LAST FALL, Erik Mercer, a Maine social worker and psychotherapist, saw one of his senators, the Republican Susan Collins, while he was waiting for a plane in Washington, D.C. Mercer, a Democrat, had approached Collins on a plane once before, after the 2016 election, to thank her for a ferociously worded op-ed she had published before the election calling Donald Trump “unworthy of being our president” and declaring that she would not be voting for him.
This time, he asked if he could sit next to her and then described the trouble he was having explaining to his children that the president was above the law, mentioning particularly the terrible things Trump says about women. Collins, he recalled, replied that she didn’t believe the president had said anything bad about women for a while and that she couldn’t comment further because she was a potential juror in his Senate trial. The conversation was frustrating, and he called a friend immediately afterward to complain about what he perceived as Collins’s lack of courage.
Mercer soon found himself just behind Collins on the jet bridge and overheard her tell another passenger that a constituent had just been “very rude” to her. Mercer cut in: “You were the one who refused to answer my questions. I was trying to do the work of democracy, and you refused to participate.”
“He called me a coward,” Collins said to her companion.
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