Back in March, Amanda Taub argued for Vox that Donald Trump’s rise could partly be explained by his supporters’ “authoritarian” tendencies.
Governor of Maine: maybe “we need a Donald Trump to show some authoritarian power”
PAUL J. RICHARDS/AFP/Getty
Andrew Prokop is a senior politics correspondent at Vox, covering the White House, elections, and political scandals and investigations. He’s worked at Vox since the site’s launch in 2014, and before that, he worked as a research assistant at the New Yorker’s Washington, DC, bureau.
Gov. Paul LePage (R-ME), a staunch Trump backer, seems to agree. On a radio show Tuesday, he said that he wonders if the Constitution is “broken” and the United States might “need a Donald Trump to show some authoritarian power.”
Here’s his full quote, courtesy of Mike Shepherd of the Bangor Daily News (CNN has the audio):
LePage is a known crank — a Politico magazine piece dubbed him “America’s craziest governor,” and he made headlines earlier this year by worrying that heroin dealers named “D-money” were impregnating Maine’s white women — but this is a mess even for him.
LePage is claiming that Barack Obama is an “autocrat” who ignores the “rule of law,” but that the way to reverse that is to bring in “Donald Trump to show some authoritarian power,” which would be … good?
Meanwhile, Trump himself is going around claiming that if he wins, he’d appoint a special prosecutor to go after his opponent, Hillary Clinton, and that she’d end up “in jail.” Scary times.
