A Republican state lawmaker in Minnesota who recently introduced a bill to create a mental illness category for liberals obsessed over Donald Trump was arrested on Tuesday for allegedly soliciting a minor for prostitution.
Minnesota senator Justin Eichorn was arrested and booked on Tuesday. He believed he was talking to a 17-year-old female, but was communicating instead with detectives from the Bloomington, Minnesota, police department, police allege.
Eichorn, a 40-year-old whose biography on the Minnesota Senate website says he is married with four kids, faces felony charges for soliciting a minor to practice prostitution.
“As a 40-year-old man, if you come to the Orange Jumpsuit District looking to have sex with someone’s child, you can expect that we are going to lock you up,” Booker Hodges of the Bloomington police department said in a statement.
The Minnesota Senate GOP called for Eichorn to resign, saying the reports were shocking. “Justin has a difficult road ahead and he needs to focus on his family,” the caucus said in a statement. The Republican party of Minnesota also called for Eichorn to resign because of the “seriousness” of the charges.
Eichorn is one of five authors of a bill introduced this week that would classify “Trump derangement syndrome” as a mental illness. The derogatory term is often used by Trump supporters to claim liberals are obsessed with Trump to the point of being mentally ill.
The bill defines the syndrome as “the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal persons that is in reaction to the policies and presidencies of President Donald J Trump. Symptoms may include Trump-induced general hysteria, which produces an inability to distinguish between legitimate policy differences and signs of psychic pathology in President Donald J. Trump’s behavior.” Expressions of the syndrome could include “intense hostility” toward Trump or “overt acts of aggression and violence against anyone supporting President Donald J Trump or anything that symbolizes President Donald J Trump”.
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The bill garnered national headlines and criticism from the left. State senate majority leader Erin Murphy called it “possibly the worst bill in Minnesota history” and said if it’s a joke, it wastes time and trivializes real mental health issues. If it’s serious, it’s “an affront to free speech and an expression of a dangerous level of loyalty to an authoritarian president”.
