The Ballad of Big Gretch
It’s not easy to govern and defend democracy at the same time. Just ask Michigan Democrats.
Hello, Bulwark readers! I usually try to keep The Breakdown focused mostly on policy. (We have plenty of political coverage at The Bulwark, including my colleague Lauren Egan’s newsletter The Opposition, which is must-reading if you want to keep up on the Democrats.) Now and then I will make exceptions, though, especially for stories tied to my home state of Michigan and politicians here I’ve come to know over the years.
That includes Gretchen Whitmer and Elissa Slotkin, both of whom I’ve been covering since the 2018 campaign, when Whitmer became governor and Slotkin first won a seat in Congress. Both have been in the headlines a bit lately—and there are lessons about our political moment to be learned from their stories.
–Jonathan
IT IS NO EXAGGERATION TO SAY THAT Gretchen Whitmer owes her significant political profile to Donald Trump. The Michigan Democrat became governor in 2018, two years into Trump’s first term, thanks in part to a backlash against his immigration crackdown and efforts to repeal Obamacare.
Two years later, Whitmer went from being a relatively low-key governor to a national figure. And once again it was thanks to Trump—this time, because he was downplaying the severity of COVID-19 while Whitmer’s constituents were dying by the thousands. The two fought publicly, Trump famously calling her “that woman in Michigan”—a line that rallied MAGA faithful against her (and may have even helped inspire the 2020 plot to kidnap her) while transforming her into a Democratic folk hero.
Two years after that, when Trump-appointed justices helped supply the majority to overturn Roe v. Wade, Whitmer further endeared herself to the party faithful by becoming a champion for abortion rights—one who, through pre-planning and executive action, kept them secure in her state. Whitmer’s resounding re-election in 2022, in which she won the kind of swing voters Democrats need if they are to prevail nationally, landed her on pretty much everybody’s list for future presidential contenders.
Now Whitmer is back in the national political conversation, and once again it is because of Trump. But this time, the story isn’t about how she’s standing up to him. It’s about how she’s standing alongside him—literally and maybe figuratively too, though that depends on who you ask and what you think an elected official should do when the well-being of their constituents is at the mercy of an ill-informed, vindictive, and unpredictable president.
It’s a genuinely difficult situation, one that has challenged not just governors but also university presidents, senior law partners, and countless other leaders with similar responsibilities for others.
Still, if you’re a politician with a national profile, and especially if you have aspirations to national office, you have certain powers too. So the issue isn’t simply how you are reacting to the political environment Trump has created. It’s also how you are trying to reshape it.
THE REASON FOR WHITMER’S RETURN to the national news is a pair of recent appearances with the president tied to the future of the Selfridge Air National Guard Base north of Detroit. One of those appearances came this past Tuesday when Trump visited Selfridge, prior to rallying with supporters in Macomb County,1 in order to announce that the base would be getting a new fighter squadron and the jobs that go with it.
Whitmer was on hand to meet Trump as he disembarked from Air Force One and then joined him on stage, speaking after Trump did. The tarmac greeting played on social media as a “hug” when, in reality, it was more like a politician’s handshake and grip on the shoulder. She spoke for less than a minute, with perfunctory remarks that seemed to avoid direct praise of Trump, even though he’d praised her rather effusively. When she shook hands with him afterwards, she kept some distance.2
In a different time and with a different president, nothing about Whitmer’s appearance would have been remarkable. But Trump is in the midst of tearing apart the world economic and security orders, destroying federal agencies and the U.S. biomedical research ecosystem, and threatening the underpinnings of democracy by—among other things—ignoring orders from the federal courts.
Treating anything about him as conventional risks normalizing his presidency—a risk that Whitmer, of all people, by now understands. Just two weeks before the Selfridge visit, she was in the Oval Office while the president was speaking to reporters. He was in the process of signing orders for the prosecution of his political enemies, thus turning Whitmer into an unwitting prop for his anti-democratic photo op.
