Who, Me?

Gretchen Whitmer’s sudden entrance into presidential politics.

- REBECCA TRAISTER

Back in the spring, Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer and her team at Simon & Schuster chose July 9 to publish True Gretch, her new memoir– slash–inspirational guidebook. “I wanted to put it out early enough in this election cycle that it gave me something positive to talk about,” Whitmer, dressed in a cupcake-pink dress in the lobby of the midtown Hilton, told me brightly the day after its release.

“And give people a laugh, or some hope, in this hard and heavy election year.” It would be a distraction for politicos in advance of Donald Trump’s scary party convention in Milwaukee and far enough ahead of the Democrats’ own August convention that it would not seem as though she were trying to bigfoot her heat-seeking peers.

However, Whitmer told me she’d had her heart set on the second week of July for another, electorally unrelated reason. “We really pushed to make sure it came out this week because it was Shark Week,” she said. Whitmer has loved Shark Week since she heard comedian Na’im Lynn’s riff on how women no longer use demure euphemisms to refer to their periods but rather proclaim to would-be sexual partners, “It’s Shark Week, motherfucker!” She found the line so funny that—partially in response to a male debate coach who’d told her to smile more when speaking publicly—she started writing “SW, MF” in her notepad prior to speeches. During the 2020 Democratic convention, Whitmer was standing at the podium waiting to go live with her remote address to the nation, and she loosened up by joking, “It’s not just Shark Week, it’s Shark Week, motherfuckers,” mouthing the last word silently. Though she hadn’t been on-air, footage quickly leaked, obscuring any memory of her actual written remarks.

This book has definitely landed in the middle of Shark Week—the one happening on the Discovery Channel and the one happening in the Democratic Party.