In retrospect, Maine Gov. Paul LePage looks like a foreshadowing of Donald Trump’s rise … and now, LePage seems to be upping his game to keep pace with Trump. He made news earlier in the year when he said that most of the drug dealers arrested in lily white Maine are black or Hispanic. Questioned about those comments this week, he repeated the claim:
“Let me tell you this, explain to you, I made the comment that black people are trafficking in our state, now ever since I said that comment I’ve been collecting every single drug dealer who has been arrested in our state,” LePage said. “I don’t ask them to come to Maine and sell their poison, but they come and I will tell you that 90-plus percent of those pictures in my book, and it’s a three-ringed binder, are black and Hispanic people from Waterbury, Conn., the Bronx and Brooklyn.”
The next day, LePage went after a state legislator he understood to have called him a racist.
“Mr. Gattine, this is Gov. Paul Richard LePage,” a recording of the governor’s phone message says. “I would like to talk to you about your comments about my being a racist, you (expletive). I want to talk to you. I want you to prove that I’m a racist. I’ve spent my life helping black people and you little son-of-a-bitch, socialist (expletive). You … I need you to, just friggin. I want you to record this and make it public because I am after you. Thank you.”
Next, he invited reporters to come for an interview in which he told them about the phone message, and fantasized about dueling Gattine:
“When a snot-nosed little guy from Westbrook calls me a racist, now I’d like him to come up here because, tell you right now, I wish it were 1825,” LePage said. “And we would have a duel, that’s how angry I am, and I would not put my gun in the air, I guarantee you, I would not be (Alexander) Hamilton. I would point it right between his eyes, because he is a snot-nosed little runt and he has not done a damn thing since he’s been in this Legislature to help move the state forward.”
You read quotes like that and have to think Lin-Manuel Miranda has things to answer for. For his part, state Rep. Drew Gattine says he didn’t call LePage a racist, but that he said “that the kind of racially charged comments the governor made are not at all helpful in solving what the real problem is.”