Democratic Maine Gov. Janet Mills was starting to feel a little bored as President Donald Trump gave a campaign-style speech in the state dining room of the White House last year, touting his poll numbers and recent win in the popular vote.
She was thinking of walking out of the bipartisan gathering of governors when Trump abruptly asked her whether she would comply with his recent executive order banning transgender female athletes from participating on girls’ and women’s sports teams.
“I’m complying with state and federal law,” she answered.
“We are the federal law,” Trump retorted, in a line that Mills thought sounded more like a king than a president. “You better comply because otherwise you’re not getting any federal funding.”
Mills replied calmly: “See you in court.”
The moment quickly passed in the room. But it reverberated for months in Maine and around the country, and eventually set the stage for Mills to run against GOP Sen. Susan Collins in a race Democrats consider crucial to their chance at regaining the Senate majority. At a time when many law firms, universities and lawmakers were acceding to the new president’s flurry of demands and sweeping executive orders, Mills’s quiet rebuttal sparked spontaneous ovations and all-caps Facebook appreciations from downtrodden liberals in Maine and elsewhere.
Mills was the best person in the state to defeat Collins, Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-New York) told her. Collins has survived decades of Democratic attempts to dislodge her from the seat.
That was then. This week, nearly six months after she opened her campaign, Mills dropped out of the race following a cool response from Democrats and difficulty raising money. She conceded the primary race to a fiery oyster farmer who’s never held elected office before.
The stunning political collapse of a sitting governor has left Mills’s allies reeling and raised questions about whether Democratic voters want to reward politicians for standing up to Trump — or are seeking something different.
“Enjoy your life after governor, because I don’t think you’ll be in elected politics,” a visibly angry Trump warned Mills at the end of their exchange at the White House.
For now, his words appear prophetic. But it was Democratic voters — not Trump — who have made them come true.
The fight
In the days before the White House meeting, Mills was growing angry with Trump’s take-no-prisoners approach to his second term and aghast at what she saw as widespread capitulation to his demands, she said in an interview.
Billionaire Elon Musk had recently boasted that he put the U.S. agency responsible for foreign development and humanitarian aid in a “wood chipper,” without congressional input. Major companies were announcing rollbacks of diversity efforts after Trump targeted such programs in the federal government. Trump was threatening to cut off federal funding for universities that didn’t follow suit and signed executive orders that challenged federal law.
Before the meeting, Mills consulted with several people, including historians Doris Kearns Goodwin and Heather Cox Richardson, who has amassed millions of followers, many of them liberals, with her daily summaries of the news and warning bells about the state of democracy.
“I was nervous about going to this meeting, and people said, ‘We need somebody to stand up to him,’” Mills said. “So maybe that was in the back of my head.”
Mills’s staff had caught wind that Trump might be uniquely angry at Maine over his executive order. In February, a conservative state representative in Maine, Laurel Libby, posted a photo of a transgender girl winning a medal in a pole vault competition at Greely High School. The post went viral in conservative media, where Republicans argued the participation of female transgender athletes violated Title IX, a law prohibiting sex-based discrimination in education programs.
Still, nothing prepared Mills and her state for the blowback she got after her one-minute altercation with Trump. Within 24 hours, three federal agencies had begun investigations into possible violations of Title IX in Maine. Days later, the acting head of the Social Security Administration ordered the termination of two data collection contracts with Maine, saying he wanted to deny funds to the governor, whom he described as a “petulant child” in an email.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration abruptly ended a $4.5 million grant for marine research in Maine in a letter. And the Department of Agriculture paused millions in grants for the University of Maine. Trump, in a social media post, demanded a “full throated apology” from Mills.
Collins, the moderate Republican up for reelection this year, was able to contain the damage, convincing administration officials to restore the Social Security and marine research money, The Washington Post reported at the time. (Mills, however, declined to credit her in an interview earlier this year about the retaliation, saying simply “I don’t know,” when asked whether Collins helped.)
In April 2025, the secretary of agriculture said she was cutting off federal funding from her department to Maine’s schools and reviewing all grants to the state’s Department of Education. “You cannot openly violate federal law against discrimination in education and expect federal funding to continue unabated,” Brooke Rollins wrote in a letter to Mills.
Rollins began freezing federal funds to Maine’s school breakfast and lunch program, which provides meals to about 172,000 children. The state attorney general sued the federal government immediately. A few days later, a judge granted a temporary restraining order blocking federal action.
Within a month, the Trump administration agreed to restore funding if Maine dropped its suit. Mills, it seemed, had stood up to Trump and won.
A late start
Mills basked in the approval of Maine’s liberals, even as a separate federal case against the state’s Department of Education continued.
Her office was flooded with thank you notes and tokens of appreciation. Voters posted their admiration for their septuagenarian governor.
In June, at a taping of a public radio show at a packed Merrill Auditorium in Portland, the crowd broke into thunderous applause when the host noted that Mills was in attendance.
