Aunt Susan’s on the Take.
How did Maine’s Senator Susan Collins go from a negative net worth when she was elected to now having millions?
Susan Collins radiates the energy of your grandmother’s sister—if your grandmother happens to be Blanche Hudson. For years, many of us were bamboozled into believing this seemingly innocuous moderate Republican actually represented decency in an increasingly radicalized party. But let’s be clear: Susan Collins is not innocuous. She’s not decent. She’s just a less obvious catastrophe. Baby Sue.
She’s perfected a particular political theater: the furrowed brow, the hand-wringing, the carefully staged consternation before every consequential vote. We know the routine now. The “concerns.” The “disappointment.” The telegraphed anguish designed to signal just how gosh-darn conflicted she feels right before voting to strip away rights, confirm extremist judges, or enable the very worst impulses of her party.
And here’s the thing about the Senate that makes Collins particularly insidious: despite all the rhetoric about representing Maine, the structure gives her an outsized voice in all our lives. She knows this. She understands that when she performs her ritual of concern and then votes with the extremists anyway, she’s not just betraying Mainers—she’s screwing all of us. The “us” is vast, and she knows it. Bless her heart.
Watch her glide through the Capitol in those aggressively sensible pumps, pearls clutched like a talisman against accusations of vanity, voice calibrated to that perfect pitch of concerned reasonableness that never quite tips into actual conviction. At 72, Collins has perfected something far more valuable than legislative skill—she’s mastered the art of looking thoughtful while doing exactly what benefits her bank account. The cardigan is a costume. The moderation is a con. And Maine voters are finally, belatedly, catching on to the longest-running grift in New England politics.
Here’s what ought to scandalize people: In 2011, Susan Collins—then already fifteen years into her Senate career—reported a negative net worth between minus-$165,000 and minus-$689,000. She was underwater. Broke. The kind of broke that makes you wonder what exactly she’d been doing for a decade and a half in one of the most powerful positions in American government.
Then she married money, and suddenly everything changed.
Thomas Daffron wasn’t some lobsterman from Penobscot Bay. He was a Washington operator, chief operating officer at Jefferson Consulting Group, the kind of lobbying outfit that makes millions orchestrating the quiet gutting of regulations while senators mouth platitudes about bipartisanship. They married in August 2012, and if you’re the romantic type, you might have sighed at the late-in-life love story. If you’re cynical—or simply paying attention—you recognized it for what it was: a merger between political access and influence-peddling infrastructure.
Six years later, Collins’ net worth had metastasized to somewhere between $2.4 million and $5.8 million. Today, it sits between $2.6 million and $7.9 million, with estimates around $6.6 million. That’s not savvy investing. That’s not careful retirement planning. That’s a woman who figured out how to monetize being the “reasonable Republican,” the perpetual swing vote, the senator who wrings her hands in public while cashing checks in private.
The portfolio reads like evidence in a RICO case. Up to $1 million in TD Bank. Up to $500,000 in Vanguard ETFs. Quarter-million chunks in Apple, Fidelity funds, Waste Connections. Stock trades totaling up to $115.8 million over the years—including a staggering $50 million purchase of 3M stock in 2015, and a perfectly-timed $50,000 bet on Nvidia in January 2022, just before the AI boom turned it into a money machine.
Her office trots out the standard excuse: all trading decisions made by a third-party adviser, no connection whatsoever to her Senate duties. Right. And I’m sure it’s pure coincidence that a senator sitting on the Appropriations Committee and formerly chairing Homeland Security—committees with access to nonpublic information about government contracts, defense spending, and regulatory decisions—just happened to make fantastically lucrative investment choices. The naiveté required to believe that would embarrass Rose Nylund.
But the real obscenity, the moment when Collins revealed herself completely, came in December 2017 with the Trump tax cuts.
She sold it with her trademark earnestness, writing constituents that the bill would help “lower-income and middle-income families keep more of their hard-earned money.” It was pure Collins—high-minded rhetoric masking naked self-interest. What she somehow forgot to mention: her husband held up to $2.26 million in stock in companies that would rake in billions from that bill. Eight companies alone represented up to $600,000 of those holdings.
