Susan Collins radiates the energy of your grandmother’s well-meaning 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.
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.
But it’s not without purpose. There’s a method to this particular madness. Collins has built an extraordinarily lucrative career as the “always earnest voice of Maine reason”—the moderate who provides cover for radical agendas while maintaining plausible deniability. Her self-dealing decision-making has generated rivers of money and political capital precisely because she exists in a landscape where, compared to the likes of Trump and his most brazenly corrupt enablers, her betrayals seem almost polite.
That’s her value proposition: destruction with good manners. Complicity dressed up as thoughtfulness. A reliable vote for the worst outcomes, packaged with just enough performative anguish to maintain the fiction of moderation.
She’s not the loudest voice dismantling democracy and rights. She’s just the one who does it while expressing deep, deep concern about having to do it.
And somehow, that makes her even more dangerous.
