The attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump two weeks ago led to renewed calls for greater civility in American politics, with Maine officials from both major parties joining that chorus.
Trump, who has compared opponents to “vermin” and is expected to face Vice President Kamala Harris in November after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race, mentioned a need to heal “the discord and division in our society” during a Republican National Convention speech. At a rally last week, he said he was “not going to be nice” on the campaign trail.
The shooting that left one dead at the Pennsylvania rally underscored a broader issue with political violence and extreme rhetoric, with voters generally agreeing on a need for more respect and civility in politics.
Several current and former Maine politicians have gotten wide attention for extreme remarks or those invoking violence going back nearly a decade. We asked five to reflect on their past comments, getting a range of reactions from “shame on you” to a story of how one left politics altogether.
Rep. Heidi Sampson, R-Alfred
Rep. Heidi Sampson, a Republican from the York County town of Alfred, faced calls to resign in 2021 after comparing Gov. Janet Mills, a Democrat, to leaders of the Holocaust.
Sampson made the remarks in August 2021 during a protest outside the State House against Mills’ COVID-19 vaccine mandate for health care workers. Sampson mentioned “Josef Mengele and Joseph Goebbels being reincarnated here in the state of Maine” and referred to Mills and her sister, Dr. Dora Anne Mills, who works for MaineHealth.
Mengele was an infamous Nazi official known as the “Angel of Death” for his role in selecting which Jewish prisoners to send to the gas chambers at concentration camps and for his sadistic medical experiments. Goebbels was Adolf Hitler’s chief propagandist.
Despite that, Sampson easily won her 2022 reelection campaign in a district representing Alfred and parts of Lyman and Waterboro. She is barred by term limits from running this year and did not say whether she has reflected on her past comments since the attempted Trump assassination and how she views the latest calls for increased civility.
Instead, Sampson told a reporter in an email to “consider your own (media collectively) actions, where you take things out of context, light a fuze [sic], then fan the flames.”
“Shame on you!!” Sampson added.
Former Rep. Scott Hamann, D-South Portland
Nearly seven years to the day Trump survived the Pennsylvania shooting, Trump and a Maine lawmaker were tied together in headlines due to what the legislator wrote in a Facebook rant.
Former Rep. Scott Hamann, a Democrat who represented South Portland in the Maine House of Representatives from 2010 to 2018, wrote a Facebook post in July 2017 calling Trump “a half term president, at most, especially if I ever get within 10 feet of that p——.”
In the wake of the comments, Hamann lost his spot on several legislative committees and resigned from his job with a food bank. The post drew national attention and condemnation from lawmakers in both parties. He previously said he regretted the words that were an “aggressively sarcastic” exchange with a childhood friend.
Hamann, who declined to share his current occupation and said he is living outside of Maine, called the attempted assassination of Trump “tragic.”
“I think there’s no place in America for violent political rhetoric,” Hamann said in a phone interview.
Highlighting what he views as other concerning incidents in American politics, Hamann pointed to the Jan. 6, 2021, riots at the U.S. Capitol, the conservative-backed Project 2025 and the man who broke into former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s California home and assaulted the Democrat’s husband in 2022. In light of the shooter at the Trump rally using an AR-15-style rifle, Hamann added he feels “stricter gun control” is needed in the country.
“I got out of politics. It just wasn’t worth it,” Hamann said.
House Speaker Rachel Talbot Ross, D-Portland
House Speaker Rachel Talbot Ross, a Portland Democrat running for the state Senate in November after wrapping up four terms, took heat last year when she said political allies should “storm the capitol” in protest of the Maine Department of Education not yet implementing a Black history law she championed.
The comments during a Juneteenth event last summer invoked images of Trump supporters storming the U.S. Capitol during the deadly riots on Jan. 6, 2021. Talbot Ross made them at a University of Southern Maine event in criticizing the state’s education department for its pace in implementing her law passed in 2021 that requires African American studies and the history of genocide be placed into the state’s K-12 education standards.
“We should be storming the capitol — really, I’m serious — because what the Department of Education has done is, it’s made excuses for not teaching our children the truth about this country, this soil that we’re on now and the labor that made our economies possible,” Talbot Ross said.
She later shared regret for those words as well as other comments about liberal “white women” she felt have pushed their causes over her racial equity efforts.
“Words matter. Civility matters. And accountability matters,” Talbot Ross said in a statement Tuesday. “Those are the reasons why I expressed genuine regret over my own comments and have since worked tirelessly to channel the frustration I felt over slow-moving policy into increased advocacy and action.”
Talbot Ross, Maine’s first Black leader of the House, said as someone who has also experienced threats, “this hostile environment both dissuades people from engaging in the political process and increases apathy.”
“We cannot allow such actions to become the norm and we must not become immune to threats to our democratic principles and freedoms,” she said.
Sen. Eric Brakey, R-Auburn
Sen. Eric Brakey, R-Auburn, who is leaving the Legislature and moving to New Hampshire to lead a libertarian group, unsuccessfully challenged U.S. Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, in the 2018 election and made foreign policy a key part of his campaign.
Brakey tweeted in July 2018 King and Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the chamber’s top Democrat, were “not happy” when then-President Trump “went to negotiate peace” with leaders of North Korea and Russia, saying the only thing that would make them happy “is if a nuke is dropped on the US, because that will mean that President Trump has failed.”
That tweet came with an image of King and Schumer smiling next to a mushroom cloud. Brakey declined to comment for this story.
Former Gov. Paul LePage
Former Gov. Paul LePage, a Republican who led Maine from 2010 to 2018, was no stranger to controversy while in office, such as when he falsely claimed in 2016 that nearly all drug dealers arrested in Maine were Black, Hispanic and from out of state.
National outlets picked up on the comments. After Rep. Drew Gattine, D-Westbrook, criticized him, LePage left Gattine a profane voicemail in which he called the lawmaker a “socialist c—-sucker” and later said he would like to have a duel with Gattine and point a gun “right between” his eyes. In a statement, he called the reference “simply a metaphor.”
LePage, who did not respond to emailed requests for comment, ran a generally toned down but unsuccessful campaign against Mills in 2022.
Four years ago, he chaired Trump’s Maine campaign but has receded from politics after giving an interview last year calling the former president “wrong” for his false insistence that he beat Biden in 2020. Last year, he headed up a fundraiser for the families of victims of the Oct. 25 mass shooting in his birth city of Lewiston, bringing in nearly $500,000.
