Vice President JD Vance has made two trips to Maine to stump for Republican Senator Susan Collins as her midterm election against Democrat Troy Jackson approaches. Yet Collins has been a no-show for each visit, leading to speculation that she is deliberately avoiding the vice president and the greater Trump administration.
In his latest visit to Maine on Monday, Vance heaped praise on Collins during a rally at defense technology manufacturer Compotech.
“Whenever I’m in the great state of Maine … I gotta give Susan a little bit of crap,” Vance said at the rally. “Susan is the most independent member of the United States Senate, and as the president of the United States Senate, she sometimes makes my job just a little bit harder. But she makes it harder because she is coming to work every single day and fighting not for a political party…. She fights for the great people of Maine.”
Vance also mentioned that Collins had been to his house about six times.
Vance: "The second shout out I gotta give is to my dear friend Susan Collins, the senator from Maine. Thank you!…She has been to my house probably a half dozen times, the Vice President's residence at the Naval Observatory." pic.twitter.com/JOipfRFFCA
It’s no surprise Collins didn’t show up to the rally. President Trump has a nearly 60 percent disapproval rating among Mainers as of last month, and nothing indicates any future improvement. The vast majority of Mainers don’t think their state is affordable, and Maine business has suffered significantly due to the most recent 50 percent tariff trade war the Trump administration started with Canada.
Collins has made a point to distance herself from Trump on his new tariffs threat against Canada, saying that they would be a “mistake.” She also drew a line in the sand against the administration’s attack on mail-in ballots, which she called “very important to the people of Maine,” particularly seniors.
Collins was called out by Jackson the morning of the rally.
“How ’bout fuel prices going through the roof because of the war on Iran? How ’bout ICE murdering people here in Biddeford? Let’s give a shoutout to Susan Collins about how poor of a job she’s doing for the state of Maine. I’m sure JD Vance loves her because she’s doing everything that he wants for her,” he said. “But she’s not doing it for Maine people.”
My message to Susan's pal @JDVance who’s coming to Maine today pic.twitter.com/mOMz4QqHFc
Jeanine Pirro, President Trump’s handpicked U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, messed up the prosecution of two accused MS-13 gang leaders earlier this year.
CNN reports that in April, Pirro, a former Fox News host, failed to get a jury to convict Moises Rivera-Luna, who is accused of ordering murders on U.S. soil from a Salvadoran jail cell more than 10 years ago, or his co-defendant Tokiro Rodas Ramirez, who was reportedly a local MS-13 leader in D.C.
And it wasn’t the first time she struggled to secure a conviction: A jury failed to reach a verdict on the two men less than five months earlier.
Trump celebrated bringing Rivera-Luna to American soil in March 2025, making the failed conviction all the more embarrassing. Under Pirro’s leadership, D.C. federal prosecutors keep running into problems with jury trials, securing convictions in only four of eight federal cases in 2026 prior to Rivera-Luna’s mistrial in April.
It didn’t get better for the Justice Department after that, either. The D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office has tried close to a dozen more criminal cases in federal court, only to have four trials end with deadlocked juries and two other defendants acquitted. It’s a highly unusual pattern, according to several investigators, unnamed former prosecutors, defense attorneys, and other legal experts who spoke to CNN. The conviction trial rate in federal criminal trials is around 90 percent.