“See you in court.”
With those four words, Gov. Janet Mills went from a 77-year-old governor serving the last two years of her final term in a lightly populated state to an unlikely heroine of the Trump resistance.
“This is how it’s done,” progressive firebrand U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez posted on Bluesky while sharing footage of the governor’s exchange with the president.
Jill Lawrence, a columnist in the conservative anti-Trump news site The Bulwark, described the back and forth as a “a bracing example of something that’s all too rare: a politician standing up to President Donald Trump in a direct, on-camera exchange that ended with nasty threats from the bully-in-chief.” Lawrence went on to join others musing about Mills potentially challenging Republican U.S. Sen. Susan Collins next year.
Meanwhile, Republicans continued to gear up for the political fight that Mills wasn’t necessarily looking for, but that’s now barreling toward her. It will come on two fronts: Sweeping and unprecedented investigations launched by the Trump administration — including a new threat of a lawsuit by U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi — into a state that has allowed some transgender athletes to participate in girls’ and women’s sports; and bills in the Maine Legislature that aim to outlaw the practice opposed by 94% of Republicans and 67% of Democrats, according to a New York Times/IPSOS poll conducted in January.
“Gov. Mills OPPOSES protecting female athletes,” the Maine Republican Party announced in a petition drive to supporters.
Mills’ dispute with Trump, as she put it, is about whether a president can force Maine to comply with his edict while ignoring state and federal laws.
“In America, the President is neither a King nor a dictator, as much as this one tries to act like it – and it is the rule of law that prevents him from being so,” she said in a statement released last week.
Mills believes that the law is on her side and that Trump can’t legally withhold Maine’s share of federal funding until it complies with his unilateral ban on transgender athletes competing in women’s sports. If neither side backs down, the courts will have to resolve the impasse. Until then, here are a few noteworthy aspects of the dispute.
Mills vs. Trump 2.0
The confrontation at the White House was the first time Mills and Trump clashed in person, but they’ve gone toe-to-toe before.
In 2020, Trump came to Maine to visit a swab manufacturer in tiny Guilford. Mills had asked him to stay home.
At the time, Trump’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and racial unrest was generating protests across the country and in Maine. Trump’s preferred approach to dealing with the unrest — mass arrests of protesters — made Mills uneasy.
“You have to dominate or you’ll look like a bunch of jerks. You have to arrest and try people,” he said during a conference call with state governors, including Mills. “If you don’t dominate, you’re wasting your time — they’re going to run over you.”
Mills told Trump that his presence could provoke more unrest.
“I’m very concerned your presence may cause some security problems for our state,” she told Trump.
Trump insisted.
“She tried to talk me out of it. Now, I think she probably talked me into it,” he said of his planned trip to Maine. “She just doesn’t understand me very well.”
When he arrived three days later, he did so with the governor’s predecessor and 2022 reelection challenger, former Republican Gov. Paul LePage.
“You have a governor who doesn’t know what she’s doing,” Trump complained to LePage during a forum with commercial fishermen at a hangar at Bangor International Airport.
“She’s like a dictator,” he said.
“Yes she is,” replied LePage.
Mills responded in a blistering statement that included a line she would reuse during her contest with LePage two years later.
“I have spent the better part of my career listening to loud men talk tough to disguise their weakness,” she said. “That’s what I heard today. I don’t care what the president says about me. I care what he does for Maine people. And that’s not very much.”
The nation notices
The governor’s first kerfuffle with Trump generated national news, but nothing like this. In recent days, the New York Times and others have quickly pulled together biographical summaries of her and national news outlets are trying desperately to land interviews. (So are the local ones.)
But why?
We’re one month into the Trump 2.0 presidency and Democrats are still unsure of what to do with a president who seems impervious to scandal, criminal conviction or attempting to overturn the previous election. Even now, as Trump continues to allow the world’s richest man to dismantle the federal bureaucracy and eliminate jobs and programs while securing new government contracts for his companies, Democrats don’t seem to have a plan. Some are making moves that look like capitulation. On Tuesday, longtime Democratic consultant James Carville even suggested that Democrats “roll over and play dead” and let the unpopularity of Trump’s agenda crater his presidency.
That approach is unsatisfying to people who are alarmed at the speed and brazen nature of Trump’s moves. So, when a governor from a far-flung state that’s heavily reliant on federal funding challenges him in person, it’s going to get a lot of attention.
The scene also matters. Mills was at the White House and seated relatively close to the president. Governors from other states sat silently and fidgeted when the two of them exchanged words. Nobody there defended her — before or after it happened.
“We always hope that people can disagree in a way that elevates the discourse and tries to come to a common solution,” said Democratic Gov. Jared Polis of Colorado when asked about it during a press gaggle. “I don’t think that disagreement was necessarily a model of that.”
It was an isolating moment for a governor with a fraction of the leverage and power wielded by billionaire tech moguls, news media companies and other power brokers that Trump has cowed since the election.
