President Donald Trump’s governing style involves bullying those on whom he depends into working with him — and at least one Democrat is learning that playing along with this approach after Trump’s 2024 election victory may not have been worth it.
“The election was devastating for Whitmer, bringing both a Republican resurgence in Michigan that ended her party’s trifecta and a sweeping Trump victory,” wrote The Atlantic's Elaine Godfrey on Sunday. “During speaking engagements, the governor likes to tell crowds that she dealt with the disappointment by watching all eight seasons of the TV show Dexter—’A serial killer to lift your spirits!’—before getting back to work.”
Godfrey added that “this also appears to be the moment when Whitmer decided to try something new with Trump,” confirming that Whitmer expressed to her a need to work with Trump for the remaining two years of her term. From there Whitmer proceeded to congratulate Trump on the day of his second inauguration, declaring in her State of the State address that she was working for “collaboration” with Trump and allegedly taking a soft approach on issues like the presence of ICE agents in Michigan.
“Whitmer began to set up White House meetings with Trump—she’s had three so far, compared with only one during his entire first term in office,” Godfrey wrote. “They have discussed an array of Michigan-centric issues—emergency aid after an ice storm, a proposed semiconductor plant, a request for new fighter jets at Michigan’s Selfridge Air National Guard base. Which brings us to the moment that has probably played like a Chaplin-esque silent projection inside the governor’s brain for the past 12 months,” an occasion when she was photographed in the Oval Office concealing her office in shame from photographers with two blue folders.
“Whitmer seems to have concluded that she can do more with her remaining time in office through conciliation than through confrontation,” Godfrey explained. “The past year shows ‘that you can’t be too cautious with Trump, and you have to choose your battles very carefully,’ Julie Brixie, a Democratic state lawmaker in Michigan, told me. ‘Governor Whitmer has done a great job of that.’ Kansas Governor Laura Kelly, a friend of Whitmer’s, told me that states are more at risk in Trump’s second administration, which is why she figures that the approach Whitmer and her team “took in the first term cannot be the approach that they take in the second.”
Yet Godfrey added that Whitmer’s strategy is fraught with peril, given the president’s notoriously mercurial nature.
“Trump could change his mind at any moment about the new fighter jets for Selfridge, which aren’t set to arrive until 2028,” Godfrey observed. “Whitmer’s much-desired semiconductor plant fell through, thanks to tariffs and a shift in federal policy. “I don’t think it’s worked,” [Mark Brewer, a former chair of the Michigan Democratic Party] said of Whitmer’s closeness with Trump. “He’s given us a few trinkets.” The president even considered pardoning men who plotted to kidnap the governor until Whitmer begged him to back down.
“Had Whitmer gone soft on Trump?” Godfrey wrote. “For more than half a decade, she’s been ‘Big Gretch,’ the Bell’s-drinking, fuchsia-lipstick-wearing, sometimes-performative badass from up north. She became governor during the peak of the anti-Trump resistance. Then her clash with the president during the pandemic sent her rocket into orbit. When Trump dismissed her as ‘the woman in Michigan,’ she put the insult on a T-shirt and wore it on television; Etsy artisans hawked prayer candles with her face on them. In 2020, Joe Biden almost chose her as his running mate. After his disastrous 2024 bid, many Democrats hoped that Whitmer, not Kamala Harris, would swoop in to replace him. Now Whitmer is on the list of potential presidential contenders for 2028.”
Yet Whitmer’s status a Democratic icon is in danger by her conciliatory approach toward Trump. One prominent donor-adviser told Godfrey that “there is no bad--- energy to Gretchen Whitmer anymore.”
By contrast to this image, Whitmer has taken occasional outspoken stands against Trump. Describing his tariffs, Whitmer said in 2025 that “Michigan understands the negative consequences of unfettered trade with other countries that don’t play fair. Decades of offshoring and outsourcing shipped hundreds of thousands of good-paying, middle-class jobs overseas and shuttered hundreds of factories. The ripple effects were devastating. Fewer people, empty main streets, crumbling roads, and shrinking schools.”
Yet in contrast to that, Whitmer admitted to feelings that could be described as helplessness when discussing Trump’s initial plan to pardon the man who wanted to kidnap her.
"I'll be honest with you," Whitmer told Michigan Public Radio Network last year. "I talked to the president about a month ago, and he asked me how I'd feel about this, and I said, 'I think it would be the wrong decision, I would oppose it.' And he said, 'OK, I'll drop it.' Now we see this revelation. So, I'm not sure how to process it."