It was Selfridge’s future that had brought her to the White House that day; she had come with a top state Republican to lobby for the new squadron, in order to replace a retiring one that would have taken jobs with it. Whitmer said afterwards she hadn’t intended to be seen with Trump publicly, let alone give him political cover. The fact that Whitmer awkwardly held up a folder to shield her face from photographers, in a moment that went instantly viral, suggests she was telling the truth:
“I had to be there because this was a big, important thing for the state of Michigan,” Whitmer told the Associated Press afterwards, emphasizing she had kept her appearance short and was staying away from his evening political event. “Now, he is going to go off to the rally and say a lot of things I disagree with, that I’ll fight against, and that’s fine, but, you know, my job is to do everything I can for the people of Michigan.”
That’s an on-brand statement for Whitmer, who has always put a high premium on getting things done even if that means working with political adversaries—and whose biggest substantive accomplishment as a state legislator, before becoming governor, was working with Republican officials to pass a Medicaid expansion through which more than 700,000 Michiganders now get health insurance.
But now the future of that Medicaid expansion is in jeopardy, thanks to legislation Trump and Republican leaders in Congress are currently negotiating. And that is just one of the ways Michiganders could feel pain from Trump policies—or, in some cases, may be feeling pain already—whether it’s the slashing of research funding for the state’s big universities or cuts to VA hospitals that are creating “disarray” in scheduling and “skyrocketing” wait times for surgeries.
And then there are the tariffs.
FEW ISSUES ARE MORE CENTRAL to Michigan’s manufacturing economy—and few are more politically fraught for Democrats—than tariffs.
Bitterness over free trade agreements still lingers, especially in the Midwest, which is why the parking lots of union halls have signs warning that imports will be towed. So do memories that it was a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, who signed the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993. Those sentiments help explain the apparent inroads Trump has made among factory workers and apparent support for tariffs now—including a hearty endorsement for the initial round that came straight from United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain, a vocal Trump critic.3
Manufacturing jobs really did leave the Midwest, undermining key industries, and trade agreements almost certainly played some role. Those are among the reasons why plenty of respectable economists talk of carefully targeted tariffs as part of a broader set of policies to promote certain kinds of domestic manufacturing. But that is not what Trump has been doing.
He wants to end federal support for the development of electric vehicles, widely seen as the market’s long-term future, while simultaneously slashing funds for basic science research that is the lifeblood of future innovation. And rather than apply tariffs narrowly to specific countries or products or parts, he’s been issuing massive, blanket levies—and then constantly changing them depending on the stock market or, perhaps, whichever person had his ear at lunch.
This is driving up costs for the auto industry, and making it impossible to plan too. Just this week, General Motors revised its profit forecast downward, saying tariffs would cost it $5 billion next year. That would reduce employee profit-sharing checks (which are part of the union agreement) by between $1,000 and $5,000 per worker, according to the Detroit Free Press, although the bigger threat as always is the threat of job losses, which may have already begun.
One Michigan Democrat who has noticed this is Elissa Slotkin. The state’s newly elected senator has a lot in common with Whitmer. She likes to talk up bipartisanship, frequently invoking her background working on national security policy for both Republican and Democratic presidents. At the same time, she also first won election as part of the anti-Trump backlash in 2018, and has never shied away from attacking him over issues like health care, abortion, or the handling of sensitive intelligence.
Two weeks ago, Slotkin was in Lansing, speaking at an automobile museum as part of a mini-tour outlining her vision for the Democratic party. It’s a vision that has to include a more aggressive opposition to Trump, she says, and that includes attacking his tariffs notwithstanding the case for a smarter, more careful approach.
“If you want to be surgical about tariffs, I’m here for that conversation, particularly vis-a-vis China,” Slotkin told me in an interview afterwards. “But I reject the idea of treating Canada like China, and kicking our allies in the teeth and declaring them a national security threat while we’re also sharing intelligence with them every single day on our borders.”
“And Michigan is going to be deeply impacted by these tariffs whenever he decides what his official position is,” Slotkin went on to say.
