THE DIRE WARNING OF A TRUE INDEPENDENT

Senator Angus King of Maine has long avoided party affiliation. But he's desperate to wake people up to the fact that Trump is putting our Constitution in the wood chipper and placing the country in grave danger.

- CHARLES P. PIERCE

I LOST PATIENCE WITH alleged “independent” voters a long time ago. My feeling was that anyone who told pollsters that they were “independent” was either disassociated from politics entirely, or ashamed to admit they were a Republican. As the GOP was overtaken gradually by the prion disease it acquired when President Ronald Reagan fed it the monkey brains in the late 1970s—when the party married itself to the rising Christian nation-alist movement and to the active remnants of American apartheid-calling yourself an “independent” was a handy rhetorical lifeboat. Being a Republican meant you allied yourself with the likes of Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, and Lee Atwater and to the dark side into which the country was led by George W. Bush in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. The two terms of President Donald Trump were never a fluke. They were an inevitability. So given the history of the past 45 years, if asked by a pollster, I'd say I was a Prohibitionist before I'd say I was a Republican. The “independent” lifeboat today is overcrowded and taking water over its side.

But Senator Angus King of Maine is that rarest of birds—a true independent. He began political life as a Democrat but, by 1993, when he defeated his future Senate colleague Susan Collins and two other candidates in a free-for-all campaign for governor of Maine, he had declared himself an independent, and he's stayed that way ever since. Following a legal career that included a stint as counsel for a Senate committee, King had come out of the business world to score his gubernatorial victory and was portrayed as a kind of pine-scented Ross Perot. After serving two terms in Blaine House—named for James G. Blaine, the “continental liar from the state of Maine,” according to Democratic propagandists in the 1884 presidential race—King did some teaching until 2012, when he was elected to the Senate as, again, an independent.