The Mess in Maine

Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows decided Thursday to remove Donald Trump from the state’s presidential ballot. Jared Golden, a Democratic congressman from Lewiston who voted to impeach Trump over the January 6th riots, quickly issued a statement:

We are a nation of laws, therefore until he is actually found guilty of the crime of insurrection, he should be allowed on the ballot.

Eight years ago this month, the big story in the presidential race was whether or not Trump was out of line in saying Hillary Clinton got “schlonged” in the 2008 primary. A Washington Post “linguistic investigation” quoted Steven Pinker in saying that “given Trump’s history of vulgarity… it’s entirely possible that he had created a sexist term for ‘defeat,’” but the paper concluded that Trump’s problem was that “he’s a gentile who, linguistically, may have wandered too far from home.”