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      True Gretch review: Whitmer’s story – next stop the White House?

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      Joe Biden’s re-election bid remains on life support, the casualty of an indelible senior moment on the debate stage. Biden says he’s not quitting but polls show him falling behind. The moment has cast a spotlight on the alternatives, including a passel of Democratic governors seen as the party’s future.Among them is Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, who reportedly confided that Biden can’t win her state. But she has since announced that even if he were to drop his re-election bid, she would not run.And she denies that she wants Biden to quit.“Joe Biden is our nominee,” she posted on X. “He is in it to win it and I support him.”As it happens, Whitmer – the non-candidate – is out with a memoir: a traditional marker of ambitions for higher things.Like most campaign memoirs, True Gretch is about image improvement. As expected, Whitmer describes personal growth and political ascent. A light read, True Gretch’s underlying message is simple: “Don’t you forget about me.”Given Michigan is a swing state, that’s unlikely. Regardless of the outcome of the 2024 election, it will matter again in four years.First elected in 2018, Whitmer’s time in office will expire on 1 January 2027. She will need a new gig. Why not the White House?On the page, Lisa Dickey, author and ghostwriter, provides a valuable assist. Her client roster includes Jill Biden, George Stephanopoulos and Newsom. She “melded so well into Whitmer world” that she received “honorary ‘Half-Whit’ status”, according to the governor.Whitmer also reminds us of her familial familiarity with conflict and politics. She pays tribute to Dana “Dano” Whitmer, her grandfather. In the early 1970s, as school superintendent of Pontiac, a city north of Detroit, he implemented court-ordered desegregation. It was rough.The Ku Klux Klan threatened him and his family. Whitmer chronicles school bus bombings and the abuse suffered by her grandmother. “The phone would ring … someone on the other end would say, ‘Your husband’s dead.’ Dano was unflappable through all of it.”Whitmer’s parents were lawyers. Richard Whitmer, a Republican, served in the administration of William Milliken, a Michigan governor, then became chief executive of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan. Sharon “Sherry” Reisig, the governor’s mother, worked for the state attorney general.Years later, in the depths of Covid, Whitmer faced death threats and a kidnap plot, the affair of the “Wolverine Watchmen”. Charges under state law yielded five convictions. Federal prosecutors charged six more men, four of whom were convicted. Two pleaded guilty and cooperated with prosecutors.Whitmer describes a protest in April 2020 outside her office: “Swastikas. Confederate flags. AR-15s.” Masked men in balaclavas abounded. This spring’s campus demonstrations come to mind. Anonymity cloaks the coward with strength.“One man had tied a noose around the neck of a brown-haired Barbie doll, dangling her from a pole.”Taking a page from his Charlottesville playbook, Donald Trump called the mob “good people” and urged Whitmer to “make a deal”. He tweeted that she should “give a little, and put out the fire”.Negotiate over the barrel of a gun. “That woman from Michigan,” he called her.In hindsight, all was prelude to January 6. Four years on, Trump still won’t rule out violence if he loses.True Gretch contains lighter notes, including an 18-song playlist. Not Ready to Make Nice by the Chicks is top. Other contributors include Aretha Franklin, Taylor Swift, Alanis Morissette, Guns N’ Roses, Eminem, Elton John and Prince.Think of it as jogging music. A good politician, Whitmer gives Motown and Michigan their due. Franklin and Eminem grew up in Detroit.Reminiscing about high school, Whitmer says she spent more time partying than studying. “I ran with a fast crowd,” she confesses. As a sophomore, she passed out drunk after a bout of exuberant tailgating.Whitmer also tells of hanging out, as governor, in a dive restaurant – and violating Covid social-distancing rules. Ostensibly regretting her sin, she mentions that Newsom of California, another ambitious Democratic governor, did the same thing, albeit at a pricier joint. Jab noted.Whitmer has been fortunate in her opponents. The US supreme court decision in Dobbs v Jackson, which removed the right to abortion, has proved a gift that keeps on giving.Tudor Dixon, Whitmer’s Republican challenger in 2022, spoke of the upside of a 14-year-old rape victim carrying the child to term.“The bond that those two people made and the fact that out of that tragedy there was healing through that baby, it’s something that we don’t think about,” Dixon told an interviewer.Whitmer won by double digits – and the Democrats flipped both houses of the state legislature. For the first time in 40 years, the party held a governing trifecta.The generational shift within Whitmer’s family crystalizes the cultural and political trajectory of the country as a whole. Teddy Roosevelt, once a Republican president, then a third-party challenger, is one of Whitmer’s heroes. She quotes from his “Man in the Arena” speech, at length.“Though these words were written more than a hundred years ago, they’re just as true today – except for two things,” she writes. “The ‘man’ may be a woman. And she may just be wearing fuchsia.”

