Does President Trump’s inviting Governor Whitmer to join him at the podium at an event in Michigan signal the beginning of a beautiful friendship? On verra, we say. Yet for those of us who reckon Mr. Trump should be striving for a unifying presidency, what happened at Selfridge Air National Guard Base at Harrison Township — where the governor welcomed Mr. Trump to the Wolverine State — is a moment to mark.Could it be a template for other Democratic governors and for Mr. Trump himself? It’s hard to imagine how some more militant leftists, like, say Governor Pritzker of Illinois, would approach the prospect of sharing a stage — much less a hug — with the president. “Awkward” is the word the headline writers are using to describe the encounter between the Wolverine State chief executive and the commander in chief.“C’mon up here, Gretch,” is how the New York Post headlined its account of the odd-couple’s interaction. It characterizes Ms. Whitmer as having been “put on the spot” when she was “unexpectedly” called upon to speak by Mr. Trump. It could be that she got carried away by her enthusiasm for the new fighter jet mission the president had assigned to the air base. That decision by Mr. Trump amounts to a boon to the local economy.“I am really damn happy we’re here to celebrate this recapitalization,” Ms. Whitmer crowed. She explained that she was speaking “on behalf of all the military men and women who serve our country” — “on behalf of the state of Michigan,” that is. Mr. Trump played up the bipartisanship of the moment, saying he wanted to thank Ms. Whitmer, even though “I’m not supposed to do that. She’s a Democrat.”Yet “for decades, they’ve been trying to save this facility,” Mr. Trump explained, noting that Ms. Whitmer “has done a very good job” on that head. “She came to see me,” he added. “That’s the reason she came to see me, by the way, to save Selfridge.” That was a nod to Ms. Whitmer’s camera-shy visit to the White House earlier this month, when she covered her face with folders rather than be photographed in the Oval Office by the press corps.Ms. Whitmer appears, if the event yesterday is any guide, to have overcome her qualms about being filmed alongside the president. After the event, she averred that she was no pushover, and that she had griped to Mr. Trump about his tariffs for harming Michigan’s economy. He might “say a lot of things I disagree with,” she asserted, “that I’ll fight against, and that’s fine, but, you know, my job is to do everything I can for the people of Michigan.”It’s hard to argue with the governor’s logic there. Mr. Trump, running against Vice President Harris, won the election in Michigan by nearly 100,000 votes. Michigan was one of the seven swing states that decided the election for Mr. Trump, who collected all 15 of the Wolverine State’s electoral votes. Mr. Trump also won Michigan in his campaign against Secretary of State Clinton. That means that the Democrats in the state have a tough road ahead.Yet some activists in her party groused that it was a mistake to cozy up to Mr. Trump. “I think the fight-back faction of the Democratic Party is ascendant, and leaders who ignore that risk getting left behind,” the co-head of the liberal group Indivisible, Ezra Levin, told the Washington Post. That advice, though, is a prescription for the kind of scorched-earth resistance that is unlikely to help the Democrats improve their electoral prospects.Voters, after all, profess to want more cross-party cooperation from their elected leaders. Some 70 percent “believe bipartisan support is critical for major policy changes,” a George Washington University survey found recently, and 87 percent “believe U.S. politics has become too much about fighting.” Shrewd Democrats like Ms. Whitmer, who is often mooted as a 2028 contender, could come to see the advantage of more “awkward” encounters with Mr. Trump.
