In an interview with MSNBC aired on Monday, Maine Gov. Janet Mills spoke about her clash with President Donald Trump and defended her ongoing fight with the federal government over rules for transgender athletes in school sports.
The governor and the president exchanged heated words at the White House in February during a dinner for state governors after Trump pressured Mills to comply with his executive order barring transgender girls from girls’ sports.
On Monday, Mills said the question was “very unexpected” and “unrelated to the topic at hand.” Past visits to the White House during multiple administrations, including the first Trump administration, had always been productive, she said.
“This was different, very different,” Mills said. “And when he said, ‘I am the law, basically, we are the law,’ my jaw dropped.
“Every every fifth grade civic student knows that there are three branches of government, and the chief executive is required by the Constitution to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, not to make the laws, not to invent the laws or reinterpret the laws by tweet or Instagram post or press release or executive order,” Mills said.
Mills described herself as a career defender of Title IX, the 1972 federal law that bars sex-based discrimination in education. The Trump administration has asserted that Maine is violating Title IX by allowing transgender female student athletes to compete in girls’ and women’s sports.
Maine had just two transgender girls competing in scholastic sports in the current year, according to the Maine Principals’ Association, the governing body for school sports in Maine. No transgender female athletes competed in women’s sports at the college level in Maine’s public universities.
Since the exchange between Mills and Trump, multiple federal agencies have targeted Maine over its transgender policies. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the U.S. Department of Education have both found Maine to be in violation of Title IX and referred their cases to the U.S. Department of Justice.
Earlier this month the U.S. Department of Agriculture froze funding for some educational programs over the Title IX dispute.
Additionally, the Trump administration pulled all non-essential funding from Maine’s prison system because the state allowed a transgender woman to live in a women’s prison.
Mills said the Trump administration has also targeted unrelated programs to punish Maine, including a school nutrition program that she said 172,000 Maine children rely on. She also noted the attempt by the acting head of the Social Security Administration in March to cancel a program to register newborns because he “was ticked at the governor of Maine for not being real cordial to the president,” and said those kinds of “arbitrary and capricious decisions” make her concerned that the whole Social Security program is at risk.
“It’s like, what if he discovers that there’s somebody on Social Security who happens to be transgender? Does he vacate the whole Social Security program?” she said.
Mills reiterated an earlier statement that if Trump, whom she referred to as “the current occupant of the White House,” wants to protect women and girls, he should protect Social Security and programs that protect “the women who are dying because they can’t get health care,” including those from miscarriages, a reference to the rise in pregnancy related deaths in Texas after the state banned abortions.
“How about those women and young women and girls? They need help too,” Mills said. “They need our compassion, and we’re not providing it. He’s not answering to their call.”
