Christopher Hooks is a politics writer for the Texas Observer based in Austin.

Michele Fiore remembers her arrival in Nevada as one of the most important moments in her life. She was 23, and had left behind a failed marriage and her childhood friends in Brooklyn for a fresh start. In the car, driving into the American Southwest, she was struck by the sense that she was arriving on a studio set, a home for her dramatic ambitions.

“The desert was an eye-opener. As I was looking at the scenery, all I could think about was Bonanza and John Wayne,” she says, at the kitchen table in her home in northwest Las Vegas. “I used to think that that was a backdrop, until I literally drove through it.” This was a place where great things happened, and people became great in return.


Two decades later, at age 45, Fiore, who descended a spiral staircase to our interview wearing a long, form-fitting red dress, tall, tan boots and a handgun pendant necklace, is finally in the spotlight. Elected to the Nevada Assembly as a Republican in 2012, Fiore has become a sort of populist celebrity in the state, and a perennial source of controversy and eccentricity. Before Donald Trump was hypnotizing cable news networks, Fiore was making headlines with her bluster, like when she said of Syrian refugees that she wanted to “put a piece of brass in their ocular cavity and end their miserable life,” or when she expressed a desire to arm “young, hot little girls on campus” to allow them to kill rapists. For $25 a pop, Fiore’s fans can buy her Walk the Talk Second Amendment Calendar: Each month features her posing in salacious costumes with a variety of firearms in glamorous, high-contrast shots, in what amounts to a sort of soft-core gun porn. For May, she dresses as a sexy sailor with a Taurus Judge .45 Revolver: For October, as a Vegas showgirl with a Kimber 9mm pistol.

votefiore.com

Though she briefly rose to a leadership position in the state assembly, it wasn’t really until this February that Fiore burst into the national consciousness, when she involved herself deeply in Ammon Bundy’s occupation of the National Wildlife Refuge in Malheur, Oregon. (She had previously been involved in Cliven Bundy’s stand-off in Bunkerville, where cable networks first discovered her punchy style.) An ally to the fringe groups that make up the anti-Federal resistance in the west, she was credited with helping to negotiate the end to Ammon’s occupation. Now, hoping for a louder megaphone, she’s running in the crowded Republican primary in the 3rd Congressional District, which covers the southern tip of Nevada and part of greater Las Vegas.

There are some who think Donald Trump emerged from a vacuum—that his particular breed of personality-driven appeal, political recklessness, truth bending and shameless self-promotion is something new in American politics. But he has many antecedents, some of whom rose to power during and after the populist wave in 2010. Fiore, who sees the similarities between herself and Trump, has been one of the most peculiar. She’s parlayed her public life into a degree of fame and fortune. And, in the process, she managed to stumble onto an issue of real importance.

It would be easy not to take Fiore seriously—she has a theatrical presence and a face and temperament custom-made for cable news. But her steady courtship of fringe causes has put her squarely at the center of a growing national issue: She’s the most prominent elected official in America to really embrace the fringe groups that make up the anti-government militia movement, which has expanded during the Obama years. That now puts her in a unique position: She is a leading voice reinforcing the sense of martyrdom and victimhood that fuels the anger of the militia-affiliated, while aspiring to join the very government they’d undermine.

True to form, Fiore’s run a bizarre campaign for Congress: One of her ads features Fiore talking in front of a green-screened Constitution, evoking the aesthetic of Breaking Bad’s Saul Goodman. Most professional observers of Nevada politics think her highly unlikely to win. But a lot of Fiore’s story is unlikely. And in the year of Trump, who knows?

***

Fiore consents to a mid-morning interview at her homestead, in northeast Las Vegas, on a warm, cloudless April day. While her young assistant clatters casually on a keyboard nearby, she makes coffee and puts hers in a Wonder Woman mug—as a kid, she always wanted that lasso, she says—and, surrounded by her grandkids’ art and western knick-knacks, makes small talk about the presidential race. She helped chair Ted Cruz’s campaign here, but she loves Donald Trump, whose style and appeal mimic her own, she thinks. Her mom, Fiore’s longtime partner in crime, considers herself a Democrat for Trump.

Fiore is misunderstood, Fiore says. Thanks to that gun calendar and her work with the Bundys, she’s identified by much of the nation as a western figure, but she’s also a product of the high-crime, dysfunctional New York City of the 1970s and 80s, the city of Bernie Goetz and white flight. Born in 1970, she grew up in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, raised by a single lesbian mother and her many relatives, “I kind of grew up like a princess, in my little Italian family,” Fiore says, “in a loving gay household,” surrounded by “cops and union members and gay folks.” Two uncles, NYPD officers, taught her how to shoot guns.

Once she got to Nevada, she launched a variety of business ventures, including a home health care company called Always There 4 You, shut down last year amid a stand-off with state regulators. She remarried. In 2005, she wrote, directed, produced and starred in a movie, Siren, about a bored housewife named Storm Fagan who attempts to forge a new career as a singer. It played repeatedly, unofficially, in a vacant real estate office on the sidelines of that year’s Sundance Film Festival.

