President Trump and Gov. Janet Mills of Maine have history.
When he visited the state early in the pandemic, he insulted her public health policies and called her “a dictator” who “doesn’t know what she’s doing.” The governor, a Democrat and brusque former prosecutor, did not mince words in response: “I have spent the better part of my career listening to loud men talk tough to disguise their weakness,” she said at the time.
It seems likely, given Mr. Trump’s long memory for slights, that he had not forgotten her appraisal in February when he tossed out a seemingly offhand question in a White House meeting with governors: “Is Maine here?”
The ensuing clash between the two leaders, over a Maine anti-discrimination law that allows transgender athletes to participate in girls’ and women’s sports, has escalated steadily since then. After Mr. Trump threatened that day to cut off funding for Maine, and Ms. Mills shot back, “See you in court,” she has not budged from her stance: that complying with the president’s executive order barring transgender women from women’s sports would violate the Maine law.
While she has stood firm, the federal government has barraged the state with investigations, declared its education system to be in violation of federal law and frozen some of its funding.
The Department of Education has set Friday as a final deadline for Maine to comply with the president’s order. If it does not, the agency plans to hand the matter over to the Department of Justice for enforcement.
Neither side shows any sign of backing down. Maine sued the Trump administration on Monday, doubling down on its defiance as it began the legal fight that Ms. Mills promised at the White House.
At a time when resistance to Mr. Trump has largely seemed muted by fears of retribution, Ms. Mills, a relative moderate who has never sought the national limelight, seemed unlikely to emerge as one of his boldest challengers. But to people who have watched her political ascent — from the state’s first female district attorney to its first female attorney general and governor — and to some who have sparred with her over thorny issues — the governor’s refusal to bow to Mr. Trump is not surprising.
Ms. Mills, 77, had a combative relationship with Paul LePage, the divisive two-term Republican governor who preceded her in office. Mr. LePage outraged Democrats by denying climate change and opposing same-sex marriage, attempting to roll back child labor laws and refusing to attend Martin Luther King Jr. Day events.
In 2017, Mr. LePage sued Ms. Mills, then the state’s attorney general, for refusing to represent him in court. She campaigned for governor in 2018 on her pledge to expand the state’s Medicaid program, a change Mr. LePage had fought even after voters overwhelmingly approved it.
“She’s entered a lot of battles, and if you go at her, she will not back down,” said Ethan Strimling, a Democrat and former mayor of Portland who served with Ms. Mills in the Maine Legislature in the early 2000s. “She’s going to go toe-to-toe,” Mr. Strimling said. “She’s always been like that.”
As a district attorney early in her career, Ms. Mills sought new ways to stamp out abusive behavior. Her official biography notes that she grew frustrated with the courts for failing to protect battered women and co-founded the Maine Women’s Lobby to advocate for them. She has described her own experience as a young woman with an alcoholic boyfriend who once held a loaded gun to her head. (She promptly left him.)
Raised in rural western Maine, closer to the state’s rugged mountains than its wandering coastline, Ms. Mills grew up in a family of politically connected Republicans. Her father, Peter Mills, served in the legislature, and as the United States Attorney for Maine in the 1950s. One of her brothers served in the legislature as well, and her younger sister was the longtime director of Maine’s public health agency.
Rejecting a more traditional path, Ms Mills dropped out of Colby College, her parents’ alma mater, to spend the 1967 “Summer of Love” in San Francisco, and then moved to Boston, enrolled in the University of Massachusetts and studied abroad at the Sorbonne in Paris. Energized by movements for women’s and civil rights, she became a Democrat. Back in Maine, she worked on Sen. Edward M. Kennedy’s doomed 1980 campaign for president and won her own race for district attorney.
In an interview this month in Farmington, Ms. Mills’s hometown, her brother Paul Mills recalled how their father pushed civil rights legislation in the late 1960s, after learning that a club in Portland had excluded Jewish members. Their father, he said, was a lot like Ms. Mills.
“He had a similarly principled temperament,” Mr. Mills said. “He spoke his own mind, and he could be unrelenting.”
