In Michigan, Trump promises women he’ll get their ‘husbands back to work’ and lashes out at Whitmer.
President Trump lashed out at Gretchen Whitmer, Michigan’s Democratic governor, during a rally in the state’s capital on Tuesday, accusing her of imposing too many restrictions to limit the spread of the coronavirus and saying she was “not a good governor.” He smiled broadly as his supporters chanted “lock her up.”
“Hey governor, let your state open, get your kids back to school. Not a good governor,” Mr. Trump said in Lansing during an hourlong rally, the first of three campaign stops as he began the final week of his re-election campaign. Ms. Whitmer lifted the state’s stay-at-home order on June 1, and schools have been allowed to reopen, with local school districts determining when and how to do so.
“I’m also getting your husbands — they want to get back to work, right? They want to get back to work. We’re getting your husbands back to work,” Mr. Trump said. “It’s a choice between a Trump boom or a Biden lockdown, but you’re already locked down. I mean, this state. We got to get her going, I don’t know.”
Some supporters of Mr. Trump at the rally were also organizing a recall effort against the governor and collected signatures for a petition to limit her powers next to signs that read, “The governor is an idiot.”
Federal officials announced in early October that they had foiled a plot by a right-wing extremist group to kidnap Ms. Whitmer out of frustrations over virus lockdowns in the state. Earlier this year, Mr. Trump had tweeted that he wanted people in Michigan and elsewhere to “liberate” their states from such restrictions.
On Tuesday, Ms. Whitmer laid the blame for the alleged kidnapping plot firmly at Mr. Trump’s feet, accusing him of “sowing division and putting leaders, especially women leaders, at risk” with his divisive rhetoric.
In an op-ed published in The Atlantic, Ms. Whitmer, a Democrat in her first term, vowed not to “stand back and let the president, or anyone else, put my colleagues and fellow Americans in danger without holding him accountable.”
In an interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes” that aired on Sunday, Mr. Trump denied that he had attacked Ms. Whitmer even though he has repeatedly insulted her and made derisive comments about her leadership.
Michigan, which Mr. Trump won narrowly in 2016, is grappling with record numbers of new coronavirus infections. The state is crucial to his re-election hopes, but he has been steadily behind there in polls.