Welcome back, and it's time for another edition of Where The Hell Is Our Republican Governor. Today's competitor is the fine state of Montana, and the governor they're searching for is the extremely wealthy Gov. Greg Gianforte. For most, Gianforte is known for physically attacking a reporter who asked a question he didn't like, but being elected anyway—because once Republican voters have taken on a tax-cheating, teen-peeping rapist like Donald Trump, then there's just not that much left that the base can pretend to get upset about.
Yes, Gov. Greg Gianforte has gone missing, with the governor's office staff refusing to tell reporters where he's gone or why it's a secret. While that would be a problem in the best of circumstances, it's a much bigger problem now that massive flooding has hit the southwest portion of the state, not just destroying homes but shutting down water treatment in Billings, the largest city in the state.
Signing an executive order declaring a state of disaster was left to now-acting governor Lt. Gov. Kristen Juras, however, because Gianforte is somewhere overseas on a "long-scheduled personal trip" with his wife.
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The Bozeman Daily Chronicle reported Wednesday that both Gianforte's whereabouts and his return date are "unclear," though now his staff is claiming he "is returning early and as quickly as possible." It also reports that Gianforte's staff "did not respond to requests for a copy of the governor's written authorization putting Juras in charge," which is also ... a little weird.
But the weirdest part is the refusal by all parties to even give a rough approximation of where it is Gianforte ran off to, as his state prepared for the predicted flooding. That's not generally considered secret information! It's a bit fishy!
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For those of you who are irritatingly young, the game of "where has our Republican governor gone" has taken on special significance since South Carolina's Gov. Mark Sanford vanished from public view in 2009, leaving his staff to concoct increasingly weird excuses for his absence that culminated in the announcement that the governor was off "hiking the Appalachian Trail" on a day that, though nobody apparently bothered to check first, coincided with Naked Hiking Day. The real story turned out to be worse; after reporters discovered Sanford's car at an airport, Sanford was forced to eventually return—and admit that he had gone off to have sex with a mistress in Argentina.
It turns out that when a governor's office doesn't want to say where the state's leader has run off to, either during a state emergency or not, it can be because the governor didn't tell them or because the governor's destination is somewhere that sounds really, really bad when you put it in a press release. Gianforte is extremely rich and has his own private plane, so the odds are quite good that he has been cooling his heels in some exceptionally posh resort while Billings residents sweat to see whether their drinking water supplies will hold up.
But this is Gianforte we're talking about, so for all we know, he could be attending a multi-day anger management sleepover camp. Or staking out a journalism school, taking notes on who looks especially punchable. Or, and this is probably one of the top possibilities, he’s off to shoot one of the world’s various threatened species in a place where it may or may not be legal to do so. All we know is that it's somewhere kind of embarrassing!
So there's your task, every resident of Montana. Try to determine where, on the planet, your state's governor has gone off to during a state emergency. Is it Cancun? Southeast Asia? Kazakhstan? Will he bring back souvenirs? Your guess is as good as anyone's, because his staff ain't talking.
It's possible that his staff knows exactly where he is and has been hiding it so that reporters can't get pictures of Gianforte strolling, tan, and with luggage in tow, through some international airport. But it could also be the anger management sleepover camp thing. We don't know. The lives of the super-rich are too different from our own for mere peasants like us to possibly understand.
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