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Donald Trump doesn’t seem to like Maine Gov. Janet Mills, based on a rambling campaign call to supporters in the Pine Tree State on Monday. He also doesn’t seem to know that she’s a woman, repeatedly referring to Mills as “he” on the call.
This small mistake speaks volumes about Trump, his factual awareness and his strained relationship with the truth.
Politicians misspeak and confuse things all the time. But Trump has habitually taken that to a new level, packaging incorrect information in an air of certainty that would have his supporters believe just about anything. Call us old fashioned, but if you’re going to declare that someone is “weak and ineffective,” it might be good to actually know who they are.
He attempts to criticize and stoke fear about a rival Democratic politician, but cannot even get basic facts about that person correct. In his world, it doesn’t seem to matter if you know what you’re talking about, as long as your words are delivered confidently and absolutely. In other words: Speak loudly, and hope your falsehoods stick (our apologies to Teddy Roosevelt).
We know that Trump has been familiar with Mills for some time, given that he compared her to a dictator several years ago for how she managed the state’s economic reopening during the COVID-19 pandemic. But for all his over-the-top language about Mills, he seems to lack a basic understanding about who she is.
Setting aside the apparent misogyny of a default assumption that leaders are men, if Trump doesn’t know or remember that Maine’s governor is a woman, what else doesn’t he know or remember? Plenty, it turns out.
As just one example, he falsely insisted during the call on Monday that Mills wants to “resettle 75,000 migrants into Maine.” That claim, as we’ve explained here previously, is a blatant misrepresentation of a state goal to grow Maine’s workforce by 75,000 people over 10 years. Those 75,000 new people would almost surely include immigrants from other countries, but would also include Mainers joining the workforce for the first time, Mainers returning to the workforce or people moving here from other states. The attempts to conflate this number with migrant resettlement, now echoed by Trump, use a real number to manufacture a false critique.
On this call and on the campaign trail, Trump piles falsehoods and ignorance on top of each other, and shrouds them with a relentless confidence that would have you believe him without question. His mistakes and misrepresentations on this call with Maine supporters should stand as an insightful if unsurprising peek behind the Trump curtain. In his world, it doesn’t matter if you’re accurate, it just matters how loudly and confidently you can declare something.
But here in the real world, the world that we must share and shape together, accuracy should still matter. It should matter if someone has a command of basic facts, especially if they want to be commander in chief.