      True Gretch: What I’ve Learned about Life, Leadership, and Everything in Between is published in the US by Simon & Schuster More

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      Biden heads to Michigan to shore up support as calls to quit persist

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      Joe Biden was headed for the battleground state of Michigan on Friday, to campaign both for re-election and for his survival as the Democratic presidential nominee.In Washington, calls for the 81-year-old president to quit continued, while the Democratic leader in the House of Representatives said he had discussed the issue with Biden on Thursday, after Biden’s press conference following the Nato summit.In a letter to colleagues, Hakeem Jeffries of New York said discussions about Biden’s age and fitness for office had been “candid, clear-eyed and comprehensive”.“On behalf of the House Democratic caucus,” he said, “I requested and was graciously granted a private meeting with President Joe Biden.“That meeting occurred yesterday evening … I directly expressed the full breadth of insight, heartfelt perspectives and conclusions about the path forward.”Biden’s response was not disclosed, nor details of Democratic “conclusions”. But as the letter was released, an 18th congressional Democrat said Biden should let someone else face Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, in November.The 19th Democrat to say Biden should go, Mike Levin of California, was reported by Politico to have told the president so to his face on Friday, during a virtual meeting with the Congressional Hispanic caucus. Levin then stated his position publicly.Politico also quoted a “pro-Biden Democrat who attended the meeting” as saying the president “sounded very lucid, sharp, engaged”.There was further worrying news for Democrats when the New York Times reported that so long as Biden remains the nominee, major donors will put on hold “roughly $90m in pledged donations”.The Sunrise Movement also called for Biden to quit. Aru Shiney-Ajay, executive director of the youth-led climate-focused activist group, said she was “concerned Joe Biden isn’t in a position to mobilise young voters and win”.As Biden headed for Detroit, the capital remained abuzz. At the Nato summit on Thursday, Biden spoke assertively and showed his foreign policy experience but also made embarrassing slips, introducing Volodymyr Zelenskiy of Ukraine as “President Putin” and referring to Kamala Harris, his vice-president, as “Vice-President Trump”.Trump seized on that, posting on social media: “Crooked Joe begins his ‘Big Boy’ press conference with, ‘I wouldn’t have picked Vice-President Trump to be vice-president, though I think she was not qualified to be president.’ Great job, Joe!”Biden had appeared to say: “Look, I wouldn’t have picked Vice-President Trump to be vice-president [if] I think she’s not qualified to be president.”Online, Biden fired back, posting: “By the way: Yes, I know the difference. One’s a prosecutor, and the other’s a felon.”Trump, 78 and facing questions about his own cognitive fitness, was convicted on 34 charges arising from hush-money payments to an adult film star. He faces 54 other criminal charges, concerning election subversion and retention of classified information, and was fined millions of dollars in civil cases over business fraud and defamation arising from a rape allegation a judge called “substantially true”.Harris came to prominence as a prosecutor in San Francisco before becoming attorney general of California, a US senator and Biden’s running mate.Michigan is a swing state, choosing Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020, its Black voters a key part of Biden’s support. The Oscar-winning actor Octavia Spencer was set to appear with Biden in Detroit on Friday.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBiden’s campaign said he would target Project 2025, a policy plan led by the Heritage Foundation, a rightwing thinktank. Trump has tried to disavow the project, which Democrats say shows his extremist agenda.There was good news for Biden on Friday: a poll showing him improving since the disastrous debate against Trump in Atlanta that pitched Democrats into crisis.“Biden actually gained a point since last month’s survey, which was taken before the debate,” wrote Domenico Montanaro of NPR, which carried out the poll with PBS and Marist. “He leads Trump 50%-48% in a head-to-head matchup. But Biden slips when third-party options are introduced, with Trump [leading] 43%-42%.”But Politico noted telling dissonance in responses to Biden’s Nato performance. One unnamed Biden aide said the president exceeded expectations and had some great lines. A Democratic aide said Biden had “lowered the bar … until it’s on the floor”.Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, the dean of the Congressional Black caucus, told NBC Biden “sometimes mangles words and phrases but all of that is almost natural for people who grew up stuttering”.He added: “He has one of the best minds that I have ever been around … and so I would hope that we would focus on the substance of this man … and how he has run this country.“… The conversation should focus on the record of this administration, on the alternative in this election, and let Joe Biden make his own decisions about his future.“If he decides to change his mind later on then we will respond to that. We have until 19 August to open our convention” in Chicago.Asked “Is this the same Joe Biden that we saw four years ago?”, Clyburn said: “No!”“I’m not the same Jim Clyburn that I was four years ago and in 10 days I’ll be 84. But I’m a bit wiser than I was before … It’s biblical. When I became a man I put away childish things. Joe Biden has put away childish things because he has become a man. His opponent [Trump] is still a child.”Biden, Clyburn said, “knows what a democracy is all about.” More

