A month into Donald Trump’s second term, the president hosted a White House event for the National Governors Association, which didn’t quite go as planned. The Republican picked a fight with Maine’s Democratic governor, Janet Mills, over transgender student-athletes, apparently hoping to bully her into submission.
It didn’t work. “See you in court,” the governor told him.
Ideally, at this point, the dispute would be handled responsibly through a legal process. But as The Washington Post reported, the Trump administration appears to have settled on a different kind of course.
When the acting head of the Social Security Administration ordered the termination of two data collection contracts with Maine in late February, a senior official on his leadership team warned him that the move would increase fraud. That didn’t matter, the agency chief responded. It was more important to punish Maine’s Democratic governor Janet Mills.
In an email first obtained by The Washington Post, Leland Dudek, the acting Social Security Administration chief, wrote that Mills was “disrespectful” and “unprofessional” toward Trump. Dudek added that canceling the contracts would lead to an increase in the number of improper payments, but he directed officials to do it anyway.
“Please cancel the contracts. While our improper payments will go up, and fraudsters may compromise identities, no money will go from the public trust to a petulant child,” Dudek wrote, referring to Mills.
The move was ultimately reversed, but the fact that this happened at all led Democratic Rep. Gerry Connolly of Virginia, the ranking member on the House Oversight Committee, to urge Dudek to resign.
Complicating matters is that the retaliatory campaign was not limited to the Social Security Administration.
Trump’s Department of Education, for example, launched an inquiry against Maine last week, and this week, as The New York Times reported, Trump’s Department of Agriculture said that it had “frozen federal funding for education programs in Maine, the latest in a barrage of actions targeting the state.”
In case that weren’t quite enough, after Trump clashed with Mills, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration sent a letter to Maine cancelling funding for Maine Sea Grant. These developments come on the heels of the president publishing an item to his social media platform in which he demanded that governor issue “a full throated apology,” adding, “I’m sure she will be able to do that quite easily.” For the record, Mills told Trump that her state would follow the law. This, evidently, sparked a retaliatory campaign against her home state. Such tactics are plainly indefensible, though they’re no doubt intended to send an authoritarian-style message to every state: If your governor makes Trump unhappy, you might be next. This isn’t how the United States is supposed to operate — and it’s not how United States operated before Trump came along.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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