“THAT’S MY GOVERNOR,” Maine resident Becca Low, 51, wrote in a typical Facebook comment, accompanied by a heart emoji.
Previously, Mills had been viewed as a relatively well-liked if unassuming governor, especially during the coronavirus pandemic. She had never been a leading character in the Democratic “resistance.” Now she was.
Mills, whose term ends this year, had been contemplating retirement, said one person familiar with her thinking. Now the combination of liberal support and Schumer’s aggressive recruitment began to “plant a seed.”
Some of her friends were still shocked when she decided to announce a Senate run in October. “Her friends were saying, ‘Janet, this is hard. Look what you’ve done for Maine, you deserve to go to your camp and fly fish,’” said Lynn Bromley, a former state senator and Mills ally.
“We stood up to Trump and stopped him from cutting the school lunch program for Maine kids,” Mills said in her launch video, featuring scenes from the White House confrontation. “I’ve never backed down from a bully and I never will.”
“See you in court,” was plastered on T-shirts and pins, the center of her pitch to Maine voters.
But by the time she announced, Mills already was behind. An oyster farmer named Graham Platner had launched his campaign in August, and he was drawing large crowds. In his launch video, Platner said he was “deeply angry” about economic conditions in Maine, and blamed “billionaires and corrupt politicians” for crushing the middle class.
“I’m not afraid to name an enemy and the enemy is the oligarchy,” he said, as he touted his record as a Marine.
Platner’s outsider, anti-elite pitch drew support from progressive Mainers. As reports surfaced about his deleted Reddit posts insulting rural Mainers and a chest tattoo that resembled a Nazi symbol, they shrugged them off.
“The problem is she waited too long,” said Mark Brewer, a political science professor at the University of Maine. “She let the moment pass.”
The same people who had cheered Mills on were having second thoughts. The political novice, Platner, had assumed the mantle of “progressive fighter” in many voters’ minds without ever having faced Trump one on one.
Low, 51, the Maine voter who had posted glowingly about Mills shortly after her Trump meeting, came out for Platner.
“She’s willing to stand up to Trump,” Low said of Mills. “She would not be willing to stand up to Schumer.”
Low, who works in sales from her home in Brunswick along Maine’s coast, sounded like many in the Democratic base who were no longer satisfied with simply taking on the president. They want drastic changes to the party itself.
“People are so sick of the status quo,” Low said.
At 78, Mills also represented an older guard of politicians to some voters. Platner is 41. Some Mills supporters say they saw sexism at play, and suggest a woman with no political experience wouldn’t be able to gain the same momentum as Platner.
“I’m just really tired as a woman of hearing — let’s just say it — a man telling me how he’s going to fight for me when there’s a woman who’s done it and will continue to do it,” Bromley said at a Mills event in March.
But Richardson, the historian and outspoken Trump critic who is from Maine, attributes voters’ rejection of Mills to style.
Some primary voters “want a bomb thrower, and Mills is not a bomb thrower,” said Richardson, a friend of Mills who talked to her before the White House meeting.
“Governance is slow and it involves a lot of expertise,” she said. “And it’s just not terribly flashy. And I think that that’s a problem for people who are trying to recover the democracy for ordinary people.”
Mike Hurley, the former mayor of Belfast, Maine, agreed, arguing that “people who speak respectfully” get ignored while “angry people get action.”
Platner has thrived on the base’s anger and desire for change. “It’s not enough to just be like, ‘We’re going to fight Donald Trump so we can protect the system,’” he said in an interview shortly before Mills dropped out. “People want to fight the system.”
Mills tried to resurface Platner’s controversial Reddit comments in attack ads in March. But the effort fell flat. Schumer’s political apparatus declined to send in reinforcements for her on-air as Platner’s lead in the polls only widened.
Platner capitalized on Mills’s lawyerly restraint, often drawing a clearer contrast with Republicans than she did. Even on the issue of transgender children in sports — the core of her dispute with Trump — Mills, in an interview earlier this year, equivocated. She wasn’t defending the specific law so much as the right of states to enforce their own laws, she emphasized.
Asked whether she supports transgender girls playing in girls’ sports, Mills deflected, saying Republicans were making it a “political issue.” Only when asked a third time did the governor support it. “Sports are very important for all kids and we should encourage kids to play in sports, not discourage any group in particular,” she said. (Platner has called efforts to ban transgender girls playing sports a culture war distraction and said he does not support them.)
In an interview at a tavern in Westbrook, Maine in March, the governor addressed whether she was angry enough for an enraged Democratic base that wants to see both action and fiery rhetoric.
“Well, you haven’t seen me on the stump,” she said. “I talk to bigger groups and I get pretty riled up, I get pretty pissed off.”
But there weren’t many bigger groups. She stuck mostly to smaller gatherings while Platner played to the overflow rooms.
“I’ve stood up to Donald Trump to his face,” she said at the Fletcher’s Tavern interview, reiterating the core pitch of her campaign. But she sounded frustrated as much as proud.
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