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      in Elections

      Newsom Urges Michigan Democrats to Stay Calm and Support Biden

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      Gov. Gavin Newsom of California told angsty Michigan Democrats on Thursday that President Biden had been engaged and all in on his re-election campaign during a White House meeting a day before. And Mr. Newsom suggested, gently, that party activists take a deep breath and rally behind the incumbent.“What I need to convince you of is not to be fatalistic, not to fall prey to all this negativity,” Mr. Newsom told more than 300 fellow Democrats who had gathered on the Fourth of July holiday in South Haven, Mich. Democrats have had a brutal week since Mr. Biden’s rocky debate performance last week, and calls for him to exit the race have exposed rifts within the party.Mr. Newsom came to Michigan, a crucial swing state, as a surrogate campaigning for Mr. Biden. But it was hard to ignore the fact that he was also among the leading names being circulated as a potential replacement candidate — along with the Democratic governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer.Mr. Newsom on Thursday did not veer from the party line that Mr. Biden remained the nominee and that Democrats were not interested in replacing him. The California governor did not so much as hint that he was interested in the job.“I believe in this man,” Mr. Newsom said. “I believe in his character. I believe that he has been one of the most transformative presidents in our collective lifetime.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Gretchen Whitmer wants to meet far-right plotters who tried to kill her, book reveals

