Gov. Ned Lamont was sharing a table with Gov. Janet Mills of Maine at the White House when President Donald J. Trump chose to make an example of Mills — and Maine — over resistance to his executive order aimed at driving transgender athletes from women’s and girls’ sports.
“Is Maine here, the governor of Maine?” Trump said, looking around the State Dining Room, where the nation’s governors gathered in late February for what is normally a congenial bipartisan dinner. He fixed his stare on Mills and said sharply, “Are you not going to comply with it?”
The moment arrived like a thunderclap, electric and deeply felt by Lamont on several counts. Mills is a friend, and Connecticut has a gender-identity rights law similar to Maine’s. Trump’s sudden jab at Mills and Maine just as easily could have been directed at Lamont and Connecticut.
“I’m complying with state and federal laws,” Mills told Trump.
“We are the federal law,” Trump replied. “You better do it. You better do it, because you’re not going to get any federal funding at all if you don’t.”
“See you in court,” Mills shot back.
Nearly three weeks later, ProPublica reported that Maine was under attack by no fewer than six federal agencies over the continued participation of a transgender girl in high school sports, and Lamont acknowledges relief that he only was a witness to Trump’s sudden attack in the State Dining Room and not its target.
“You don’t necessarily want to get singled out by the president of the United States and have him take retribution, as he singled out Janet Mills and took some retribution,” Lamont said. “I was sort of happy to be sitting where I was — but I was also pretty proud of Janet for standing up.”
The mixed sentiment is emblematic of a careful, constructive-engagement approach to all things Trump that Lamont says is informed by his experiences with Trump during the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. The disagreements were frequent but created no lasting breach with the White House.
The lesson from 2020?
“When you disagree, disagree with respect,” Lamont said. “And let people know loud and clear where you stand.”
Lamont’s ability to balance those two things will be on display Tuesday.
He is holding a morning press conference with U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal to urge the Trump administration to halt its plans to gut clean air rules. In the afternoon, he is to join the congressional delegation at a Disability Connecticut Rights rally outside the state Capitol to protest Medicaid cuts being considered by Trump and congressional Republicans.
More often, Lamont has opted to criticize Trump policy, not Trump personally.
A case in point was Lamont’s initial restraint on the Trump administration’s action last week in rolling back clean air rules that the Environmental Protection Agency boasted was the “greatest and most consequential day of deregulation in U.S. history.”
One of the 31 changes would lift “good neighbor” restrictions on midwestern power plant emissions that are carried to Connecticut and other states on prevailing winds. The EPA’s administrator, Lee Zeldin, also promised to erase the foundational finding that greenhouse gases endanger humanity.
“These rollbacks are especially damaging for downwind states like Connecticut, which rely on federal protections to prevent other states’ pollution from impacting our air quality,” Lamont said. He added, “I strongly urge the EPA to reconsider rolling back these critical environmental and public health protections.”
Neither Lamont’s statement nor one from Katie Dykes, his commissioner of energy and environmental protection, mentioned Trump or the Trump administration by name. Similarly, a week ago, Lamont largely ignored Trump in describing the state’s vulnerability to cuts in federal funding of Medicaid, which provides health coverage for more than one-third of Connecticut residents.
The omissions were deliberate.
“I don’t think the Democrats are doing themselves any favors when they make everything all about Trump all the time,” Lamont said in an interview. “I talk about Medicaid, I talk about child care, I talk about SNAP benefits. I reach out to Republican governors. I say, ‘This is going to impact your state just as much as it’s going to impact my state. We don’t have to make this all about Trump, but on this one issue, I think we should be working together.’ I think that’s primarily what my job is right now.”
Mark Bergman, a Democratic political consultant whose clients include governors and members of Congress, said the different roles can dictate different tactics regarding the president. Governors, more often than not, are opting for pragmatism.
“As a governor, you’ve got a lot of different interests you have to balance, and every governor will make those decisions and do what’s in the best interests of their state,” Bergman said. “That’s the best way to handle what is now a very disruptive period of time for state and federal government. If you are a member of Congress, it’s a different calculation.”
Connecticut’s two Democratic U.S. senators, Blumenthal and Chris Murphy — who broke with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-New York, over his voting for a Republican take-it-or-leave it resolution that avoided a shutdown of the federal government — said Monday that Democrats at all levels have to be more aggressive.
“I don’t think appeasement works right now,” Murphy said.
Blumenthal quoted Timothy Snyder, a Yale history professor whose first lesson in a pamphlet, “On Tyranny,” is “Do not obey in advance.” Snyder posits that most of the power of authoritarianism is given freely by individuals who think about what a repressive government wants, then “offer themselves without being asked.”
“We have to resist appeasement,” Blumenthal said. “Do not obey in advance. This road is long and windy, but it leads only to catastrophe if we resort to appeasement.”
Neither senator said they were talking about Lamont, who will be appearing with them Tuesday.
