This is a "Person who" kind of scenario, of the kind that a certain person personality is distorted to a certain point, all right? All right, well, let's start with a little history:
Brazil, Ukraine, Guatemala, all had "exotic" presidents, strange people that got elected for unlikely reasons and ruled some very disfunctional governments, eventually falling. Ukraine just elected a comedian president, Guatemala had a president called Jorge Ubico who tough that he was the reincarnation of Napoleon and completely militarized the country while building palaces everywhere and Brazil, oh Brazil, we had Jânio f*cking Quadros.
Every Brazilian reading this is probably laughing just of remembering of him, but basically he was elected in 1960 on a wacky attempt by the right wing liberal party UDN to counter the PTB-PSD coalition, thus picking this strange fellow that was the governor of São Paulo from the party PTC and flooding him with money, allowing him to be elected, ruling for seven months before resigning on a attempted self coup since you know, nobody endured him anymore. During his government he banned bikinis, made speeches in broken portuguese trying to gain appeal of the poor, gave a freacking medal to Che Guevara thus causing part of the hassle that led the 1964 coup, allowed chicken fights while outlawing cassinos and passed a law forbidding non dubbed movies to be shown on cinemas, but he is not the focus, this is just the introduction, so here is the idea of the challenge:
Pelley ring some bells of Quadros, Pelley was a fascist, totalitarian, racist but if you remove these things, you got a nuts sci fi writter who had a very "exotic" touch to him, that liked aliens and stuff and had some minor charisma that allowed him to organize his hatefull group. Let's say that for some reason this sci fi writter from Washington is not a fascist and joins the democratic or the republican party, where he suffers from the same fame as "Emperor Norton" had, he begins to make speeches, gather some supporters by preaching his ideology (either republican or democratic plataforms), his books begins to sell more, he turns into some kind of local celebrity and then decides to run for governor. He somehow wins and has a pretty generic government for the most part, but he begins to add some of his stories to childrens books, begins to make very populist rallies, making very
passionate and at the same time not so rational speeches, like claiming that the nazis can bomb america and the government must build large underground vaults to protect the people, or claiming that Christ has came to him and told that unless they start a government project of funding churches the might depression might come, and thus he get's elected later as a senator, having so disfunctional mandates but still getting reelected that he turns into the american Janio Quadros and is remembered by the future generations as the crazy man in the upper house.
Edit: To have a idea of how nuts he was:
In May 1928, Pelley gained notoriety when he claimed he had an
out-of-body experience in which he travelled to other planes of existence devoid of corporeal souls. He described his experience in an article titled "My Seven Minutes in Eternity", published in book form in 1933 as
Seven Minutes in Eternity: With the Aftermath, originally probably appearing in the
American Magazine in the late 1920s. In later writings, he described the experience as "hypo-dimensional".
[9] He wrote that during this event, he met with God and Jesus, who instructed him to undertake the spiritual transformation of America. He later claimed that the experience gave him the ability to
levitate, see through walls, and have out-of-body experiences at will. His
metaphysical writings greatly boosted his public visibility. Some of the early members of the original
Ascended Master Teachings religion, the
"I AM" Activity, were recruited from the ranks of Pelley's organization, the Silver Legion.
What do you think? Is that possible?