Reid hammers Trump for mispronouncing 'Nevada'

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid has attacked Donald Trump as a liar, a racist and a “human leech.” Thursday morning, Trump’s pronunciation of Reid’s home state made it onto the senator’s long list of grievances.

Trump was campaigning in Reno, Nevada, on Wednesday when he interrupted a portion of his speech on drug abuse to do a riff on how the state’s name is pronounced. Nevadans generally say the name of their state without an "h" sound in the middle (think Neh-VAD-uh, not Neh-VAH-da), but Trump told the crowd that the latter pronunciation was the correct one.


“Heroin overdoses are surging and meth overdoses in Nevada. Neh-VAHH-da," Trump said Wednesday night, drawing out the middle syllable. "You know what I said? You know what I said? I said when I came out here, I said nobody says it the other way. It has to be Neh-VAHH-da. Right? If you don't say it correctly, and it didn't happen to me, but it happened to a friend of mine, he was killed.”

Trump seemed to imply with that point that his friend had only been criticized, not physically harmed. But that didn’t stop Reid from eagerly launching another attack against Trump over the pronunciation as well as his refusal to give an answer to a local news reporter about Yucca Mountain, the proposed nuclear waste storage site in the state that Reid fought hard against.

“If Donald Trump wants to come down from the penthouse his daddy bought him to lecture us on how to say Nevada, he could at least pronounce it correctly,” Reid said in a statement posted to his website. “Instead, Trump told us we pronounce the name of our state wrong minutes before he refused to take a position on Yucca Mountain. I have news for Donald: it’s pronounced Nev-AD-a and Yucca Mountain is dead.”