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      Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan widely spoken of as a possible Democratic candidate for president should Joe Biden cede to growing pressure and leave the race, wants to meet members of a far-right militia who plotted to kidnap and kill her.“I asked whether I could meet with one of the handful of plotters who’d pleaded guilty and taken responsibility for their actions, just to talk,” Whitmer writes in a new book, of the plot motivated by resistance to Covid public health measures and revealed with 13 arrests in late 2020.The attorney general of Michigan, Dana Nessel, said it might be possible to talk to the plotters, Whitmer writes, though it has not happened, due to “all the various trials and appeals.“But I do look forward to being able to sit and talk, face-to-face. To ask the questions and really hear the answers. And hopefully to take some small step toward understanding.”As described by Nessel’s office, the affair of the “Wolverine Watchmen” resulted in “20 state felonies against eight individuals alleged to have engaged in the planning and training for an operation to attack the state Capitol and kidnap government officials.” Five men were convicted.Federal charges were filed against six more men, four of whom were convicted. Two pled guilty to conspiracy charges and co-operated with prosecutors.Whitmer describes the plot, and how she coped with it and other threats from the armed pro-Trump far right, in True Gretch: What I’ve Learned About Life, Leadership, and Everything in Between. The book will be published in the US next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.Given Whitmer’s presence in the ranks of proposed replacements for Biden after the president’s disastrous debate against Donald Trump escalated Democratic panic last week, the governor’s book will be eagerly read.Whitmer has said she does not want to replace Biden but that has not stopped speculation. On Wednesday, she was due to be among Democratic governors meeting Biden at the White House.Though True Gretch is a standard campaign-oriented biography – perhaps intended as a marker for a run in 2028 – Whitmer does not shy from describing the violent plot against her.Describing plotters’ threats such as “Grab the fuckin’ governor, just grab the bitch” and “Just cap her”, she considers the toll taken on her husband and daughters as well as on herself.She describes how her husband was forced by threats to close his dental practice; how her two daughters have refused to go back to a family cottage the plotters were revealed to have “scoped out”; and her own disappointment when two men were acquitted.Despite it all, showing willingness to bridge the sort of jagged partisan divide that affects the battleground state of Michigan, and the US as a whole, Whitmer insists she wants to talk to those who wanted to kill her.Elsewhere in the book, the governor does shy away from one thing: open discussion of any ambitions for national office.In fairness, True Gretch was written before Biden’s hold on the presidency began to be seriously questioned by Democratic politicians, pundits and strategists, concerned that at 81 the former senator and vice-president is proving himself too old to beat Trump and serve a second term.Whitmer’s readers, however, may spot allusions to higher ambitions now thrown into sharp relief.Chapter four, describing Whitmer’s first steps as governor of Michigan and the challenge of dealing with extreme cold weather, is titled “Surround Yourself with Great People – and Don’t Be Afraid To Ask For Help”.In Chapter 10, Whitmer describes how she prepares for campaign debates, the sort of challenge Biden failed so starkly.Whitmer’s chapter title is “Be a Happy Warrior” – a label defined by dictionary.com as “a person … undiscouraged by difficulties or opposition” and in US politics perennially linked to Alfred E Smith, Hubert Humphrey, Ronald Reagan and others who ran for president with a determinedly optimistic message.In her epilogue, Whitmer moves from Reagan to another Republican: Theodore Roosevelt. In “every campaign, and during every term I serve”, she writes, she shares the 26th president’s “Man in the Arena” speech.In that speech, given in Paris in April 1910, Roosevelt said: “It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.“The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”Whitmer’s use of the quote may strike a chord with Democrats panicked by Biden and now looking the governor’s way. So might what Whitmer writes next.“Though these words were written more than a hundred years ago, they’re just as true today – except for two things. The “man” may be a woman. And she may just be wearing fuchsia.” More

