Last week, President Trump asked Gov. Janet Mills if Maine was going to comply with his executive order “banning men,” by which he meant transgender women, from playing in women’s sports. Mills replied, “I’m complying with state and federal law.”

The president told her, “We are the federal law.” The “we” here would be the royal we.

Trump seems, as the columnist Jonathan Chait wrote in The Atlantic (“The Governor Who Stood Up to Trump”), to view the law “as coterminous with his desires.”

His manner was so autocratic and repulsive that I sent the governor a thank-you email.

My email seemed insufficient. What about letting people (most of whom already share my opinion) hear my thoughts on Facebook? Ditto. So I drafted a letter to send to local newspapers and asked people I knew to sign.

The letter read as follows:

Thank you, Gov. Mills, for responding to President Trump’s bullying on Feb 21, 2025, by making clear that executive orders from this administration are not the same as state and federal law. He responded to you with threats worthy of a mob boss — “You better do it” and then, as is his customary behavior, a putdown. “Enjoy your life after, governor, because I don’t think you’ll be elected in politics.”

Janet Mills, we will be supporting you if you run for elected office again, and greatly appreciate you speaking frankly when others have been cowed into silence.

Within the hour, Stephen King signed. My adult son’s first-grade teacher followed. Friends started passing the letter on for signatures; soon hundreds were flooding my email box, saying, “Add my name.”

Within 48 hours, I had 600 signatures and had to stop collecting names. Emails continue to pour in, even as I type these words. I was struck by the range of Mainers who wanted to sign, from best-selling and Pulitzer Prize winning authors (Jennifer Finney Boylan, Tess Gerritsen, Elizabeth Strout, Rick Russo, Richard Ford, Jonathan Lethem, Monica Wood and Cathie Pelletier) to Lisa Marin, granddaughter of John Marin, who has so beautifully painted the Maine coast, to lawyers, teachers, reverends, students, cookbook authors, gallery owners, librarians, farmers, house cleaners, doctors and more.

A whole slew of people who represent this state, from the easternmost point of Eastport to the blueberry barrens of Milbridge to the Allagash waterway, grittier former mill towns and food and culture-centric Portland. This was decidedly a District 1 and a District 2 outpouring, and one I planned to send to this paper, until I learned the paper does not publish open letters. Instead, Jennifer Finney Boylan, president of PEN America, posted the letter to Medium.

One man who knows Mills personally, having worked with her at the attorney general’s office before she became governor, described last Friday’s exchange between Mills and Trump as akin to Margaret Chase Smith confronting Joe McCarthy. Even though I’ve lived here for 25-plus years, I was in the dark on this extraordinary moment till last spring, when I saw Joe DiPietro’s play “Conscience.” It beautifully portrayed Republican (!) Maine Senator Margaret Chase Smith and her courageous “Declaration of Conscience” speech, a 15-minute effort delivered on June 1, 1950.

How can we have returned to a similarly ugly moment in history?

Somehow, President Trump has not insisted the “Declaration of Conscience” be removed from the United States Senate website, in the way he insisted the Department of Justice scrub its national database of police misconduct incidents, because … what? Now we are OK with police brutality? Just as we are in favor of inequity and exclusion in a democratic country where we supposedly value fairness and the rights of all?

Margaret Chase Smith, a freshman senator then hoping a more senior senator would take the lead, finally spoke out against Joe McCarthy. She began her famous speech by saying, “Mr. President, I would like to speak briefly and simply about a serious national condition. It is a national feeling of fear and frustration that could result in national suicide and the end of everything that we hold dear.”

Among her colleagues, Chase Smith noted “a considerable amount of mental paralysis and muteness set in for fear of offending McCarthy.”

We see the same mental paralysis and muteness among Republicans today. We can have different opinions — even different opinions about how to handle transgender rights and sports contests that are fair to all — without assenting to unilateral decisions done without the participation of Congress and which so far only are only resulting in more unemployed people, weaker protections for Americans citizens, more people treated with disrespect and no improvement in any normal citizens’ pocket book.

Chase Smith asked fellow Republicans not to achieve political victory through the “four horsemen of calumny: fear, ignorance, bigotry and smear.” These are some of Trump’s favorite horsemen.

Nota bene, those of you Republican senators who are keeping silent. This is not about ideological differences. This is about ceding to tactics and behavior that are morally wrong and plainly, as scholars of history keep warning us, fascist, starting with preying on the weakest and most vulnerable members of the population.

Remember: In the immediate aftermath of Chase Smith’s speech, she was praised and attacked. In the long run, only praised and celebrated.