Dana Rohrabacher is a surfing enthusiast, cannabis activist, and former Reagan speechwriter who once joined muhajadeeen to attack Russian targets and Afghanistan and arm wrestled a visiting bureaucrat named Vladimir Putin in a DC bar while representing Orange County, California for 15 terms in Congress. In recent years — to the consternation of some of his fellow Cold Warriors — he emerged as the most vociferous defender and apologist for Putin and Hungarian strongman Viktor Orban, a friend of British populist Nigel Farage, and a visitor to Julian Assange.
But after losing reelection in 2018, he declared he would be moving to Maine. Now, as I reported last week in the Maine Sunday Telegram, he’s here, having moved his family to York full-time. He doesn’t appear to be engaging in cannabis politics here in Maine — where the newly legalized recreational marijuana industry is just getting going — but he is backing a mentee of his, Republican 2nd District Congressional hopeful Eric Brakey, who I caught up with for the story.
I first became aware of Rohrabacher in 2015, when I was back in Hungary writing this POLITICO story on Orban.
COLIN WOODARD is a New York Times bestselling author and award-winning journalist. He is the author of six books that have been translated into a dozen foreign languages and inspired an NBC television drama. He is currently Director of Nationhood Lab at the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Affairs at Salve Regina University. As State and National Affairs Writer at the Portland Press Herald and Maine Sunday Telegram he won a 2012 George Polk Award and was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 2016. He is a contributing editor at POLITICO and his work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Economist, Smithsonian and dozens of other major publications.