We need more Janet Millses. I find myself here applauding a Governor who I disagreed with more than I have agreed.

But today I agree on this: We need more Janet Millses.

We need more leaders with less to lose personally, and more to gain for us all.

Janet Mills at age 77, has had a good political life:

• Maine's first female criminal prosecutor;

• Assistant attorney general from 1976 to 1980;

• District attorney for Androscoggin, Franklin and Oxford counties, a position to which she was reelected three times;

• First woman district attorney in New England;

• In 2002, she was elected to the Maine House of Representatives, she served on the judiciary, criminal justice, and appropriations committees;

• Became Maine's 55th attorney general 2009.

• Mills was again chosen as attorney general, 2012;

• She was reelected attorney general 2014;

• In 2018 became Maine's first female governor;

• In 2022 re-elected, she received over 373,000 votes, breaking the record for the most votes ever cast for a gubernatorial candidate, set four years earlier.

In 1985, Mills married Stanley Kuklinski, with whom she had five stepdaughters. Kuklinski died due to the effects of a stroke in 2014. She is the sister of Peter Mills, Dora Anne Mills, and Paul Mills.

Trump cannot affect any political life she may choose to have after her current term ends.  If anything, he will have much to worry about from someone who, “Speaks truth to pawer.”

We need more people of courage, who know they might end up in the cross-hairs of a deluded acolyte (but that has been true for many politician, over the centuries).  And while they might not seek to become a martyr, they know they are needed now, more than ever.

Mills said last Friday: "You must ask yourself: Who and what will he target next, and what will he do,” she said. “Will it be you? Will it be because of your race or your religion? Will it be because you look different or think differently? Where does it end?”

Paul Sheridan lives in Northport