The level of uncertainty for our small business owners, for anyone who works in manufacturing and anyone who works [in] farming, it’s the same level of uncertainty we had in COVID—except this time, it’s completely manufactured. It’s created by Trump. No one wants to bring manufacturing back more than me, but the proof is in the pudding, and from what I can see right now, he’s just a yo-yo on this stuff, making it impossible to plan, impossible to place orders.
WHITMER HAS ALSO SPOKEN OUT about Trump’s tariffs. She’s talked to Trump about them directly, she says, and she’s discussed them publicly—as she did on the very same day she was in the Oval Office.
It was during a speech about her vision for a national economic strategy, the kind you give when thinking you might run for president sometime soon. She spent the first few minutes cataloguing the ways Trump’s tariffs were already damaging Michigan’s economy, calling the impact “a triple whammy” of “higher costs, fewer jobs, more uncertainty.” Then she outlined a policy vision that on trade specifically had a lot in common with what Slotkin would later say in Lansing—that is, clumsy tariffs bad, careful tariffs good.
But the tone and emphasis were quite different. Whitmer said nothing about Trump’s erratic rhetoric or constantly changing policy positions. In the half-dozen instances when she mentioned Trump by name, it was to cite mutual understanding (“here’s where President Trump and I do agree”), to credit him with good faith (“the Trump administration says they get this”) or to echo one of his lines (“let’s usher in, as President Trump says, a ‘Golden Age’ of American manufacturing”).
“There’s a lot more common ground here than we think,” Whitmer said towards the end. “While partisanship has infected every aspect of our lives, driven by opportunistic politicians, cynical media figures, and addictive algorithms . . . our people are not as divided as our politics. I really believe that.”
It was hard not to interpret the difference as a conscious decision, especially as it was coming from a politician who two years ago launched a political action committee called “Fight Like Hell.” Among those who noticed the shift was New York Times correspondent Reid Epstein, who wrote that “Ms. Whitmer sought to thread a political needle, avoiding direct criticism of Mr. Trump or his administration—a notable contrast with the blunter attacks on the president made by other Democrats seen as potential presidential contenders in 2028.”
That contrast became even starker a few weeks later, when another Midwestern Democratic Governor, J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, gave a blistering speech about Trump—not on trade alone but on the whole Trump agenda. Speaking in New Hampshire (an obvious sign that his eye is on a presidential run), Pritzker invoked comparisons of Trump’s authoritarian moves to Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.
“Never before in my life have I called for mass protests, for mobilization, for disruption. But I am now,” Pritzker said. “These Republicans cannot know a moment of peace. They must understand that we will fight their cruelty with every megaphone and microphone that we have. We must castigate them on the soap box and then punish them at the ballot box.”
The next day, Whitmer stood beside Trump at Selfridge.
PRITZKER HAS SOME LUXURIES that Whitmer doesn’t, like governing in a reliably blue state where Democrats still control both houses of the legislature. Michigan’s Democrats lost their narrow, briefly held House majority in 2024, which means the term-limited Whitmer needs some Republican cooperation on still-unfinished legislative business (like her ongoing efforts to “fix the damn roads”).
Still, Whitmer herself is already sounding a more confrontational tone—like she did two days after the Selfridge event, during an interview on Pod Save America, when host Jon Favreau asked whether she agreed America was facing a constitutional crisis. “We are,” Whitmer said. “I think that no one is above the law. The thought that we’ve got an administration that is just blatantly violating court orders should, I think, scare everybody.”
A more telling indicator about Whitmer’s posture may be the debate over those proposed GOP cuts to Medicaid expansion. A few weeks ago, she ordered the state’s department of health to issue a report on the impact of potential Medicaid cuts. The results are due soon and, if the findings line up with past research, they will show that cuts would lead to more financial and medical distress for Michiganders—and tough going for providers, especially the rural hospitals for which Medicaid is an economic lifeline.
Other states face similar threats, making the future of Medicaid expansion a national story. Whitmer, whose influence includes a strong social media presence, is among the few Democratic leaders who can get the word out to voters all over the country. But it would also require sending a clear message about what’s at stake if Medicaid goes away—and about who wants to make that happen.