After Collins cast her vote? Those investments potentially doubled—surging by $340,000 to $600,000 as the corporations she was invested in gorged on tax breaks and stock buybacks. She voted to enrich herself by hundreds of thousands of dollars while assuring struggling Mainers she was fighting for them.
The American Democracy Legal Fund called it what it was: “blatant corruption.” Brad Woodhouse didn’t mince words: “Instead of focusing on helping her constituents, Sen. Collins is using her office to enrich herself and her husband. This blatant corruption must be thoroughly investigated by the Senate Ethics Committee.”
The investigation never materialized. Of course it didn’t. Investigating Collins would require the Senate to acknowledge it’s become a millionaires’ club where policy is just portfolio management by other means. Can’t have that. Might interrupt the money flow.
So Collins skated. She always does.
That’s her genius—the ability to commit corruption in broad daylight while maintaining that expression of wounded innocence, as if she’s the victim of partisan attacks rather than a politician caught red-handed voting for bills that stuff her pockets.
But the tax bill was merely prologue. The real revelation of who Susan Collins actually is came with Brett Kavanaugh.
Fall 2018. The nomination lands like a grenade. Activists organize a crowdfunding campaign called “Be a Hero” that raises nearly $1.5 million, pledging to fund her 2020 opponent if she votes yes. Collins clutches her pearls, calling it “disgusting,” “unethical,” possibly illegal—an “attempt to bribe” her. The outrage is exquisite. How dare anyone suggest money might influence her vote! (The irony, apparently, is lost on her.)
More than 230 Maine attorneys sign a letter begging her to reject the nominee. Christine Blasey Ford delivers testimony so credible, so devastating, that even cynical Washington operatives find themselves moved. Collins, who has spent decades positioning herself as pro-choice, as a defender of women’s rights, faces a simple test: Will she believe a woman, or will she believe the conservative legal establishment that’s been courting her for years?
She meets with Kavanaugh for two hours. When she emerges, she has her talking points polished to a high gloss. Kavanaugh assured her Roe v. Wade was “settled law.” Problem solved. Concerns addressed. Time to confirm.
Then came the floor speech—that 45-minute masterpiece of self-serving constitutional interpretation. She announced that Kavanaugh believed “precedent is not merely a practice and tradition, but rooted in Article III of our Constitution itself.” It was brilliant political theater, the kind of performance that sounds principled if you’re not listening carefully or thinking critically about what’s actually being said.
She voted yes.
Kavanaugh was confirmed.
And like clockwork, the money came flooding in.
Since 2019, Collins has hoovered up nearly $200,000 from Federalist Society donors—the very organization that vetted Kavanaugh, that orchestrated the conservative court takeover, that existed for the explicit purpose of overturning Roe.
The donor list is a who’s who of right-wing judicial activism. C. Boyden Gray, the Federalist Society board member who had run attack ads against her in 2003 for voting against a conservative judge? Suddenly generous—his contributions jumping from $3,600 in 2014 to nearly $8,000 after Kavanaugh.
Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society puppet master—first-time donor. Philip Anschutz, billionaire Federalist Society bankroller—maximum contribution of $5,600. Bernard Marcus, Home Depot founder and Federalist Society “Madison Club” member, and his wife—$20,800 combined to Collins’ campaign and PAC.
This wasn’t gratitude. This was a transaction. These people got what they paid for—a Supreme Court majority that would overturn Roe—and they were settling accounts with the senator who made it possible.
June 2022. Roe falls.
Kavanaugh signs the majority opinion.
Collins issues a statement dripping with shock and betrayal. The decision is “completely inconsistent with what Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh said in their hearings and in our meetings.” She’s been misled! Deceived! How could they!
The performance would be Oscar-worthy if it weren’t so transparently dishonest.
