On Wednesday, LePage claimed that “the majority” of drug dealers arrested in Maine are black or Latino. He said: “Look, the bad guy is the bad guy. I don’t care what color he is. When you go to war, if you know the enemy and the enemy dresses in red and you dress in blue, then you shoot at red.”
When LePage’s remarks prompted a critical response from Drew Gattine, a Democratic state representative, the governor told reporters he left Gattine a threatening voicemail full of expletives. He said he wished he could challenge the lawmaker to a duel in which “I would point [my gun] right between his eyes”.
The governor apologized on Tuesday for threatening Gattine.
“When I was called a racist I just lost it, and there’s no excuse,” he said. “It’s unacceptable. It’s totally my fault.”
LePage said being called racist “absolutely knocked me off my feet”, comparing it to “calling a black man the N-word or a woman the C-word”.
Gattine has said he didn’t call the governor a racist but instead told a reporter that “the kind of racially charged comments the governor made are not at all helpful”, according to the Portland Press Herald.
The governor has a long history of making controversial statements, which he himself has acknowledged as “outrageous comments”. LePage’s style and unwillingness to back down when speaking about race have drawn comparisons to his party’s presidential nominee Donald Trump. LePage himself has said that he and Trump are “of the same cloth”.
The string of startling remarks LePage has made include an assertion that drug dealers “with the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty” came to Maine and “half the time they impregnate a young white girl before they leave”. He later said he meant to say “Maine women” instead of “white women”.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/aug/30/governor-paul-lepage-leaving-office-racial-remarks-enemy
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