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      in Elections

      Some States Say They Can’t Afford Ozempic and Other Weight Loss Drugs

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      Public employees in West Virginia who took the drugs lost weight and were healthier, and some are despondent that the state is canceling a program to help pay for them.Joanna Bailey, a family physician and obesity specialist, doesn’t want to tell her patients that they can’t take Wegovy, but she has gotten used to it.Around a quarter of the people she sees in her small clinic in Wyoming County would benefit from the weight-loss medications known as GLP-1s, which also include Ozempic, Zepbound and Mounjaro, she says. The drugs have helped some of them lose 15 to 20 percent of their weight. But most people in the area she serves don’t have insurance that covers the cost, and virtually no one can afford sticker prices of $1,000 to $1,400 a month.“Even my richest patients can’t afford it,” Dr. Bailey said. She then mentioned something that many doctors in West Virginia — among the poorest states in the country, with the highest prevalence of obesity, at 41 percent — say: “We’ve separated between the haves and the have-nots.”Such disparities sharpened in March when West Virginia’s Public Employees Insurance Agency, which pays most of the cost of prescription drugs for more than 75,000 teachers, municipal workers and other public employees and their families, canceled a pilot program to cover weight-loss drugs.Some private insurers help pay for medications to treat obesity, but most Medicaid programs do so only to manage diabetes, and Medicare covers Wegovy and Zepbound only when they are prescribed for heart problems.Over the past year, states have been trying, amid rising demand, to determine how far to extend coverage for public employees. Connecticut is on track to spend more than $35 million this year through a limited weight-loss coverage initiative. In January, North Carolina announced that it would stop paying for weight-loss medications after forking out $100 million for them in 2023 — 10 percent of its spending on prescription drugs.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Thousands of Michigan Residents Weather Days Without Power During Heat Wave

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      As storms battered southeast Michigan this week, Lindsey Brenz heard trees crashing and saw bright flashes of lightning through her windows. Then, she heard a pop and the monotone drone of what she suspected was a power surge.“I thought, ‘Oh gosh, this is not going to be good,’” she said.Ms. Brenz, 32, was one of 69,000 customers who lost power Wednesday night after powerful storms downed trees and toppled power lines — compounding the effects of an intense heat wave that has scorched the Midwest and other areas of the country.Three days after the outage, about 7,000 customers are still without power, according to DTE Energy, a Detroit-based utilities company that serves the area. Detroit has suffered temperatures in the 90s since the heat wave began on Monday. The heat index, a measure of how conditions feel with humidity factored in, reached 95 degrees on Saturday afternoon.Ms. Brenz’s biggest concern was keeping herself and her cat, Bubba, safe from the sweltering conditions during the outage. She closed her windows, drew the blinds and refrained from showering to keep her house in Berkley cool.“It was the little things I had to be aware of to keep me and my cat safe,” said Ms. Brenz, who works for a nonprofit.Deb Dworkin, a 52-year-old human resources manager, lives in a bungalow in Berkley. She said her upstairs bedroom got “crazy hot” during the outage. She slept on her couch for two days, using a battery-powered travel fan and a neck towel filled with ice cubes.“I probably looked ridiculous,” she said.Michael Reiterman, a 25-year-old assistant financial planner who lives in New Baltimore, tried similar remedies in his home, including shutting the blinds to keep out the heat. But his ultimate solution was to shuttle between his home, which had outages intermittently, and his fiancée’s house, which maintained power through the week.The country has so far been spared widespread blackouts amid the heat wave, which heightened demand for electricity and put pressure on the grid’s infrastructure. Experts say that’s a promising sign that the grid will be able to handle intense heat waves later in the summer.But the difficulties faced by the Michigan residents demonstrate the risks of power outages that coincide with heat waves — regardless of whether the outages are caused directly by the heat.To help mitigate those risks, DTE Energy is planning to invest about $9 billion over the next five years to “harden” the grid to weather the effects of climate change, said Brian Calka, vice president of the company’s distribution operations business unit. “The weather patterns that we’re seeing right now are fundamentally different from what we’ve seen in recent memory,” he said. “It’s a call to action.”Sophia Lada More

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      Republican-Led States Push to Expand Power to Curb Immigration

