What The Hell America!

IT’S NOT CLEAR YET if Democrat Janet Mills will run against Sen. Susan Collins in 2026, or if she should. But the Maine governor’s confrontation with President Donald Trump on Friday was a bracing example of something that’s all too rare: a politician standing up to Trump in a direct, on-camera exchange that ended with nasty threats from the bully-in-chief.

The issue at hand was Trump’s executive order barring transgender students from girls’ sports and Mills’s “see you in court” response when Trump told her—at a bipartisan governors gathering in the State Dining Room at the White House, no less—that she’d better comply. Mills said that Maine would follow state and federal non-discrimination laws, and would sue if he cut off all federal funding to its schools.

What a scene: Trump said imperiously that “We are the federal law” (he’s not) and faced an immediate counterargument from a confident adversary in the same room. We won’t see much of that when he is done stocking the government with acolytes and cowing the Republican-run Congress to shut up and submit.

Which brings us to the nightmare Trump cabinet—compliments of Collins and other GOP senators facing re-election next year—and all the other mayhem, cruelty, and lawlessness unfolding hourly. Never has it been so important to jumpstart upcoming campaigns.

Share

In the two states holding races for governor this year, former Rep. Abigail Spanberger is making a good start in Virginia, and a half dozen Democrats are running in New Jersey. Now we need Democrats to dive into high-profile 2026 contests and get the message out: None of this is normal or good for America.

The internet humor magazine McSweeney’s, in a 2017 parody called “Winners and Losers of the Recent Nuclear Holocaust,” called Collins “the human fulcrum perched stoically at the precise center of American politics.” She is still exactly that, and her shtick has gone from tiresome to literally hazardous to U.S. health, national security, and the Constitution.

Collins, 72, has now voted against two of Trump’s awful nominees, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and FBI Director Kash Patel. But she voted in favor of three who are equally bad or worse—Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for health secretary, Tulsi Gabbard for national intelligence director, and Russell Vought for budget director. That’s even as she and other Senate Republicans very much hope, after securing pinky-swears from these Trump allies that they will reexamine one thing or never change another, that they won’t do what they’ve been doing for decades.

How’s that going? Kennedy is already undermining vaccines, mental health treatment, and biomedical research. Vought is ruthlessly trying, in court and in real time, to kill the impoundment law that says presidents can’t grab money Congress gave to specific programs and spend it however they want. And Gabbard, raked by senators over her secret meetings with Bashar Assad, defense of Edward Snowden, and supportive comments about Russia and Vladimir Putin, is now positioned to alarm U.S. allies and reinforce Trump’s worst instincts.

Jeez Louise. Why not just vote against them?

I know these struggling Republicans are dealing with primary-season threats bankrolled by Elon Musk and physical threats, even death threats, from MAGA followers. But I can only summon a tiny scrap of sympathy. These are important people with weighty responsibilities. Is it too much to expect them to stand on principle, to consider the greater good? I guess so.

Collins, one of only two Republican senators up for re-election next year in states viewed as competitive, has made a career of provoking exasperation and frustration across the spectrum. She said in November that she intends to run for a sixth term, and she’s gotten two challengers in the past ten days.

“Lifelong Republican” Greg Smeriglio, 42, is the founder of Voice of the People USA, which he announced last June was returning after fourteen years “to advocate for Free Speech, Liberty and to support President Trump.” So despite her maneuvers and rationalizations, Collins faces at least one challenge from the right, potentially well funded by Musk.

The other Collins challenger so far, Phillip Rench, 37, filed to run as an independent. He spent five years as a senior engineer at SpaceX, Musk’s aviation company in Texas. (Coincidence? We will see.) He moved home to Maine in 2019 and bought twenty acres of land that is now Ossipee Hill Farm and Observatory—the largest astronomical observatory in the state, designed and built by Rench and his wife.

North Carolina’s Thom Tilllis, 64, supported all five of Trump’s most objectionable nominees and recently earned a “profile in poltroonery” from analyst Radley Balko for his decisive role in elevating Hegseth to defense secretary. His first primary challenger is a non-MAGA conservative, but his frequent bipartisanship and breaks with MAGA on Ukraine and other issues suggest he’ll get competition from the right, as well.

Where are the Democrats? You’d think they would be lining up to run, but so far the primary fields in both states are frozen as Mills and former North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper mull their plans.

Cooper, 67, is interested and, as a reporter for National Review notes, he’d pose “a major electoral challenge” to Tillis. Mills hasn’t ruled out running against Collins but, at age 77, should she? Maybe. Sen. Angus King, Maine’s independent senator, won his third term last year at 80, and Mills certainly showed at the White House that she’s got game.

Share The Bulwark

Mills and Cooper should make their decisions and unfreeze those fields ASAP. By this time in 2023, Trump had been running for re-election for three months. Anyone desperate for Democrats to check his power by winning the House, the Senate, or both next year is probably, like me, desperate to see these races get going and star candidates—for both the midterms and the 2028 presidential campaign—begin to emerge.

Campaigns will give much needed shape, direction, and specificity to Democrats’ critiques of Trump and Republicans. The media will have better reasons and ways to report on what Democrats are saying. And, not least, campaigns will be a constructive outlet for the energy of voters increasingly frustrated by Democratic leaders.

Republican senators had the chance to matter, and they chose not to step up. Instead they are enabling a national tragedy. It’s time for them to be exposed, called out, and defeated.