except for the three youngest grandchildren were armed. That included her bespectacled 5-year-old grandson Jake, who was positioned front and center gripping a pistol pointed at the ground. Fiore caught flack for letting her grandson hold the gun, but she said Jake had more training with firearms than many adults.
Fiore loved the criticism, and she’s already planning on setting up another photo that will involve Jake and guns. She wants the image to show the two of them teaming up on a “tactical reload” with a magazine. “So the magazine will be dropping as Jake will be reloading,” Fiore said. “Just to make the liberals’ heads implode.”
Fiore is the kind of politician who lacks filters and itches for just such a fight. Those qualities have made her a natural fit in an election year that’s given rise to plain-spoken, ill-mannered populists. A few months ago, the best-known political journalist in Nevada labeled her the “female version of Donald Trump.” It’s a term Fiore at first bristled at, but one that she has since embraced as her fellow New York native, whom she recently endorsed, has rolled on to become the presumptive GOP nominee for president. And like him, she doesn’t just hit back against her critics; she tries to set fire to everything around them with the kind of schoolyard taunts that are increasingly, incrementally passing for normal, mainstream political discourse.
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