Collins says Trump did 'a lot that was right' in pandemic — including withholding supplies from Maine

It's been a while since we checked in on Sen. Susan Collins and what she's concerned about these days. Thanks to the Bangor Daily News, we know now. She's disappointed that Donald Trump isn't opening Affordable Care Act enrollment, but thinks he's doing a bang-up job otherwise, including by withholding desperately needed medical supplies from her state. But she still won't say if she voted for Trump—the only Republican on the presidential ballot—in Maine's primary.

This part on Trump, OMG: "The president did a lot that was right in the beginning." Seriously. She said that. "I think his daily press briefings have been far more helpful to the American people and that he has deferred in many cases to the experts who usually accompany him to those press briefings." She takes credit for that, of course. "First let me say that I was among many who advised the president to listen more closely to the excellent medical advisers that he has like Dr. Fauci and like Dr. Deborah Birx [the White House coronavirus response coordinator], and he has been doing that lately." Right. Because we all know how Trump learns his lessons from her.

She also, remarkably, defended the administration for only sending Maine a fraction of its request for N95 face masks, while Florida got far more than it requested. It's because Maine—get this—asked for too many! "The fact is that Maine requested far more masks than Florida did," she told BDN. "When you look at the number of masks that had been sent out in three different shipments from the national stockpile, 86,000 masks have been sent to the state of Maine and that is one mask for every 15 Mainers." Never mind that Maine asked for 500,000—they were being greedy! Then she said that "masks are generally allocated on a per-capita basis." Maybe per capita of the number of times the state's governor has kissed Trump's ass.

As far as that maybe or maybe not vote for Trump in the primary? "I'm not going to get involved," she says. Because she's "working literally night and day on" the pandemic and "I just don't think it's appropriate at a time when we are facing the most serious health crisis since the 1918 Spanish flu." What she's apparently not working day and night on is convincing Trump to give her state what experts there say they need. The state with the oldest population in the nation and where fully half of all adults are considered high risk for developing a serious illness if they are diagnosed with coronavirus is not getting what it needs from Collins, either.