Her roots in conservative Franklin County, which Mr. Trump won in each of the last three presidential elections, help explain why Ms. Mills has been politically moderate on some issues, most notably gun rights. That positioning has helped her succeed in a divided state, while sometimes disappointing liberal and progressive voters, many of whom hoped she would propose aggressive new gun control measures after a 2023 mass shooting in Lewiston by an Army Reservist whose unraveling mental health had raised alarms.
Ms. Mills allowed a new law to take effect requiring a 72-hour waiting period for gun purchases, but said she felt “deeply conflicted” about it. She vetoed a ban on bump stocks — add-on devices that let semiautomatic rifles fire more rapidly — and said she did not want hunters to lose options.
Ms. Mills opted not to push for Maine to adopt a “red flag” law, which would allow people to petition a court to take away guns from a relative whom they considered to be dangerous. Gun control advocates are seeking a statewide vote on a red flag law in November.
The governor’s feud with Mr. Trump has raised her profile across the country — fans now wear “See you in court” T-shirts — and has intensified feelings about her at home.
“When I saw it on TV, I thought, ‘Yep, that’s Janet Mills,’” said Elayne Richard, a 71-year-old Democrat in Fairfield, Maine, who supports the governor. “My first reaction was, ‘I’m so proud she did that,’ because no one else had the gumption.”
But in a state where 46 percent of voters supported Mr. Trump, many people are livid about Ms. Mills’s stance. Roseanna Young, 52, of Edgecomb, a Republican who believes transgender women should not play on women’s sports teams, called the governor “an embarrassment.”
“We’re the laughingstock of the United States,” she said.
Ms. Mills has been adamant that her resistance is not about the issue of transgender women in sports, per se, but about upholding Maine law and fulfilling her duty to defend it. She maintains that the state’s human rights law — which prohibits discrimination based on gender identity as well as religion, race and other factors — can be changed only by the Legislature, not by anyone’s executive order. She has not expressed her own views on transgender women athletes publicly, though she has said the issue was “worthy of a debate.”
Katrina Smith, the assistant leader of the Republican minority in the Maine House of Representatives, said Ms. Mills had made the state’s financial position precarious by putting its federal funding at risk, given the state’s budget problems, high energy costs, property tax burdens and household incomes below the national median.
Republican legislators have introduced several proposals to change the anti-discrimination law, including some compromises, Ms. Smith said, but Democrats have not scheduled hearings to discuss them.
“We’re ready, and this could be done in a week,” she said. “It kind of lays at her feet. Everyone’s got their bristles up, but someone’s got to be the adult and come to the table.”
Because of the state’s refusal to comply with Mr. Trump’s order, the U.S. Department of Agriculture imposed a funding freeze that the state said could threaten free meals for schoolchildren. Attorney General Pam Bondi cut funds for Maine prisons this week because the state was housing a transgender woman in a women’s prison, she told Fox News.
Leland Dudek, the acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration, acknowledged that he tried to punish Ms. Mills by briefly cutting off Maine’s access to a program that makes it easier for parents to request Social Security numbers for their children.
“I was ticked at the governor of Maine for not being real cordial to the president,” Mr. Dudek said in a recent interview.
Mr. Trump demanded in late March that Ms. Mills issue a “full throated apology.” She lashed back instead, challenging his claims that he was protecting women by policing women’s sports.
“If the current occupant of the White House wants to protect women and girls, he should start by protecting the women and teenage girls who are suffering miscarriages and dying because they can’t get basic, lifesaving health care,” she said at an event in Bangor. “He should talk about the little girls and boys and infants in Sudan and other countries who are dying right now because he has cut off their supply of food and lifesaving medicines.”
Ms. Mills, who is term-limited, will leave office next year. That could ease the friction between Maine and the White House — or not. The first Democrat to announce plans to run for governor was Shenna Bellows, Maine’s secretary of state, who tried unsuccessfully last year to exclude Mr. Trump from Maine’s primary ballot.
Sydney Cromwell contributed reporting from Waterville, Maine.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/10/us/janet-mills-donald-trump-maine.html