In May, 2015, she admonished a fellow Nevada lawmaker, whom she called “colored,” to stop talking about “the race issue” during a hearing on a voter ID law.

As the years went on, she started to play new roles. She hated politics for a long time, she tells me. “But my second husband used to listen to Rush Limbaugh all the time, and I used to get aggravated with him about it. Until I started listening to Rush myself.”

Rush slowly introduced Fiore to politics—a portrait of him makes an appearance in her gun calendar—but the issue that ultimately called her to arms is an unusual one for a right-wing lawmaker. When legislators started ratcheting down reimbursement rates for her home health care businesses, Fiore says she turned to her husband: “Who’s making these laws? Who is making these decisions? He said, ‘Oh, it’s your elected officials.’” So Fiore decided to run to office. She ran for Congress first in 2010, but failed to make the cut, and secured a seat in the state legislature in 2012.

She did pretty well, at first. She took a libertarian line at the assembly, voting for same-sex marriage and medical marijuana bills. As late as 2014, when she was getting involved in Cliven Bundy’s dispute, she was treated as something of a rising star in the Nevada Republican Party. But she fought a lot with her party’s leadership, and Governor Brian Sandoval, a moderate Republican. Sandoval championed a tax increase, and Fiore fought it, hard. She briefly became the Assembly’s Majority Leader. But when word broke the IRS had placed more than $1 million in tax liens against her home care business, the party saw a chance to be done with her: She was stripped of her leadership positions and sent to the back benches. She decided to run for Congress instead of re-election.

Fiore’s Brooklyn theatricality and desire to be heard, and seen, suited her well in politics. In her own happy way, she stumbled on a mechanism that helped Donald Trump win the Republican nomination this year. She makes statements she knows to be provocative, then bathes in the attention. In May, 2015, she admonished a fellow Nevada lawmaker, whom she called “colored,” to stop talking about “the race issue” during a hearing on a voter ID law. A Christmas card featuring four generations of her family carrying guns, including a small child, won her interviews with outlets as far away as BBC Radio 5.

State media disseminates these statements widely—and sometimes the national media as well, earning Fiore fans in unexpected places. Fiore wins points in certain corners for her bravery, then hits the media for ignoring context, which allows her to play victim. She’s able to put herself in headlines seemingly whenever she wants. Recently, Fiore suggested to a Las Vegas local TV station that it was within a person’s rights to point guns at law enforcement officers who were aiming guns themselves. After a firestorm, she asserted that she was talking only about the Bureau of Land Management, her hated enemy, and also that she currently had a romantic relationship with a cop.

To figures like Fiore, media attention is oxygen. She’s fought extensively with Jon Ralston, a political journalist who’s carved out a steady line of work explaining Nevada to the rest of the country. (Ralston is also a contributing editor to Politico Magazine.) Among other bouts in the long-running match between the two, Ralston first reported the story of the investigation and shuttering of Fiore’s home care business. The mere mention of his name lights her face up.

I am not that politician that says, ‘Oh, that’s just the media.’ Nope. I’m that politician that will go and spend a thousand dollars to do a background on you and find out exactly who you are and who is listening to you.”

Ralston took the fight to her first, she says, so she was only happy to take the fight to Ralston. “I am not that politician that says, ‘Oh, that’s just the media.’ Nope. I’m that politician that will go and spend a thousand dollars to do a background on you and find out exactly who you are and who is listening to you.” She slings a series of charges against Ralston, and urges me to “be an investigative reporter and find out what Johnny Boy does." (Ralston, when I called him, says that Fiore’s been spreading false information and threatening to dig up dirt on him for years.)

A minute later, I ask again about the background check. You paid for extensive background research on Ralston? “Not fully.” But I should dig up the dirt, she tells me, it’s all there.



***

In her kitchen, Fiore tells me that she won’t hold back with me: That political correctness is killing the country, and that it’s important to be brutally honest. But she’s as capable of code-switching as any other politician. Fiore says the Bundy protests were useful in bringing people’s attention to issues at hand, but asked if she wants more direct action, she deflects: She wants to see what she calls the “militarization” of agencies like the BLM rolled back. She’s heartened that so many elected officials came to embrace the concerns of the Bundys, directly or indirectly.

To other audiences, she strikes a different tone. In the aftermath of the Malheur occupation, when she won a lot of broadly positive attention for her role in negotiating the occupiers’ surrender, she’s repeatedly appeared on far-right radio shows and webcasts to give accounts of what happened. The passion of the movement that supported the Bundys is now being channeled into “liberating” those arrested in the course of the occupation.

Fiore calls them “political captives” and “political prisoners” and relates tales of their abuse and maltreatment by prison officials in Oregon and Nevada: She tells one webcast, the North West Liberty News, of the Malheur prisoners’ daily exercise in a kennel, and maintains that they’re being humiliated for their opposition to the tyrannical administration in Washington.