Bottom up
An underplayed aspect of this story is how Trump even came to know about Maine’s law allowing transgender athletes to compete in women’s sports. It’s a feature of the right’s media ecosystem.
A podcast by WNYC’s On the Media recently showed how viral posts by right-wing influencers and politicians are amplified by traditional conservative media like FOX News and go straight to President Trump.
On the Media uses the example of how Trump’s obsession with gold reserves at Fort Knox seems to have originated with an online exchange between Elon Musk and a poster who calls themselves Zero Hedge. Zero Hedge asserted — wrongly — that the government never audits the facility to make sure the U.S. gold reserves haven’t been stolen. Trump is vowing to inspect. (Musk says he’ll livestream it.)
The transgender athlete dustup followed a similar arc. Last week, Maine state Rep. Laurel Libby, R-Auburn, shared a photo of a transgender high school athlete winning an event at a recent track championship. The photo went viral on Facebook, which removed rules about posting such content after Trump won the election, and also on Musk’s platform X, formerly Twitter. Libby, a prolific poster on social media, then landed interviews on FOX News and other outlets.
Trump took notice shortly thereafter. His first public comments about Maine’s law were at a Republican Governors Association event last Thursday, but Mills wasn’t there. The next morning, he confronted Mills at the National Governors Association event at the White House.
A censure ... and a looming debate
On Tuesday night, Democrats officially rebuked Libby for shining an unwelcome light on the transgender high schooler in her now-viral Facebook post.
The House voted 75-70 to censure Libby for what Democrats portrayed as her “reprehensible” use of an underage student as a political pawn in order to advance an agenda. This was only the fourth time in history that a House member was censured — but the third instance in less than a year.
“There is a time and place for policy debates. That time and place will never be a social media post attacking a Maine student,” House Speaker Ryan Fecteau, D-Biddeford, told Libby after summoning her to stand below him in the “well” of the House chamber.
Libby refused to formally apologize to her House colleagues — a stance that will cost her the ability to vote or speak on the House floor.
“These photos are publicly available but because the radical left doesn’t like how they were used, I am being silenced and by virtue of that, Maine girls are being silenced,” Libby said afterward.
Libby has a unique platform in Augusta. She is not a member of the Republican leadership but she frequently gives floor speeches on social issues. She helped coordinate the massive pushback from conservative Christians two years ago to Democrats’ push to lift restrictions on abortions later in a pregnancy. And she is a prolific fundraiser through her political action committee.
Tuesday’s censure vote also won’t be the last word on the issue in Augusta.
Republican lawmakers have submitted two bills on the issue. The first, LD 233 by Rep. Dick Campbell of Orrington, would prohibit schools in Maine that receive any state funding from “allowing a person whose biological sex assigned at birth is male to participate in an athletic program or activity that is designated for females.”
The second bill, from Rep. Elizabeth Caruso of Caratunk, has not yet been printed. But according to the bill title provided by Caruso, it will deal with ensuring “equity and safety” in school athletics as well as in restrooms and changing rooms.
Neither bill has been scheduled for a public hearing.
Public opinion favors GOP
As we stated earlier, polls suggest that the vast majority of Americans disagree with Maine’s policy regarding transgender athletes.
The recent New York Times/IPSOS poll showed 79% of respondents opposed allowing transgender athletes who were born male to compete in female sports. The polling giant Gallup, meanwhile, has also detected a sizable shift in the same direction. In 2021, 62% of national survey respondents said transgender athletes should only be allowed to play on teams that match their birth gender. Two years later, that figure had risen to 69%.
Maine is one of roughly 20 states that still allow transgender students to compete in athletics based on their gender identity regardless of their birth gender.
That number has declined since Trump’s executive order, however. And professor Jami Taylor, who studies the intersection of transgender rights and politics at the University of Toledo, says the trend is clear.
“I think the trans-rights movement is going to take a loss on that issue,” said Taylor, co-author of the 2018 book “The Remarkable Rise of Transgender Rights.” Taylor said in addition to states, athletic organizations are also changing their policies for “trans-female athletes.”
“At least for trans-women, they are probably going to lose this issue in the short- to medium-term and maybe even the long-term,” Taylor said. “The public is not with them. And it’s no longer just about local, state or national politics. This is an international issue now. We are seeing sporting bodies all over the world that govern different sports enact policies that are excluding trans-women.”
But Taylor added that U.S. policies enacted by presidents via executive orders “are not sticky,” as evidenced by the wild swings between Obama, Trump 1.0, Biden and Trump 2.0.
“This isn’t the end of the story because there will be a successor to Mr. Trump,” Taylor said.
Maine's Political Pulse was written this week by State House bureau chief Steve Mistler and State House correspondent Kevin Miller, and produced by news editor Andrew Catalina. Read past editions or listen to the Political Pulse podcast at mainepublic.org/pulse.
