It feels like I’m in an emotionally abusive relationship with yet another disingenuous Republican real estate developer who doesn’t know who he’s messing with. No, I’m not talking about Donald Trump. I’m talking about Mike Mullins.

Mr. Mullins started out his obscenely expensive campaign (so far he’s spent over $77,000.00 for a Maine House seat, a record, by the way) by hiring Ms. Marci Casas and paying her roughly eleven thousand dollars. He’s running against Valli Geiger for Maine House Seat for District #93 in Rockland and Owls Head. The amount he’s paying Ms. Casas, his Campaign Manager, according to finance records available through the Maine Ethics Commission, is roughly twice Ms. Geiger’s entire campaign budget of $5,800.00.

Aside from the obscenity of the dollar amount, and more to the point, Mr. Mullins and Ms. Casas have attempted to pull the wool over Mainer’s eyes with everything from his visual branding to his advertising to his attempts to micromanage coverage of his campaign. The more he tries to brand himself as a ‘Progressive Republican’, the more he reveals himself through his own words and actions as a Trumpist Republican who, when pressed, will not answer who he supports for president but instead, when asked, according to reporting by Becca Glaser in The Free Press, ‘resorts to bashing Mr. Biden and the Clintons in minute detail’. 

His campaign has been dishonest with us from the start and at first glance. His visual branding is blue on blue and when combined with his calling himself a ‘progressive’ one would assume he’s a Democrat or left leaning independent. His campaign Manager told me that his colors are that of Oceanside HS, this despite the fact that he never went there. Midcoast residents have to ask themselves, who spends seventy seven thousand dollars on a Maine House seat? I don’t know, maybe someone who thinks he will be challenging Chellie Pingree for her congressional seat one day?

When interviewed by Ms. Glaser for an article on him in The Free Press, Mr. Mullins preempted her article on him by publishing the transcript of the interview before the article even came out on his own Facebook page and titled the piece “Notes from Lime City: A Conversation with Becca Shaw Glaser.” As Ms. Glaser put it, ‘Mullins had surreptitiously published our unfinished exchange on his online Penobscot Bay Pilot member page, with zero consultation with me or The Free Press, making it appear as if I had co-authored it.’

He made a series of demands of Ms. Glaser regarding the piece before it was published but I’m guessing he felt the story was getting away from him and he needed to step in first. As she put it ‘he tried to get me to agree to this and that, full citations, responses printed in full, etc.’ Much the way Donald Trump walked out of his interview with Leslie Stahl on 60 Minutes last week.

When the local press have pushed him on who he actually is, he feels compelled once again to control the narrative much the way Mr. Mullins himself just did in this very publication in what I think can accurately be described as an unhinged Op Ed. He boldly states in an attack on The Free Press that ‘WE DO NOT NEGOTIATE’. Certainly sounds more authoritarian than progressive to me.

Is this man running for a Maine House seat or a chance to replace Stephen Miller? Haven’t we had enough of authoritarian Republican real estate developers who play fast and loose with objective truth and try to control the press?

And that’s the whole point. Mike Mullins has tried to convince us in every way from his signage to his disingenuous advertising that he is not what he actually is, a conservative Republican that wants to buy a seat in the Maine House as a jumping off point in his political career. A ‘progressive you can vote for’? Sure thing, her name is Valli Geiger and her campaign budget is $5,800.00, exactly what it should be. 

Seth Silverton lives in Thomaston