Janet Mills stood a few feet away from the tough-talking man trying to unseat her as the state’s top executive as he accused her of lying and destroying the economy, when she made a declaration.

“I’ve spent the better part of my career listening to loud men talk tough to disguise their weaknesses,” said Mills.

On that day in October 2022, the man next to Mills on the debate stage was Paul LePage, a gruff former two-term Republican governor who famously declared that he was “Trump before Trump.”

Mills again stood her ground last week, but this time before the most powerful man in the country after being called out publicly for not complying with his directive regarding transgender athletes.

During a White House event with a bipartisan group of governors on Friday, President Donald Trump — who has pushed the boundaries of his presidential authority since taking office a month ago — asked if Maine’s governor was in attendance. After she replied that she was there, Trump turned and asked her if she planned to follow his executive order to “(keep) men out of women’s sports.”

“I’m complying with state and federal law,” she answered from across the room.

“Well, we are the federal law,” Trump said. “You’d better do it. You’d better do it, because you’re not going to get any federal funding at all if you don’t.”

“See you in court,” Mills replied.

Mills had been taking a wait-and-see approach to the second Trump term and refrained from joining public shows of defiance organized by some other Democratic governors. But that brief exchange Friday catapulted Mills into a symbol of the civil resistance to Trump 2.0 — and put Maine squarely in the sights of the Trump administration.

The confrontation led some other Democratic governors to urge caution against publicly challenging Trump at the White House.

But Mills’ stand came as no surprise to longtime observers like James Melcher, a political science professor at the University of Maine in Farmington, which is Mills’ hometown.

He does not think that Mills planned to confront Trump but was instead forced to respond after he called her out in a public address.

“That’s completely on brand for both Trump and Mills,” Melcher said. “He was calling attention to her and calling attention to her state’s policies, and I think under those circumstances, she’s not one to back down from that kind of fight.

“She’s not easily intimidated.”

The confrontation is another chapter in Mills’ long political history in Maine — one that the rest of the nation is now getting to know.

Her father, Sumner Peter Mills Jr., was a Republican floor leader in the state House of Representatives and a U.S. attorney for Maine, while her mother grew up on a potato farm in Aroostook County and became a teacher.

Her dad bucked the establishment and supported Margaret Chase Smith‘s bid for U.S. Senate.

Mills has cited Smith, a Maine icon who became the first woman to have her name placed in nomination by a major party for president, as a role model throughout her life.

“I was raised to be brave and to fight for what’s right,”  she wrote in a social media post in 2022 that included a reference to childhood surgery for scoliosis. “I’ve got a backbone of steel.”

She also has alluded over the years to her personal history with an abusive man.

“Some years ago, there was a young woman who dated a man who was handsome and charming and smart, and she was in love with him,” Mills said during a radio address announcing Domestic Violence Awareness Month in 2023. “The man was also an alcoholic, as it turned out. And one night in a drunken rage, that man held a gun to her head. The gun did not go off. She was alone in a strange city and had no place to go. She packed her bags and left that place and never turned back.

“The rest of the story is that that young woman went to law school. She became a prosecutor, later the attorney general and now the governor of the state of Maine.”

Mills was appointed as Maine’s first female prosecutor by Democratic Gov. Joe Brennan. She served as an assistant attorney general from 1976 to 1980, when she became the first woman elected as a district attorney in New England, prosecuting cases in Androscoggin, Franklin and Oxford counties.

In 1990, Mills was targeted for an investigation after joining two other district attorneys in criticizing the Bureau of Intergovernmental Drug Enforcement for allegedly targeting small-time dealers to boost their arrest numbers during an election year.

“It’s scary,” Mills told the Press Herald in November 1991. “Maine apparently has a secret police force at work that can ruin the reputation of any who opposes it.”

The probe was closed, and no charges were filed.

In 1994, Mills ran unsuccessfully for the 2nd Congressional District seat and lost in the Democratic primary. She worked for years at a family law firm and co-founded the Maine Women’s Lobby before being elected to the State House in 2002. She was reelected three times before being elected by the Democratic-controlled Legislature as the state’s first female attorney general in 2008.

Mills rose to statewide prominence as a foil to Paul LePage.

LePage grew increasingly angry with Mills as her office refused to represent his administration in lawsuits seeking to trim MaineCare rolls, deny state and local assistance for asylum seekers, or represent his administration in supporting Trump’s first-term immigration policies.

LePage wanted to fire Mills as attorney general, a position elected by both chambers of the state Legislature. He sought to withhold funding for her office and by extension district attorneys. The two often traded barbs in news reports.

In 2022, Mills offered an explanation about why she clashed so much with LePage — words that were echoed in her clash with Trump last week. Her job as attorney general, she said, was “to uphold the rule of law, and that’s what I did.”

The law that Mills says she is following now is the Maine Human Rights Act. After an update passed by the Maine Legislature in 2021, the state law now prohibits discrimination based on gender identity, in addition to race, sex, sexual orientation, physical or mental disability, religion, age, ancestry, national origin or familial status.

Mills signed the update into law, which passed the Senate along party lines, 22-13, and passed unanimously in the House of Representatives.

Along with officials in other states, Mills and other Maine officials have said they will continue to follow state and federal laws in spite of Trump’s order.

Last week, Trump threatened to cut all federal funding to Maine until the state complies with his order. And after Mills’ defied Trump in public Friday, at least two federal agencies that provide funding to the state launched investigations into Maine’s compliance — or noncompliance — with the order.

Mills hasn’t spoken publicly about the clash with Trump. But she made it clear in a written statement that her position has less to do with the issue of gender identity and high school sports than abuse of presidential power.

“In America, the President is neither a King nor a dictator, as much as this one tries to act like it — and it is the rule of law that prevents him from being so,” Mills said in a written statement Friday, saying she will work with the attorney general to defend the interests of Maine people in a court of law.

“But do not be misled: this is not just about who can compete on the athletic field, this is about whether a President can force compliance with his will, without regard for the rule of law that governs our nation,” she continued. “I believe he cannot.”

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