Could Gretchen Whitmer be the first female president of the USA? The governor of Michigan has just released her memoir “True Gretch,” “swears like a sailor” – and the FBI has foiled a plot to kidnap and kill her

It looks like Whitmer’s star will be on the rise if things get worse for Biden – here’s what you need to know about her.

What is Gretchen Whitmer’s background?

Whitmer is the eldest of three children born to Sherry and Richard Whitmer in Michigan. Her late mother was the state’s deputy attorney general and a Democrat, while her father was director of the Michigan Department of Commerce and is a Republican.

In a Vanity Fair profile, Whitman remembered her mother as a “wild,” “unflinching” person who wanted to claim “her own space” and who “always wore pink blazers to court.” Photos of the governor herself wearing that color on several important occasions suggest the apple didn’t fall far from the tree.

Gretchen Whitmer is the current governor of Michigan

She is known as an honest person

When Politico quoted an anonymous source as saying Whitmer had warned that Biden’s debate performance would make it harder for Democrats to win Michigan in the 2024 election, her response to X was typically belligerent: “Anyone who says I’m saying we can’t win Michigan is talking bullshit,” she wrote. “Here we go.”

Whitmer also has “a quirky sense of humor” and “curses like a sailor in private,” Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel told NBC News in April.

People tried to kill her

In October 2020, the FBI announced that it had arrested 13 men accused of plotting to kidnap and murder Whitmer. According to the BBC, nine of the men were later charged or found guilty. Notably, in her new book, the governor talks about her desire to meet the men “in person” to understand why they did it, “and to really hear the answers.”

On the day of the insurrection, she was also one of the senators in the Capitol.

She is passionate about women

Today, Whitmer has two daughters of her own and regularly advocates for women and girls. According to The New Yorker, Whitmer tied her 2022 candidacy to a state constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to abortion, and in 2013 she shocked the country when she told the Senate that she had been raped when she was younger.

“Thank God I didn’t get pregnant,” she said in the unplanned remarks, “because I can’t imagine going through what I went through and then having to think about what to do about an unwanted pregnancy caused by an attacker.”