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Governor Gretchen Whitmer is being touted as a prospect for 2028 as the first female President of the United States.
More than six years ago, after Donald Trump upset Hillary Clinton in the presidential election, some wise guy wrote: “It is as if it is closing time at the bar and we have tossed our car keys to the biggest, loudest, meanest drunk in the joint and said to him, ‘Here, Butch, you get us home!’” (OK, it was me.)
That metaphor survived and thrived last week when Bret Stephens wrote in The New York Times that Trump’s “entire presidency was a drunken joyride with a reckless driver careening around hairpin turns at high speed.”
Now, under legal indictment in two places with possibly more to come, Trump is in the next phase of the metaphor: Police cars are chasing him at high speed with lights flashing and sirens wailing.
But he’s still ahead of them and he threatens to pull a U-turn on the cops and chase them back and – Ha! — lock them all up in prison.
Meanwhile — back in reality — Trump has indeed promised that, if elected again, he will jail his enemies and release from prison the violent convicts who tried on Jan. 6, 2021 to keep him in power and overthrow the government of the United States by lynching his vice-president, Mike Pence.
Assuming Trump again wins the Republican nomination, what happens if President Joe Biden doesn’t run for re-election due to health, age, or other reasons? What other Democrat might take on a political bully like Trump?
According to at least a couple straws in the Democratic wind, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer might be more than just a longshot. At the very least, she’s being touted as a prospect for 2028 as the first female President of the United States.
Two obvious hints dropped last week. First, Vanity Fair magazine published an extraordinarily flattering profile of Whitmer. Next, host Lawrence O’Donnell featured Whitmer on “The Last Word” on MSNBC.
“She is a strong female executive who could be elected president,” wrote Jennifer Palmieri in Vanity Fair. Her story was headlined “The Spartan: Why Gretchen Whitmer Has What It Takes for a White House Run.”
Palmieri is hardly a neutral observer. She worked for President Barack Obama and was the communications director in 2016 for Mrs. Clinton’s campaign. Palmieri wrote that Whitmer has “the talent, drive, and toughness to be a solid national candidate.”
“Whitmer describes herself as a progressive Democrat,” Palmieri wrote, “but observing her up close, I see her core ideology as getting shit done.”
O’Donnell, once a Democratic Senate staffer, is kind of an éminence grise among his party’s pundits.
In an interview of more than 10 minutes with Whitmer, he didn’t ask her about the White House, but he allowed her to plug her new “Fight Like Hell” political action committee for national issues, including next year’s re-election campaign for Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris.
“It’s the first time I’ve had a federal PAC,” Whitmer said. “It gives us the ability to help candidates whether they are Congressional or state legislature or the Biden-Harris campaign — and causes, as well, that are on the front lines.”
Among those causes are abortion rights and gun safety. They have brought Whitmer success with Michigan’s new, Democratic-majority legislature and they are likely to be crucial in next year’s elections. In many places, these issues are trending liberal.
Whitmer’s PAC platform might bring her national money, power, and influence during and beyond her second and final term, which ends on Jan. 1, 2027.
“We can replicate what we did in Michigan but also beyond Michigan,” she said. “The fight for these fundamental freedoms does not end at the state line.”
Without mentioning the word “abortion,” Whitmer said: “You see some states rolling rights back, taking away freedoms. Michigan’s moving in the opposite direction and I’m really proud of that.”
Of gun safety, she touted “common-sense gun policies, simple things like background checks and secure storage laws as well as red-flag laws.”
Neither Whitmer nor O’Donnell mentioned Trump by name, but his presence wafted like an odor from the TV. Trump famously dissed Whitmer as “that woman from Michigan,” a state where right-wing militia members plotted to kidnap and murder her.
Referring to that and to the Feb. 13 gun massacre at Michigan State University, her alma mater, Whitmer said:
“This moment is still so very real and scary. We are in a very precarious moment in this country … This is an unprecedented moment in American history … It has been tough. The rhetoric’s gotten so ugly and scary.”
Making it so ugly and scary, of course, is Trump, the metaphoric GOP elephant in the room who taunts his enemies and taints his allies by increasingly flinging dung.
Among Trump’s friends are the religious fundamentalists on the Supreme Court and gun groomers like Kari Lake. She is the failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate who still denies that she and Trump lost their elections in 2022.
Like Trump, the delusional Lake makes threats with Mob Boss inference.
In a speech to the Georgia Republican Party convention earlier this month, Lake issued threats to Biden, to Attorney General Merrick Garland, and to special counsel Jack Smith, as well as to “the guys back there in the fake news media, you should listen up as well. This one’s for you.”
Then she implied that a conviction of Trump might lead to gun battles.
“If you want to get to President Trump, you’re going to have to go through me and you’re going to have to go through 75 million Americans just like me,” Lake said to laughter and cheers. “And I’m going to tell you, most of us are card-carrying members of the NRA. That’s not a threat. That’s a public service announcement.”
Lake — like Sarah Palin, Marjorie Taylor-Greene, and Lauren Boebert — proves that female politicians can be just as verbally reckless as men like Trump, who has increased the venom of his ad hominem attacks against “evil people” who dare to enforce laws against him.
“The prosecutor is a thug, I call him ‘Deranged Jack Smith,’” Trump said Tuesday, after being indicted with 37 counts under the Espionage Act for his defiant and deceptive handling of government secrets after leaving the White House. “I did everything right and they indicted me.”
As is often the case, Trump slandered his foes with exaggeration and spouted a grandiose opinion of himself.
“If the Communists get away with this, it won’t stop with me,” he said. “I am the only one that can save this nation.”
Perhaps, one day in a debate, an opponent like Whitmer will speak to Trump in his own, blunt tone of voice but with truth on their side and tell him:
“Mr. Trump, you are a sex creep, a greedy grifter, and a selfish, immature groupie for dictators. You are a dangerous buffoon. You are a sociopath. You’ve done enough damage. You scare people. Turn over the keys, please, sir, and step away from the car. Please place your hands behind your back, sir. Mr. President, you have the right to remain silent…”
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