It’s safe to say that Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s recent overture to President Donald Trump didn’t go exactly as planned.
Last week, Big Gretch was in Washington, D.C. to bend the ear of Trump — her second such visit in two months. But whatever Whitmer hoped to accomplish, a viral photo showing her hiding from cameras as she found herself in an awkward situation in the Oval Office probably wasn’t part of it.
On the one hand, Whitmer can’t be blamed for wanting a working relationship with Trump. The two had a high-profile feud during Trump’s first term, with the Democratic governor accusing the Republican president of not taking the COVID-19 pandemic seriously enough and egging on the militia groups that unsuccessfully plotted to kidnap her. Trump retaliated by threatening to withhold federal aid to who he derisively dubbed “the woman from Michigan,” deeming her insufficiently grateful.
So there Whitmer was, in a rented venue near the White House, giving a “Build, America, Build” speech calling for bipartisanship and offering conditional support for Trump’s tariffs, which he says are necessary to bring jobs back to the U.S. but have caused chaos in the stock market and stoked fears of a looming recession.
“I understand the motivation behind the tariffs, and I can tell you here’s where President Trump and I do agree,” she said. “We do need to make more stuff in America. … We do need fair trade. No state has lived through the consequences of offshoring and outsourcing more than Michigan.”
She added, “Let’s usher in, as President Trump says, a ‘Golden Age’ of American manufacturing.”
In a Q&A following the speech, Whitmer elaborated on her goals for her meeting with Trump later that day. “We’re never going to find common ground without talking to each other,” she told former Fox News journalist Gretchen Carlson, adding that she and Michigan state House Speaker Matt Hall, a Republican, planned on discussing issues pertaining to Michigan including invasive Asian carp in the Great Lakes and investments in Macomb County’s Selfridge Air National Guard Base.
Fair enough. But what Whitmer assumed would be a private meeting wound up being anything but. A camera crew was on hand as Trump signed the latest in a series of despotic executive orders targeting his critics, including calls for Justice Department probes into officials from his first term who spoke out against his baseless accusations that the 2020 election was “rigged” as well as his handling of classified documents.
Another executive order placed restrictions on the law firm Susman Godfrey, which represented Dominion Voting Systems in a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News over Trump’s election lies.
In an Orwellian bulletin, the White House described the orders as part of its efforts to terminate contracts with firms engaged in “activities not aligned with American interests” and “to end the weaponization of the Federal government.”
Whitmer, viewed as a likely 2028 Democratic Party presidential candidate, seemed to realize she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. After shielding her face from a New York Times photographer with a stack of folders, video footage showed her standing awkwardly in the background as Trump praised her, saying, “She’s done an excellent job.”
Speaking to reporters later, Whitmer defended the visit.
“My presence was not an endorsement of any of the actions taken or the comments that were made. I was going in for a meeting and they walked me into a press conference,” Whitmer told reporters. “I disagree with a lot of the stuff that was said and the actions that were taken, but I stayed in the room because I needed to make the case for Michigan and that’s my job.”
In hindsight, though, why wouldn’t there be cameras following the ultimate reality TV star?
UAW president Shawn Fain was similarly criticized for his outspoken support of Trump’s tariffs given the union’s longstanding relationship with Democrats, but on Thursday he offered a more nuanced take during a livestream address.
“One of the great divide-and-conquer tricks the ruling class has played on the working class of this country is to see politics like a spectator sport,” he said from the UAW’s Detroit Solidarity House, adding, “Both sides talk about bullshit issues to hype up their fan base, while the real issues that impact working-class people are never addressed.”
Fain maintained that the UAW’s obligations are to workers, not any particular political party or president. “Our approach to President Trump is no different than our approach was to President Biden,” he said.
“That’s not flip-flopping,” he added. “It’s called integrity.”
Like Whitmer, Fain said strategic tariffs along with other policies could help restore manufacturing jobs in Michigan. He also applauded Trump for even addressing the issue at all.
“The Trump administration is the first administration in my lifetime that’s been willing to do something about this broken free trade system,” Fain said, while also forcefully denouncing its attacks on organized labor, support for what he called the genocide in Gaza, and suppression of antiwar protesters at college campuses, among others.
“No matter what party you voted for, understand this — there is a direct line between the free trade disaster and the political chaos in this country,” Fain said. “Plant closures and mass layoffs resulted in intense pain and suffering and anger for hundreds of thousands of working families in our country, and all that pain and anger had to go somewhere. A lot of it went to support Donald Trump for president and now it’s being directed at immigrants, at transgender people, at higher education, and that’s the wrong target. The right target is corporate America, and the sooner both parties understand this, the sooner our country will begin to deal with our real issues.”
Fain’s speech is worth watching in full on YouTube, a masterclass in noting common ground while also speaking forcefully out against areas of disagreement.
So what should Whitmer have done differently?
“She should have punched him in the face,” political commentator Evan Stern wrote in a Substack post. “Or, short of that, Whitmer could have rhetorically assaulted the president, jumped in front of the cameras and eviscerated his plainly anti-American executive orders. .. Had Whitmer recognized the situation for what it was, she could have captured the attention of the nation and catapulted to the forefront of a crowded field of potential presidential candidates. But she stood silent, out of deference — indeed, out of loyalty — to Donald Trump.”
Stern continued, “It’s time for Democratic leaders to summon their fighting spirit and embrace unwavering opposition to Trump’s agenda — not as a matter of partisan strategy, but as a moral imperative to protect what remains of our constitutional republic.”
What would you do if you were witness to injustice anywhere?
Would you speak up against it in the Oval Office, surrounded by cameras?
What if you were just engaging in some “locker room banter” and someone made a crude boast, saying, “when you’re a star, they let you do it … you can do anything … grab ’em by the pussy” — even if you thought nobody else was around to see or hear it?
There’s power in being in the so-called room where it happens, but that power also comes with responsibility.