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      Republicans’ latest efforts capitalize on the issue’s prominence in the 2024 election. But the fate of their proposals is still being litigated.Nearly a year since Texas adopted a law empowering state and local police officers to arrest undocumented migrants who cross into its territory, Republican lawmakers in at least 11 states have tried to adopt similar measures, capitalizing on the prominence of immigration in the 2024 presidential election.The fate of the proposals — six have been enacted or are under consideration, with Louisiana expected to sign its measure into law as early as next week — is still being litigated. In a case before a federal appeals court, Texas is defending its law by arguing that illegal immigration is a form of invasion, allowing it to expand its power to protect its borders. Federal courts have previously ruled that, from a constitutional perspective, the definition of the term invasion is limited to military attacks.States have tested the limits of their power over immigration before, but lawyers and legal scholars said the push this year was accompanied by what had amounted to a public-relations campaign.In campaign speeches, political ads and the halls of Congress, more Republicans are echoing former President Donald J. Trump by arguing that the rise of migration at the southern border is an “invasion.” President Biden, under pressure from both Republicans and Democrats to tackle the issues at the border, signed an executive order this month to curb asylum, and he could have more actions coming next week.The measure expected to be signed by Gov. Jeff Landry, Republican of Louisiana, includes provisions allowing Mr. Landry and his attorney general to establish a compact with Texas to address border security. Mr. Landry has already met with Gov. Greg Abbott, Republican of Texas, and dispatched Army National Guard soldiers from Louisiana to Texas’ border with Mexico.Valarie Hodges, the state senator in Louisiana who wrote the legislation, joined other Republicans in calling Mr. Biden’s recent action “too little, too late,” saying in an interview that state measures like hers were essential because the Biden administration had failed to enforce immigration laws.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Kamala Harris Expected to Blast Trump at Party Dinner in Michigan

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      In one of her first campaign appearances since former President Donald J. Trump was convicted of falsifying business records, Vice President Kamala Harris sharply criticized him on Saturday as a “cheater” who believes himself above the law and argued that he should be disqualified for the presidency.Ms. Harris, who headlined a state Democratic Party dinner in downtown Detroit, rebuffed Mr. Trump’s false claims that his trial, like the 2020 presidential election, was “rigged” and defended the judicial process behind his felony conviction.“Simply put, Donald Trump thinks he is above the law,” she said. “This should be disqualifying for anyone who wants to be president of the United States.”The speech on Saturday evening capped a day of campaigning across Michigan, a crucial battleground state. Ms. Harris was accompanied by the actress Octavia Spencer, attending a fund-raiser in Ann Arbor and stopping at a Black-owned bookstore in Ypsilanti.In Detroit, the vice president opened her speech with remarks about the war in Gaza. As she tried to describe the Biden administration’s monthslong efforts to negotiate a cease-fire deal, a protester stood up and shouted at her and was quickly removed from the ballroom. Ms. Harris’s response was stern: “I value and respect your voice, but I’m speaking right now.”She then continued her speech. “We have been working every day to bring an end to this conflict in a way that ensures Israel is secure, brings home all hostages, ends ongoing suffering for Palestinian people and ensures that Palestinians can enjoy their right to self-determination, dignity and freedom,” she said. “As President Biden said last week, it is time for this war to end.”Turning to the election, Ms. Harris, the former top prosecutor of California, accused Mr. Trump of attacking “the foundations of our justice system.” She said that the former president was convicted by a jury of 12 Americans who were selected in part by his defense team, and that his lawyers had a chance to present their side of the evidence.“You know why he complains? Because the reality is cheaters don’t like getting caught,” she said.A spokeswoman for the Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.The event took place in a key swing state with heightened stakes. President Biden won Michigan’s primary in February, 81 percent to 13 percent, prevailing over a movement that urged Democrats to vote “uncommitted” on the ballot in protest of his support for Israel. But more than 100,000 voters took that stance against him, among them progressives, young people and many in the state’s large and politically active Arab American community. Mr. Biden’s campaign has also been seeking to shore up its support among Black voters in cities like Detroit.Mr. Trump won Michigan by nearly 11,000 votes in 2016, and lost it to Mr. Biden by more than 150,000 votes in his 2020 re-election bid. Mr. Trump focused on the voting in Michigan in his efforts to subvert the 2020 election. More