Democratic governors are in a tricky spot. If they defy President Trump, they are liable to find themselves retaliated against, as happened last week to Gov. Janet Mills of Maine, whose state become the subject of a Trump-administration investigation after she sparred with the president during the annual National Governors Association meeting over his executive order banning transgender athletes from women’s sports. But appeasing or ignoring an emboldened Trump leaves them vulnerable to an increasingly angry Democratic base that wants to see their elected officials fight back.
Among those trying to find the right balance is Gov. Maura Healey of Massachusetts. Healey is a former civil rights lawyer who, in 2015, became the nation’s first openly gay state attorney general. During the first Trump administration, she sued the federal government dozens of times from that perch. In 2022, she was elected governor, and she recently announced that she will be running for another term.
While Healey may not have the same national profile as some of her colleagues — like JB Pritzker of Illinois or Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania — she is known as being very influential in the party. She was the first Democratic governor to publicly urge former President Joe Biden to step aside after his disastrous debate and more recently was part of a group that privately pushed Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, to be more aggressive in opposing Trump. As part of a series of conversations I’m having with Democrats, I wanted to talk to Healey about how she views her role as the governor of a blue state in this new Trump era, and how she thinks her party can pick its battles and rebuild its brand.
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You just returned from D.C. for the annual National Governors Association meeting, and you attended an event with the president, along with other Democratic and Republican governors. What did you discuss with the other governors while you were there? Well, you go to the White House with the expectation that you’re going to hear the president articulate some vision for the future. It’s supposed to be an opportunity to talk about how governors and states can work with a new administration. That wasn’t what this was about. The meeting began with an address by Stephen Miller, and then later the president came out and began by recounting that he’s got the highest approval rating of anybody this early in his tenure, that he won the election not once, not twice, but three times, and then continued with a litany of conspiracy theories and false information. So it was unfortunate because I’m there as governor thinking: Let’s have a conversation about maybe where we can work together, right? How can we focus on the needs of everyday Americans? But unfortunately, we didn’t see any of that. What was also upsetting is that we saw him attack another governor.
The governor of Maine. The governor of Maine. Now remember, a few weeks ago he attacked Illinois and Governor Pritzker. He attacked Governor Hochul in New York recently. He’s now very gratuitously, in a way that seemed very manufactured in the moment, attacked the governor of Maine.