las vegas — Aaron Mahan is a lifelong Republican and has voted twice for Donald Trump.
He had high hopes of appointing a businessman to the White House, and although he found the president’s brutal arrogance annoying, Mahan voted for re-election. He said, mostly, because of party loyalty.
However, by 2024, he will have had enough.
“I saw more bad qualities, more arrogance,” said Mahan, who worked for decades as a food server on and off the Las Vegas Strip. “And I felt like he was running at least partly to stay out of prison.”
Mahan was unable to support Kamala Harris. He has never supported a Democratic presidential candidate. So, when illness got the better of him on Election Day, it was a good excuse to stay in bed and not vote.
Mahan said he’s not a Trump hater. “I don’t think he’s evil.” Instead, the 52-year-old calls himself a “realistic Trump” who sees good and evil.
This is the reality of Mahan: a significant drop in pay. He exhausted his emergency savings. Stress every time he walks into a gas station or visits the supermarket.
Mahan happily throws things into his grocery cart. “Now, you have to look at the prices, because everything has become more expensive,” he said.
In short, he’s experiencing the worst combination of inflation and economic distress he’s seen since he started waiting tables after finishing high school.
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Las Vegas lives on tourism, an industry fed by rivers of disposable income. The decline of both has led to an even more painful decline following the pent-up demand and years of take-off that followed the crippling coronavirus lockdown.
Over the past 12 months, the number of visitors has decreased significantly and those who come to Las Vegas are spending less. Passenger arrivals at Harry Reid International Airport, located a short distance from the Strip, were down, and room nights, a measure of hotel occupancy, were also down.
Mahan, who works at the Virgin Casino Resort just off the Strip, blames the slowdown in large part on Trump’s failure to tame inflation, his pugnacious tariffs and immigration and foreign policies that have antagonized people — and potential visitors — around the world.
“His general attitude is: ‘I’ll do what I’m going to do, and you’ll either like it or leave it.’ They leave it,” Mahan said. “The Canadians don’t come. And the Mexicans don’t come. And the Europeans don’t come the way they came. But also people from Southern California don’t come the way they come either.”
Mahan has a way of describing the painful blow to Las Vegas’ economy. He calls it the “Trump recession.”
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Mahan was an Air Force brat who lived all over the United States and, for a time, in England before his father retired from the military and began looking for a place to settle.
Mahan’s mother grew up in Sacramento and loved the mountains that surround Las Vegas. They reminded her of the Sierra Nevada. Mahan’s father worked intermittently as a waiter. It was a skill of great use in Nevada’s vast hospitality industry.
This was the capital of the desert.
Mahan was 15 years old when his family arrived. After high school, he attended college for a while and began working at the bar at the Barbary Coast Hotel and Casino. Then move to the upscale gourmet room. The money was good. Mahan found his career.
From there he moved to Circus Circus, then in 2005 to the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino, where he has resided ever since. (In 2018, Virgin Hotels purchased the Hard Rock Hotel.)
Mahan, who is single and has no children, has learned to adapt to the ups and downs of the hospitality industry. “As a caterer, there will always be slowdowns and takeoffs,” he said over lunch at a dim sum restaurant in a Las Vegas mall.
Mahan would cash in during the summer months and hunker down during the slow times, before things started to improve around the new year. It weathered the Great Recession, from 2007 to 2009, when Nevada led the nation in foreclosures, bankruptcies soared and weeds blew through many of Las Vegas’ overbuilt subdivisions, which fell financially short.
This economy looks worse.
Over the past 12 months, Las Vegas has attracted fewer visitors and those who come are spending less.
(David Becker/For The Times)
With tourism on hold, the hotel where Mahan works has changed from a full-service café to a buffet with limited hours. So he no longer waits tables. Instead, he runs an open window, preparing drinks and serving food to guests, which brings him a small amount of tips. He estimates his income has dropped by $2,000 a month.
But it’s not just that his salaries have become significantly slimmer. They don’t go nearly that far.
gasoline. egg. Woof. “Everything costs more,” Mahan said.
He admitted to being a soft drink addict, and was gulping down Dr. Pepper. “You’ll get three bottles for four dollars,” Mahan said. “Now they’re $3 each.”
It has been scaled back as a result.
Worse still, his air conditioner broke last month, and Mahan spent $14,000 replacing it — plus an expensive filter he needed for allergies — pretty much wiping out his emergency fund.
It’s as if Mahan is barely getting by, and he’s not at all optimistic that things will improve anytime soon.
“I look forward to the day when Trump leaves office,” he said.
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Mahan considers himself somewhat apolitical. He would rather hit a tennis ball than discuss the latest events in Washington.
He likes some of the things Trump has accomplished, like securing the border with Mexico — though Mahan is not a fan of the zealous immigration raids sweeping away landscapers and tamale vendors.
He’s happy with the no-tax provision for tips in the massive legislative package passed last spring, though, “I’m still taxed at the same rate and there’s no additional money coming in right now.” He’s waiting to see what happens when he files his tax return next year.
He doesn’t count on much. “I wasn’t convinced by anything at all,” Mahan said. “Until I see him.”
Something else was going on in the back of his mind.
Mahan is a store manager with the Culinary Union, a powerful labor organization that has helped make Las Vegas one of the few places in the country where a waiter, like Mahan, can earn enough to buy a house in an upscale suburb like nearby Henderson. (He points out that he made the purchase in 2012 and probably couldn’t afford it in today’s economy.)
Mahan worries that once Trump is done targeting immigrants, federal workers and Democratic-run cities, he will go after organized labor, undermining one of the fundamental building blocks that helped him ascend into the middle class.
“He’s a businessman and most businessmen don’t like to deal with unions,” Mahan said.
There are some bright spots in Las Vegas’ economic picture. Conference bookings increased slightly during the year, and we look forward to further strengthening them. Gaming revenues increased year over year. The workforce is still growing.
“The streets of this community are not full of people who have been laid off from their jobs,” said Jeremy Aguero, principal analyst at Applied Analysis Inc., an economic and financial policy consulting firm in Las Vegas.
“Layoffs and unemployment insurance trends have gone up,” Aguero said. “But it is certainly not significantly high compared to other periods of instability.”
However, this offers little solace to Mahan as he prepares drinks, delivers prepared food and keeps a careful eye on his wallet.
If he had known then what he knows now, what would the Aaron of 2016 — the hopeful figure of the Trump presidency — say to Aaron today?
Mahan paused, his chopsticks hovering over the custard dumpling.
“Get ready for a bumpy ride,” he said.