Then there’s LaVoy Finicum, the Malheur occupier who told the media he’d rather die than be arrested, and did just that, after a lengthy confrontation with federal agents toward the end of the occupation. Fiore quickly tweeted that he had been killed with his hands up, which turned out to be false. But Finicum’s supposed martyrdom has become a potent symbol for the militia-affiliated. And Fiore has helped that come to pass. To the Liberty News, she talked about Finicum’s “murder” and agreed with its hosts that the instructions that resulted in his death came from Barack Obama’s White House. On another show, she discusses at length the circumstances of what the host, Gavin Seim, refers to as “the assassination of LaVoy Finicum.”

Supporters join Republican Assemblywoman Michele Fiore, right, as she files paperwork in Las Vegas on March 9, 2016, to run in Nevada's 3rd Congressional District. | AP Photo

Asked by Seim to explain who she is, she says she wants people to know, first and foremost, that “I am truly a fighter for our people.” Many of those watching the Malheur occupation were amazed that only one person had been killed, given the amount of guns and anger involved, and credited the feds with restraint. Fiore and her supporters paint a different picture. In Bunkerville and at Malheur, the Feds were planning a bloodbath, just like in Waco and at Ruby Ridge, and it was only narrowly avoided. As Fiore puts it: “Was the BLM preparing for a Bunkerville Slaughter?”

It’s a dangerous game she’s playing. The American militia movement over the last few decades manifests in a relatively predictable pattern. There’s periods of relative silence, in which the groups stew over past grudges, and then there’s a flashpoint. LeVoy Finicum’s “assasination” and the humiliation of Malheur’s “political prisoners” are becoming part of that lore: If that anger boils over years down the road, Fiore will have had a hand in it.

At the same time, the rapport Fiore built with the Bundys and their supporters allowed her to talk the Oregon occupiers down from a position which many feared would escalate into serious violence. Her successful attempts to steady nervous hands at the wildlife refuge is Fiore’s most cinematic moment, and maybe her most significant accomplishment in public life. It’s one of a very few times that the assemblywoman won the right kind of media attention.

***

Fiore was stripped of her positions in the assembly because of tax issues, but it’s hard to say what she’s suffered for her fringier positions. In fact, she’s sought-after: She served on Ted Cruz’s Nevada Leadership Team before the state’s caucus. She loved his dad, Rafael, and liked Ted’s record. But she pledges to fight for Trump now. “I’ll become the biggest fighter for him just like I was the biggest fighter for our cowboys.”

But Trump is more or less opposed to Fiore on federal lands, her most important issue.

She doesn’t mind—policy positions are a little bit like being in love, she says. “You’re with someone and you think, this is it. I could never imagine my life without this person. And then you break up. Then all of a sudden you find yourself a year later with another person, going, ‘Oh. I get it now,’” she says. “When you look at politics and policies and stances, people evolve, as they should. So once upon a time when I met my first husband, I said, ‘Oh my god, I’m going to die with this guy.’ Well, now I’m 45, and I’ve had two husbands, and a couple of relationships. And so, when you look at that, you can see, people evolve. That’s normal.”

Unlike her ex-husband, she thinks Trump will come around.

Fiore is running in a crowded field. The Republican primary in the 3rd district includes Nevada Senate Majority Leader Michael Roberson, former 2012 congressional candidate Danny Tarkanian and Andy Matthews, the former head of a free-market think tank, the Nevada Policy Research institute—all weighty names. The odds are against her. “I think it would be a miracle for her to win,” says Ralston. Nobody really knows why she’s running, he says, and everyone has a different theory. “Get attention, sell magazines, get a reality show, runs the gambit.”

She’s indeed launching a magazine alongside her bid: In her kitchen, Fiore hands me a copy of Truth in Politics the Magazine, a monthly journal which Fiore is pushing for a subscription cost of $24 a year. The first issue features a picture of Fiore, glammed up and smiling beside a horse, Spirit. She’s holding Spirit’s reins in her right hand and a Remington Model 1100 shotgun in her left. (It’s the July photo from her calendar.)

Subscribers get a privileged look into Fiore’s world. She’s written an account of her efforts to stave off the “Bunkerville Slaughter.” There’s an account of the overmedication of veterans, leaning heavily on information provided by the Church of Scientology-affiliated Citizen’s Commission on Human Rights. The cover story: “Islam Is The Religion of War,” penned by a disgraced former FBI agent and anti-Islam activist, John Guandolo, who has suggested Muslims have infiltrated the federal government at its highest levels and shouldn’t have the right to constitutional protections.

Asked what she’ll do if she doesn’t win—a question a lot of politicians won’t answer—she smiles. She’ll work for the cause. Just for 10 years, though. “And then it’s like, I get to live my life,” she says. For some people, politics is a calling. For others, roleplay.

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly said that Jon Ralston has considered taking legal action against Fiore.