A Republican who calls himself “Wyoming’s Trump” has declared he will run for governor on a radical states rights platform: He’s promising to take control of the state’s federally-owned land — about half of the state’s public territory — by any means necessary.
“I would sign an executive order requiring the state police to arrest anybody that didn’t vacate their federal offices,” Rex Rammell told The Casper Star-Tribune Wednesday. “We’re talking about the BLM [Bureau of Land Management], the Forest Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife, and the Park Service.”
Rammell, a perennial candidate in Idaho and now Wyoming, has proudly touted his beliefs about right-wing militias for years now. When he ran for Congress in Wyoming in 2016, Rammell’s campaign Facebook page shared a video of Rammell on MSNBC titled, “REPUBLICAN REX RAMMELL RUNNING FOR OFFICE SUPPORTS HOSTILE TACTICS OF EXTREMIST MILITAS [sic].”
Rammell did tell the Star-Tribune that he believes, if elected, he would be able to work with Utah and Idaho (both states with significant portions of federally-owned land) to peacefully convince President Trump to hand over the land to the states. But Rammell doesn’t want to take back the land to conserve it. Rather, he believes taking the land would solve “[a] lot of our problems in the West” by allowing Wyoming start to invest in coal and other natural resource commodities and bypass federal regulations.
Rammell also said he believes he is “Wyoming’s Donald Trump.”
“I speak my mind,” he said.
Rammell, like Trump, has a controversial background, having been convicted for elk poaching after illegally shooting an elk in Idaho in 2010. The two also both have conspiratorial streaks: When Rammell was running for governor of Idaho, he called for a meeting of “faithful priesthood-holders of the LDS church” to discuss a disputed church prophecy known as the “White Horse” prophesy. Those who believe in it say it predicts that the Constitution will one day “hang like a thread.” (There is an ongoing debate about whether the founder of the Mormon church, Joseph Smith, ever made the prophecy at all.)
During the same race, Rammell said that he would buy tags to hunt President Barack Obama. At a 2009 event, Rammell was discussing wolf hunting tags when audience member yelled, “What about Obama tags?”
“The Obama tags? We’d buy some of those,” Rammell responded. He later wrote the comment off as a “joke,” adding on Twitter, “Everyone knows Idaho has no jurisdiction to issue tags in Washington D.C.”
Obama hunting tags was just a joke! Everyone knows Idaho has no jurisdiction to issue tags in Washington D.C.
— Rex Rammell (@rammellrex) August 28, 2009
Today, Rammell seems to think running a Trump-like campaign could finally be his ticket to public office. He called a Star-Tribune reporter in late December after a quote from a GOP operative in a story caught his eye.
“The electorate of Wyoming has a type of candidate that they like to elect. That is typically very pro-business, reasonable … conservative … not the fire-throwing individuals,” Bill Novotny told reporter Arno Rosenfeld.
“We’ll see about that,” Rammell reportedly told Rosenfeld.
Rammell is one of four declared candidates running for governor of Wyoming. The current governor, Republican Matt Mead, is term limited.
As the 2018 races heat up, Rammell isn’t the only one banking on Trump’s far-right, firebrand style. In Arkansas, a woman who once declared her gun range “Muslim-free” is challenging the state’s Republican governor with a campaign focused on passing a meaningless anti-Sharia Law bill that would have banned Sharia Law in Arkansas courts, slashing taxes, and eliminating government regulations. In Colorado, a Breitbart columnist named Tom Tancredo is running for governor on xenophobic, anti-immigrant policies similar to Trump’s.
Across the country, a number of people running for Congress have begun to channel the president as well, some of whom are backed by former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, who returned to his post as executive chairman of Breitbart last fall. On Wednesday, however, a feud broke out between Trump Bannon after the latter man reportedly called Donald Trump Jr.’s notorious meeting with a Kremlin-connected lawyer “treasonous.”
The rift has already begun to upend the midterms, with some mini-Trumps being forced to choose between the Breitbart machine that could get them elected and the president they have been striving to emulate.