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Former President Donald Trump repeatedly referred to Maine’s first woman governor, Janet Mills, as “he” and “him” during a rambling call to supporters in the state earlier this week.
The Republican presidential nominee made the mistake at least six times during the 15-minute call Monday night, according to the Bangor Daily News, which published audio of the “tele-rally.”
In return, the governor fired off a snappy retort on X, writing that Trump “better get used to recognizing women. He’s about to get beat by one.”
“Perfect response from Maine Gov. Janet Mills after Trump misgenders her repeatedly in call to supporters,” one X user wrote in reply.
Misgendering the state’s governor wasn’t the only error Trump made during the call. He falsely claimed that Harris plans to get rid of private insurance, and at one point erroneously insisted that Mills wanted to get 75,000 immigrants into the state.
In reality, Mills in 2019 announced a plan to increase the state’s workforce by 75,000 within the next decade, partly by providing education to immigrants. The 10-year economic strategy called for attracting “75,000 people to Maine’s talent pool ... both by increasing participation among Maine’s existing population and attracting new people from out of state.”
“Your radical left governor has announced a plan to resettle 75,000 migrants, many of them will be murderers, gang members, and terrorists, frankly, and whatever is going on with him, radical-left governor,” Trump said.
He added: “He wants to resettle 75,000 migrants into Maine. That’s only because they told him to do so. He’s weak and ineffective and they told him to do so and he’s saying ‘Yes, sir. Yes, ma’am. I will do it.’”
Trump also used a masculine pronoun to refer to Mills when he criticized the Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris.
“Kamala’s turning your state into a dumping ground because they have a governor that’ll do whatever they say, and that’s the next thing — you’d better get rid of him someday in the near future — and if she wins, Maine’s unique character will be lost forever,” he said.
Mills, the first woman governor of Maine, has two years left of her second term. Governors in the state can be elected to two consecutive terms after which they have to wait four years to run again.
Maine is one of just two states, the other being Nebraska, that doesn’t use a winner-take-all system when it comes to how they distribute their electoral votes. Maine instead hands one electoral vote to each of the winners of its two congressional districts and another two to the winner of the entire state.
The call on Monday night was to rally support among voters in the heavily Democratic First District. While Trump is likely to lose the state as a whole, according to polling, he looks set to win the Second District.
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