OPINION:
President Trump 1, Maine Gov. Janet Mills 0 (F).
With the 2025 Major League Baseball season having begun Thursday, that seemed like an apt way to sum up the University of Maine System’s capitulation two weeks ago to common sense.
With the prospect of losing hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funds, unless it prohibited transgender faux females from any longer competing in collegiate women’s athletics, the University of Maine System on March 19 repudiated the Democratic governor’s gratuitous “see you in court” resistance to Mr. Trump’s Feb. 5 executive order on the subject.
The next day, the feds announced that Maine was back in compliance and that the federal spigot was being turned back on.
“After the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) initiated a Title IX compliance review regarding federal funding, the University of Maine System (UMaine) has clearly communicated its compliance with Title IX’s requirement to protect equal opportunities for women and girls to compete in safe and fair sports, as articulated in President Donald J. Trump’s Executive Order,” the USDA said in its announcement.
It’s not clear whether Dannel Malloy, a former governor of Connecticut who is now the chancellor of the University of Maine System, made that decision independent of fellow Democrat Ms. Mills or whether he had to talk her down from that ledge.
Either way, the University of Maine System, of which I am an alumnus, recognized that “Show me the money” isn’t just the signature line from the 1996 film “Jerry Maguire.” It realized, even if Ms. Mills did not, which side its bread was buttered on.
To continue with the baseball analogy, it appears that Democrats in the Maine Legislature didn’t get the memo, and as with Democrats elsewhere, they seem determined to “double” down on their reflexive subservience to the microscopically small but muscular transgender lobby. (An estimated .003 of 1% of the population “identifies” as transgender, so why Democrats like Ms. Mills put their interests ahead of those of 51% of the population — real girls and women — is, to borrow Winston Churchill’s formulation, “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” As a purely political calculation, it’s a losing proposition.)
Yet, the Democratic-controlled Maine Legislature is now weighing whether to require Maine’s public schools to install tampon dispensers in boys’ restrooms, following the lead of failed Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz’s Minnesota.
This is just another case of “stuck on stupid,” and if the Legislature passes the bill and Ms. Mills signs it into law, Maine voters should subject it to what, in the Pine Tree State, is called a “people’s veto,” putting it up for repeal in a referendum.
Maine’s Democratic secretary of state, Shenna Bellows, who on Wednesday announced her candidacy to succeed the term-limited Ms. Mills as governor, would do well to come out against it or risk getting crushed by an electoral Indiana Jones-style boulder that she wouldn’t be able to outrun.
Suppose Ms. Bellows, who fought to keep Mr. Trump off Maine’s primary and general election ballots last year, doesn’t disavow it. In that case, Republicans running for the party’s nomination should put the issue front and center in the 2026 gubernatorial and legislative campaigns and make Ms. Bellows and other Democrats defend the indefensible.
If the 80%-20% nature of public polling on the issue of faux females interloping in girls’ and women’s sports is any indication, that too would be a losing issue for Democrats — not just in Maine but nationwide.
• Peter Parisi is a former editor with The Washington Times.
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