Gretchen Whitmer wants to meet far-right conspirators who tried to kill her, book reveals | Books

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, widely touted as a possible Democratic presidential candidate if Joe Biden bows to mounting pressure and drops out of the race, wants to meet with members of a far-right militia that plotted to kidnap and kill her.

“I asked if I could meet with one of the few conspirators who had pleaded guilty and taken responsibility for their actions, just to talk,” Whitmer writes in a new book, about the plot motivated by resistance to COVID-19 public health measures and exposed by 13 arrests in late 2020.

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel said it might be possible to speak to the conspirators, Whitmer wrote, although that has not happened, due to “all the different trials and appeals.”

“But I’m looking forward to sitting down and talking face to face. Asking questions and really hearing the answers. And hopefully taking a small step toward understanding.”

As Nessel’s office described it, the “Wolverine Watchmen” case involved “20 state crimes against eight individuals accused of participating in the planning and training of an operation to attack the State Capitol and kidnap government officials.” Five men were convicted.

Federal charges were filed against six other men, four of whom were convicted. Two of them pleaded guilty to conspiracy and cooperated with prosecutors.

Whitmer describes the plot and how she dealt 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 has obtained a copy.

Given Whitmer’s presence among Biden’s proposed replacements after the president’s disastrous debate with Donald Trump intensified Democratic panic last week, the governor’s book will be eagerly read.

Whitmer has said she has no interest in replacing Biden, but that hasn’t ended speculation. On Wednesday, she was scheduled to be among the Democratic governors scheduled to meet with Biden at the White House.

Although True Gretch is a standard campaign-focused biography — perhaps intended to serve as a marker for a 2028 campaign — Whitmer doesn’t shy away from describing the violent plot against her.

Describing the conspirators’ threats such as “Get the fucking governor, just get that bitch” and “Just capture her,” she considers the toll it took on her husband and daughters as well as herself.

She describes how her husband was forced, under threat, to close his dental practice; how her two daughters refused to return to a family cottage that the conspirators had “scouted”; and her own disappointment when two men were acquitted.

Still, showing her willingness to bridge the partisan divide that plagues the key state of Michigan and the United States as a whole, Whitmer insists she wants to talk to those who wanted to kill her.

Elsewhere in the book, the governor avoids one thing: any open discussion of his 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 was proving too old to beat Trump and serve a second term.

Whitmer’s readers, however, might spot hints of loftier ambitions now in evidence.

Chapter four, describing Whitmer’s first steps as Michigan governor and the challenge of coping with extreme cold, 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 kind of challenge that Biden failed so egregiously.

The title of Whitmer’s chapter is “Be a Happy Warrior” – a label defined by dictionary.com as “a person…undeterred by hardship or opposition” and which, in American politics, is eternally linked to Alfred E Smith, Hubert Humphrey, Ronald Reagan and others who ran for president with a decidedly optimistic message.

In her epilogue, Whitmer turns from Reagan to another Republican: Theodore Roosevelt. “In every campaign and every term that I have held,” she writes, she shares the 26th president’s “Man in the Arena” speech.

In this speech delivered in Paris in April 1910, Roosevelt declared: “It is not the critic who counts, nor the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, nor where the doer of deeds could have done them better.

“The merit belongs to the man who is really in the arena, whose face is marked by dust, sweat, and blood; who struggles valiantly; who makes mistakes, who fails again and again, for there is no effort without error and failure; but who really strives to accomplish the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, great devotions; who expends himself for a noble cause; who, at best, knows in the end the triumph of a great achievement, and who, at worst, if he fails, at least fails by daring much, so that his place will never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”

Whitmer’s use of the quote could strike a chord with Democrats panicked by Biden and now turning to the governor. As could what Whitmer writes next.

“Although these words were written over a hundred years ago, they are just as true today, with two exceptions. The ‘man’ may be a woman. And she may simply be wearing fuchsia.”