William C. Hiss lives in Lewiston.

Like many Mainers, I get newsletters from members of our congressional delegation.

Sen. Susan Collins’ versions are full of pictures of her meeting with constituents and reminders that she has used her power as chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee to gain earmark grants for projects in Maine, from firehouses to Navy destroyers to Lewiston-Auburn’s new MILL museum.

Whether earmarks are a rational way to spend our tax dollars, that is the system we have. What you almost never find in her newsletters are the words “Trump” or “president.”

Every disaster in this presidency — the Iran war debacle, his threats to invade Greenland or take over Canada, the forced retirements of our most senior experienced military leaders, his racist attacks on immigrants, the shameful conduct of his now hideously well-funded ICE teams, even his destruction of much of what is lovely in Washington’s landscape — is of Trump’s own making.

In August of 2024, I wrote a letter to these Maine papers titled “20 reasons to reject a candidate.”

Tragically for America, every one of these 20 reasons has come to pass: we have a president who is a convicted felon, and adjudged by all our courts as a sex abuser. He is a serial liar, mentally ill with narcissism, appointer of utterly incompetent staff and pardoner of thousands who tried to overthrow our government or have been found guilty of graft.

Now he is trying to destroy our elections, ensure that he and his family and billionaire buddies are enriched by his every decision and draw us into one disastrous crisis after another. Millions of Americans are losing their health insurance, scientific and climate research is being cut and with the enormous loss of tax revenues, our exploding federal deficits will put Social Security, Medicare and most other federal programs at serious risk.

Meanwhile, a never-ending stream of distractions: an immense marble and gold arch, destroying the White House lawn for garish fights, a ballroom, banners of his face from federal buildings, passports with his face and even a demand that he be put on the U.S currency.

This spring on a family vacation we tried to visit the national park sites in the U.S. Virgin Islands. We were told by the park ranger on duty that the parks had lost almost all their staff except for security personnel, and there were no staff to collect normal entrance fees or give historical tours of the sites. Trump’s flashy trip to Medora, North Dakota, was another distraction, hoping for reflected limelight from Teddy Roosevelt, the founder of our system of national parks.

Sen. Collins most carefully is measuring out expediency in quarter-teaspoons, almost never raising publicly anything Trump does. Is this political survival, trying to stay out of the inevitable explosions of anger from a mentally ill con man? Hoping to make a visible trail of earmarks her path to reelection?

But Sen. Collins votes for what Trump wants 95% of the time, from right-wing judges to his disastrous budget bills. As arguably the most powerful person from Maine in Washington, she has had hundreds of opportunities to push back against Trump’s madness, and she has avoided almost every one of them.

In a recent weekly newsletter, Sen. Collins reported that she gave an address to the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America. In her remarks, she added a personal note:

“My father fought against the Nazis in World War Two. He was wounded twice in the Battle of the Bulge when he had just turned 19, earning two Purple Hearts and the Bronze Star. He rarely spoke about the war, but he taught me that evil cannot be ignored …”

Just so. Evil cannot be ignored. We are seeing the daily evidence of what can happen in
America when evil is ignored, or we are intimidated by threats or blinded by distractions.