Donald Trump only attracts the best and the most mentally stable people. Every personnel decision his campaign has made from Corey Lewandowski to Katrina Pierson to Paul Manafort to Steve Bannon simply screams AWESOME!! And nothing says awesome like the surrogates Trump collects. One of the best and most mentally stable of his surrogates in Maine Governor Paul LePage. LePage took time out from social commentary like his warning

…that drug dealers with names like “D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty” come to his state to sell heroin and “impregnate a young white girl before they leave.”

to become an early Trump endorser. It didn’t help. Ted Cruz beat Trump like a rented mule in that state’s caucus and then reduced LePage to tears when they took the delegates. More recently, LePage has been in the news with more trenchant observations on American society:

Republican Gov. Paul LePage is being accused again of making racially insensitive comments, this time by saying photos he’s collected in a binder of drug dealers arrested in the state show more than 90 percent of them are black or Hispanic.

The governor made the remark at a town hall in North Berwick on Wednesday, a day he also said the father of a dead Muslim U.S. Army captain is a ‘‘con artist’’ for criticizing GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump.

LePage’s comment about the drug dealers came after a businessman asked how he could bring a company to Maine ‘‘given the rhetoric you put out there about people of color,’’ the Portland Press Herald reported.

LePage, who’s white, said he keeps a three-ring binder of photos from drug busts and most ‘‘are black and Hispanic people from Waterbury, Connecticut; the Bronx; and Brooklyn.’’

Binders of drug dealers. He has binders of them.

I don’t know the breakdown of drug arrests by race in Maine and I’d hope like hell that the governor has more productive use of his time than scrapbooking mugshots. Even if it is true it is unnecessarily inflammatory and, what makes it worse, it is a blinding non sequitur to he question he was asked which really calls into question why he answered in that way.

As surely as night follows day, someone accused LePage of racism. Then more people did. Then a reporter asked LePage to comment on whether or not he was racist. Hilarity ensued.

LePage sent the message Thursday morning after a television reporter appeared to suggest that Democratic Rep. Drew Gattine was among several people who had called the governor a racist, which Gattine later denied. The exchange followed remarks the governor made in North Berwick on Wednesday night about the racial makeup of suspects arrested on drug trafficking charges in Maine.

Maine Gov. Paul LePage leaves profanity-laced voicemail for state lawmaker https://t.co/95VimG2MUO https://t.co/xu5kUswtgY

— CNN (@CNN) August 26, 2016

LePage later invited a Portland Press Herald reporter and a two-person television crew from WMTW to the Blaine House, where during a 30-minute interview the governor described his anger with Gattine and others, told them he had left the phone message and said he wished he and the lawmaker could engage in an armed duel to settle the matter.

“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.”

The only problem…

Gattine said Thursday that he never called LePage a racist.

“What I said to the television reporter today is that the kind of racially charged comments the governor made are not at all helpful in solving what the real problem is,” Gattine said. “And that is, we have a crisis in the state of Maine of people overdosing on heroin and prescription drugs and we are not doing enough with respect to treatment and prevention.”

Gattine said he essentially agrees with LePage that drug traffickers must be stopped from coming into the state.

“The law enforcement piece is incredibly important,” Gattine said. “And I don’t really care what the color is of the people that are importing drugs into this state. I think law enforcement needs to be in a position where it can do its job, but in an area where we are really failing is not funding treatment and prevention as much as we should be.”

These are the kind of people that will inhabit a Donald Trump administration. And they are why I actually fear a Trump win more than a Hillary win. I experienced the psychic drain of defending a GOP president who was not not making the best decision… that would be George Bush during his second term. And we all paid a helluva price for even being associated with him in 2006 and again in 2009. And George Bush was a smart, sane, and genuinely nice human being. Trump is none of those things. The price we will pay for being lumped together with Trump will quite possibly reduce the nation to one-party rule for a generation.