This Is Why You Don’t Play Footsie with Fascists

Gretchen Whitmer’s attempt to laugh off her embarrassing Oval Office photo-op only makes things worse.

Screenshot / Sky News

By most accounts, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer is the sort of fairly decent elected official whose “fairly decent-ness” and lack of any overarching scandals places her towards the front of the Democratic pack as the party examines a depressingly shallow bench for the 2028 presidential elections. While hardly a progressive firebrand, Whitmer is nevertheless an ostensibly more deserving standard-bearer for a party hoping (at least, theoretically) to put up some sort of center-left opposition to Donald Trump than, say, Kathy Hochul or Gavin Newsom. She may not be “good” by any strict leftist sense of the term, but she’s certainly “not nearly as bad as…” which ain’t exactly nothing these days.

At least, that’s what I thought until last week. Now I’m not so sure.

Fascism— particularly the American iteration exercised by the Trump administration — is best thought of in terms of a massive black hole, sucking in passers-by both willing and unwitting alike. Last week, Whitmer learned the hard way that mere proximity to Trump’s fascist event horizon can be enough to absorb the indelible stink of his tacky authoritarianism.