Because we know now—reporters found out later—that Trump administration officials had privately mocked Collins during the confirmation process, viewing her as an “easy mark” who could be manipulated with constitutional jargon and promises about precedent. They held elaborate mock hearings preparing Kavanaugh for exactly how to handle senators like Collins—what reassurances to offer, what magic words would let her justify a yes vote while maintaining her moderate brand.
She wasn’t fooled. She was complicit. There’s a difference.
Collins isn’t stupid. She’s calculating. She knew exactly what Kavanaugh would do on the court. She knew his entire judicial philosophy was built on overturning Roe. She knew the Federalist Society had spent decades building the infrastructure to make it happen. She voted yes anyway because her political survival and her bank account mattered more than the reproductive rights of millions of women.
The voting record strips away any pretense of moderation. Collins has voted with the GOP majority 99% of the time on judicial nominees over 22 years. She confirmed 95% of Trump’s judicial picks, including multiple nominees rated “not qualified” by the American Bar Association. These aren’t the votes of a thoughtful moderate carefully weighing each nominee. These are the votes of someone who knows which side pays better.
And the pay is spectacular. The Senate salary is $174,000—comfortable, certainly, but nowhere near enough to explain how someone goes from negative net worth to nearly $8 million in a decade. The difference is the investment portfolio, the stock trades, the perfectly-timed bets that just happen to align with her committee assignments and access to nonpublic information.
Collins still weaponizes her biography—the lumber business her family has run since 1844, the parents who both served as mayor of Caribou, the small-town values and work ethic she supposedly learned in Aroostook County. She deploys it like armor against criticism, as if being born in northern Maine somehow inoculates her against charges of corruption.
But that earnest girl from Caribou—if she ever existed—is long gone. She’s been replaced by a Washington insider who has mastered the art of profitable betrayal. Vote for tax cuts that enrich your portfolio. Confirm judges that make conservative donors happy. Maintain the fiction of moderation while consistently serving power and money. Never take responsibility. When consequences arrive—when Roe falls, when hospitals close, when families struggle—issue a carefully-parsed statement expressing disappointment, then deposit the checks.
Collins has plummeted from “one of the most popular politicians in the country” to someone facing potential electoral extinction. This summer she voted to advance Trump’s bill that would strip Medicaid from 60,000 Mainers, then voted against the final version—the kind of transparent both-sides maneuver that might have worked in 2005 but looks pathetic now.
She still brags about perfect attendance—9,000 consecutive votes!—as if showing up matters when the votes themselves constitute betrayal. Nobody cares that you never missed roll call when you spent those votes selling out your constituents.
Governor Janet Mills is preparing to challenge Collins in 2026, and the race will be delicious. Not because of policy differences or partisan dynamics, but because it will force Collins to defend the indefensible: How does someone go from broke to multimillionaire while voting consistently against the interests of the state they claim to represent?
The financial disclosures are a confession. Negative net worth to $8 million. Public servant to wealthy insider. Moderate voice to reliable conservative vote. The transformation is complete, and the evidence is irrefutable.
Susan Collins — sensible shoes, reasonable demeanor, the kind of woman who’d organize the church potluck. But she’s not. She’s a politician who spent three decades perfecting the monetization of moderation, extracting maximum profit from positioning herself as the swing vote, accumulating wealth while maintaining plausible deniability about corruption that’s documented in black and white in public filings.
She takes no responsibility for Roe, though her vote made it possible. No responsibility for tax cuts that exploded the deficit while padding her portfolio. No responsibility for unqualified judges or gutted Medicaid or any of it. She takes nothing but money, and seems genuinely mystified that people are furious.
That’s the real tell with Collins. She’s been running this con so long, has perfected the performance of wounded reasonableness so thoroughly, that she’s started believing it herself. She thinks she’s still that earnest public servant from Caribou, making tough calls with imperfect information.
But the bank account tells the truth. From negative net worth to multimillionaire in the time it takes most people to pay off a mortgage. That’s not public service. That’s a heist.
And in 2026, Maine voters will finally get their chance to tell Susan Collins exactly what they think of her performance.
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