California Governor Gavin Newsom and Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer have apparently decided that the public needs a fresh round of pandemic nostalgia, complete with mutual praise and remarkably little humility.
Their new video looks less like an honest reckoning and more like an audition for a future Democrat ticket.
Together, the two governors revisit how they managed their states during the COVID pandemic, a chapter millions of Americans remember through closed classrooms, shuttered businesses, arbitrary restrictions, and elite exceptions.
Newsom and Whitmer, by contrast, seem eager to congratulate each other for making the hard calls.
The exchange begins with Newsom raising the former federal health official who became the face of pandemic policy.
He asks, “What did you make of Fauci and all that?”
Whitmer responds, “I feel bad for him, ya know?…people were trying to do the right thing with the information we had…”
Her defense leans heavily on good intentions, the familiar refuge of officials who imposed sweeping rules and now prefer not to dwell on the wreckage.
That is a convenient framing. Families were not dealing with an academic exercise; they were living under orders that disrupted work, education, worship, health care, and ordinary human contact.
Whitmer also acknowledges the fury over school closures, saying, “Everyone was so pissed off that I pulled kids out of school.”
That anger did not materialize from nowhere, and parents did not need a government lecture to understand what prolonged isolation was doing to their children.
She follows with another broad defense: “We were doing what we thought was the right thing to do at the time.”
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The phrase may explain their thinking, but it does not erase the consequences or settle whether those choices were justified.
The video is especially rich coming from Newsom, whose pandemic image remains tied to his notorious French Laundry dinner while Californians endured restrictions.
Nothing says shared sacrifice quite like powerful officials enjoying privileges unavailable to the people expected to obey them.
Whitmer brings her own baggage to this effort, including restrictions remembered for preventing shoppers from buying seeds to grow food.
Those policies became symbols of an approach that often looked less like careful public health and more like bureaucratic control for its own sake.
Now, with years of distance and future elections looming, both governors have every incentive to polish the old record.
The video gives them a friendly setting where each can validate the other without facing sustained questions from parents, business owners, workers, or students.
That political context makes the pairing hard to ignore.
Whitmer has said she is not running for president in 2028, but such a declaration would not prevent her from joining someone else as a running mate.
Newsom has spent years cultivating a national profile, while Whitmer remains a prominent Democrat from a crucial Midwestern state.
A polished conversation between them naturally invites speculation about whether viewers are watching simple partisan backslapping or an early ticket preview.
Whatever the electoral purpose, the larger project is obvious.
They are trying to recast controversial pandemic mandates as courageous leadership, with the passage of time serving as a substitute for accountability.
Americans are entitled to remember the record without assistance from a glossy political production.
They remember children kept from classrooms, livelihoods placed at risk, rules that shifted without warning, and politicians whose own conduct did not always match the sacrifices demanded from everyone else.
Newsom and Whitmer may believe a warm conversation can soften those memories, but voters have long memories when government power reaches into their homes and families.
Their mutual victory lap is not likely to impress people who paid the price for decisions the governors still insist were right.