“I just don’t want to live in a world in which any of us go and bend the knee to Donald Trump in order to get money. That may feel like the right thing in the short run, but it will destroy our democracy in the in the long run,” Murphy said. “I don’t think that that’s what’s happening in in Connecticut. That’s broader advice that I’m giving.”
Lamont notes that Mills did not go to the White House looking for a viral moment, one that has placed her face on T-shirts with the line, “See you in court!” Trump brought it to her, and she made the call not to back down, he said.
While Lamont has opted for engagement with Trump, he has not yielded ground on Connecticut’s areas of conflict with the president, most notably the “Trust Act” that sets limits on how the state interacts with federal immigration agents or its support for refugees.
“Obviously, there’s some lines that I will not cross, you know. If you want to take away that Dreamer from Middlesex High School, not on my watch, you’re not going to do that,” Lamont said. “But I don’t need to go out and pick a fight. People know where I stand.”
In June 2020, a month after the police killing of George Floyd, Lamont dismissed Trump’s call for governors to use the U.S. military to crack down on the resulting police-brutality demonstrations. He suggested then that the president look to states like Connecticut, where police and protesters generally have demonstrated mutual respect.
“I hope he’ll be able to learn from our example,” Lamont said at the time. It was on-brand for Lamont — equal measures quiet defiance and optimism, perhaps misplaced, that Trump might see another way.
Lamont may be recalibrating, but his posture toward Trump lately has been what it was a month into the pandemic five years ago. He said then, “I’ve got to leave the door open. I’ve got to work with people. Our congressional delegation can put on the boxing gloves. I need to get this state through a crisis.”
In his state of the state speech last month, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, a potential candidate for president in 2028, drew a different lesson from his dealings with Trump in 2020.
“There are people, some in my own party, who think that if you just give Donald Trump everything that he wants, he’ll make an exception, and he’ll spare you some of the harm. I’ll ignore the moral abdication of that position for just a second to say almost none of these people have had the experience with the president that I do,” Pritzker said. “I once swallowed my pride to offer him what he values most: public praise on the Sunday news shows.”
Pritzker said it yielded nothing helpful. With Trump, he said, “Going along to get along does not work.”
State Rep. Josh Elliott, D-Hamden, a progressive weighing a run for governor, said he preferred Pritzker’s more defiant approach to Lamont’s. “We need to be strong without being unnecessarily antagonistic,” he said.
Lamont is aware of such sentiments and how they appeal to potential Democratic primary voters. He has yet to decide if he will seek a third term in 2028.
For now, his approach suits the goals and personality of Lamont, a 71-year-old former businessman from Greenwich who did not object this week when introduced on Bloomberg TV as a centrist who finds order and comfort in a businesslike approach to governing that, so far, is foreign to Trump 2.0.
In January, a CBS poll found that a majority of Democrats essentially shared Lamont’s view in favoring an effort to find common ground with the incoming president. A month later, the numbers more than flipped, with 65% favoring across-the-board opposition.
On March 9 in Trumbull, the Democratic Town Committee’s annual “Keys to Democracy” fundraising dinner drew its largest crowd, and the vibe was one of resistance, not cooperation or engagement, said attendees, including the Democratic chair, Ashley Gaudiano.
Attorney General William Tong, who has joined other Democratic attorneys general in suing the Trump administration over everything from a presidential order ending birthright citizenship to this week’s dismantling of the Department of Education, was a defiant crowd pleaser.
“People have a deep respect for how he is speaking out in this moment. I hear a lot about his boldness, that this is an energy that is needed in this moment in time,” Gaudiano said. “There is a little more pause with the governor’s response that I hear, depending on the person and where they fall, as more progressive or moderate.”
The governor did not attend.
Tong said there are no substantive differences with the governor over Trump. Unlike in some other states, Tong does not need a gubernatorial sign off to sue the president, but he consults with Lamont and has heard only support for his litigation.
“As far as I know, there is no daylight between us, and I don’t expect there to be. He regularly encourages me to take strong action,” Tong said. “We just have different roles, different authority.”
Tong, who recently addressed anti-Trump protesters on the state Capitol lawn and led them in fight cheers, paused and added, “I think it’s obvious that Ned and I have different styles.”
For now, officials from the Trump administration are focused on whether Maine is to be punished for letting a transgender girl compete on a high school track team. The governing authority over scholastic sports is the Maine Principals Association, not the governor.
The federal departments of Education, Health and Human Services, Justice, and Agriculture are investigating. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration cancelled a $4.5 million grant to Maine for marine research. And even the Social Security Administration got involved by canceling contracts that allowed hospitals to automatically report births. SSA later reconsidered.
No federal law explicitly bars trans athletes from competing against girls in high school sports or women in collegiate games. Trump’s order is a threat to take federal funding from any “educational program that deprives women and girls of fair athletic opportunities.”
The NCAA has complied with Trump’s order, so he has succeeded in banning trans athletes from collegiate women’s sports in Maine and elsewhere. The Maine Principals Association has not.
As Mills told Trump, she anticipates it will end up in court.
The story was originally published in the Connecticut Mirror.
