August 7, 2020 — President Trump is struggling to win over Maine voters with his recent pledge to lift restrictions for the state’s lobster industry.
Trump was beaming when he traveled to the state just two months ago to tell lobstermen he was reversing protections for some 5,000 miles of ocean territory in a bid to open it to fishing.
“You’re going to go fishing in that area now that you haven’t seen for a long time,” Trump said at a roundtable with representatives from Maine’s fishing industry. “Lobstermen and seafood producers, I want to just congratulate you.”
But the state’s lobstermen aren’t celebrating. That’s because the area Trump aims to reopen is 130 miles southeast of Cape Cod — far beyond the reach of Maine’s day-boat lobstermen.
“This doesn’t help the Maine fisherman at all,” Leroy Weed, 79, who has had a lobster license since he was 10 years old, said of Trump’s reversal of protections for the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument off of Cape Cod.