From My Reading List
More Dads Changing Diapers, Even If Donald Trump Wouldn’t.
Last week I wrote about the debate over falling birth rates in the United States and the extent to which that likely reflects a mismatch between the expectations of women and men—that is, women seeking equal opportunities in the workplace, while men have been slower to take on equal responsibility for childrearing and housework. But now men may be stepping up more, according to research by Misty Heggeness, the codirector of the Kansas Population Center at the University of Kansas.
That’s via New York Times columnist Jessica Grose, who asked Heggeness to run the numbers on a hunch the behavior of fathers has been changing since the pandemic. “We’re in a retrogressive political and cultural moment, when the valorized ideal of the American family involves a woman managing all domestic labor,” Grose wrote. “But that’s not the reality that a plurality of American families are living, and it’s not what a lot of dads appear to want.”
Elon’s Impact, As It Looks From West Virginia
The assessments of Elon Musk’s efforts through the Department of Government Efficiency, now that he is sorta-kinda-but-maybe-not-really leaving, have focused heavily on his outlandish boasts that he would find trillions of dollars in savings—and the reality, now apparent, that he’s fallen fall short of that goal. In fact, there’s good reason to think the net effects of his cuts to the federal workforce will actually mean higher costs—i.e., a less efficient government—especially if you take into account how cuts to the Internal Revenue Service will lead to laxer enforcement and higher tax evasion.
All of that matters. But there’s another, potentially more important story to tell. And that’s the one about lives harmed and even lost because of cuts to programs that provide health care, food, and other kinds of assistance. That will be true abroad, as children literally die of starvation and preventable or treatable diseases like malaria and HIV/AIDS, thanks to cuts to global aid. And it will be true here in the United States—for reasons the New Republic’s Michael Tomasky laid out this week. His essay is a personal one that starts with a story from West Virginia, where he grew up, but it’s a story that’s already playing out across America.
As my editor Sam Stein likes to note, journalists like me are contractually obligated to describe Macomb as the ancestral home of “Reagan Democrats”—the white, working-class voters who had been loyal Democrats until Reagan came along. For a more detailed explanation of the phenomenon and its implications, I recommend this 1991 American Prospect article by Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg, whose studies of Macomb put it on the political map.
For more on Whitmer’s appearance at Selfridge and what to make of it, I recommend listening to Sarah, Tim, and JVL on Wednesday’s edition of The Next Level. They discuss all of this right at the top of the show.
I’m hedging with “apparent” because it’s hard to find good data, and thus hard to know for sure, just how autoworkers feel about tariffs—or about Trump, for that matter.
Let's see...which person did Michiganders (corrected) want for president, Trump or Kamala Harris? I believe it was Trump, and Michigan was one of the...what do they call it...swing states that literally decided the election for the entire country. So who do I think I don't give a crap about if they are now suffering the effects of Trump's presidency? Yeah, that would be the people who live in Michigan.
Whitmer's lost my respect. I understand that she's playing the game as it needs to be played, but this isn't normal times when you kiss someone's rear in order to get a bridge built. This is about everyone with any form of influence standing against those who are threatening our very way of life. I don't know that anyone said "I know he's a genocidal maniac, but hey, I need to get a shipment of Mercedes Benzes delivered" about Hitler, at least not after they all knew who and what he was. If Whitmer is term-limited, then she's in even more a position to tell Trump to his face that he's a frickin' monster. I live in Illinois, I voted twice now for Pritzker, and I'm damn proud of him every single day.
First, excellent story and reporting. There is a Bulwark writer who does nothing but trash Dems and especially Biden in her stories. She can learn a thing or two from Cohn.
I get Whitmer needing to work with the current admin--trump wants to parade her around for his own purpose, unfortunately she let him do it. There was a good reason to be at the WH that day but not a good reason to be in the Oval at that moment. Meeting him on the tarmac, attending his speech weren't smart either -- might only have been a total of a couple min but those min will live long before anyone remembers her trying to clean up her missteps.
This is stuff I remember for 2028. When you have the chance to define yourself you don't let trump do it for you. Major fail by Whitmer.