President Joe Biden did a selfless and patriotic thing when he announced he wouldn’t seek re-election. His wholehearted endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris has turned the 2024 presidential election on its head.

Donald Trump’s Republican Party apparatchiks have responded the way most sycophants do when their bully-in-chief gets his nose bloodied. They’ve started sniveling.

The people who conspired to overturn the 2020 presidential election by force and installed fake electors in key battleground states — including Nevada — are once again calling the other guys cheaters. These desecrators of the U.S. Constitution, who filed stacks of specious lawsuits in Nevada and elsewhere that fomented election conspiracies and outright lies, are at it again.

With Harris setting fundraising records and already using her formidable prosecutorial skills to carve up convicted-felon Trump on the campaign trail, the response from top Republicans and their Svengalis inside the Heritage Foundation think tank is painfully predictable: They’re preparing to sue.

As ever in moments such as this, Nevada appears to have a role in the amorality play. As reported by The Associated Press, Nevada was named along with Georgia and Wisconsin as a state offering “the potential for pre-election litigation” that would make “the process difficult and perhaps unsuccessful,” a Heritage official wrote in a June email as part of the organization’s “Oversight Project.” The goal of such litigation would be to prevent Biden from dropping out of a race he has already discontinued.

That doesn’t mean it won’t be litigated in what Heritage predicted would be “the contentious path ahead.”

But the arch-conservative think tank that traditionally prefers taking a lower profile in wielding its influence inside the Republican Party will have difficulty riding to Trump’s rescue as he gripes about his opponent being a mean-spirited woman, and much worse. The exposure of Heritage’s Project 2025, a voluminous authoritarian playbook that would gut government, erode personal freedoms and hand unprecedented power to the president, promises to shadow Trump’s campaign. Although he has lamely denied a connection to it, his political fingerprints are all over it. It is being called “A wish list for a Trump presidency.” Perhaps he’s read the Cliff’s Notes version of the 900-page document.

A thoughtful reporting analysis of Biden’s bowing out of the race by Louis Jacobson and Amy Sherman of Poynter’s PolitiFact team throws water on team Trump’s latest legal smokescreen. With no official nominee (Democratic National Convention starts Aug. 19 in Chicago) and state ballot deadlines more than a month away, there’s nothing to litigate.

As state ballot access expert Richard Winger told The AP, “It’s ridiculous for people to talk about ‘replacing Biden.’ He hasn’t been nominated yet.”

But just because the idea is ridiculous doesn’t mean lawsuits won’t be filed. Not if the 2020 presidential race is a reliable indicator. As if predicting what many have been expecting during the dramatic runup to Biden’s decision not to seek re-election, prior to his announcement Sunday House Majority Leader Mike Johnson (R-LA) told CNN’s State of the Union that Democrats have “legal hurdles in some of these states and it’ll be litigated … They have got a real problem.”

Perhaps Trump’s biggest trouble is that we’ve all watched this tired routine before. The orchestrated predictions, the cardboard foundational arguments, the “novel legal approach” of so-called Constitutional scholars who emerge from the woodwork. 

Maybe Trump’s noted legal authority John Eastman can take time out from the defense of the conspiracy, fraud and forgery charges he faces in Arizona to lend a hand in the anti-Harris harassment. I would have suggested that Rudy Giuliani volunteer to weigh in on this, but he’s disbarred in New York and has also been charged in connection with the attempt to overturn the 2020 election. And don’t get me started on Rudy’s Georgia troubles and defamation issues.

While we’re at it, let’s mark off former Department of Justice attorney Jeffrey Clark, Kenneth Chesebro, Jenna Ellis, James Troupis, Christina Bobb, Alina Habba, and Sidney Powell off the list of players available to check into this Trumpian game. This is just a partial list of attorneys whose careers are forever tarred for shamelessly promoting Trump’s bullshit.

Don’t be surprised to find former Nevada attorney general and rebuffed U.S. Senate candidate Adam Laxalt, who knows plenty about the Heritage Foundation, preparing to enter the charade. After the “Stop the Steal” nonsense, anything is possible.

Some are already predicting a whole new level of low from Trump, who can’t help vilifying any woman who challenges his authority.

If successful, Harris will become the first woman president in U.S. history, and one of Jamaican and Indian heritage no less. Not surprisingly, she’s already having her citizenship status and racial identity maligned on social media. In this race, “nasty woman” comments and pantsuit jokes might be the nicest lines she hears from Trumpworld. And I suspect it won’t faze her a bit.

With a conviction on 34 charges in the Stormy Daniels hush money coverup case, an $83.3 million civil judgment against him in a lawsuit that accused him of rape, and his undeniable role in the Jan. 6 case, Trump has given her plenty with which to work.

While GOP elected officials and conservative social media influencers have started to spew racist and sexist dog whistles in a prelude of coming distractions, former California attorney general and San Francisco District Attorney Harris made allies and critics with tough-on-crime policies and attempts at criminal justice reform. She made her plan to prosecute Trump’s political and criminal record clear. 

“In those roles I took on perpetrators of all kinds: Predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain,” she said. “So hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type.”

We’re about to hear a lot more sniveling from the bully with the bloody nose — through whatever attorneys he can find to take his case.

John L. Smith is an author and longtime columnist. He was born in Henderson and his family’s Nevada roots go back to 1881. His stories have appeared in Time, Readers Digest, The Daily Beast, Reuters, Ruralite and Desert Companion, among others. He also offers weekly commentary on Nevada Public Radio station KNPR.