AUBURN HILLS, Mich. — Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said Thursday that she stood by in the Oval Office a day earlier as President Donald Trump signed a series of memos targeting his political enemies because she wanted to advocate on behalf of the residents of Michigan.

"It was not where I wanted to be or planned to be or would have liked to have been," Whitmer told reporters after an event on the campus of Oakland Community College. "I disagree with a lot of stuff that was said and the actions that were taken.

"But I stayed in the room because I needed to make the case for Michigan, and that's my job."

Whitmer, a second-term Democrat who has previously clashed with the Republican president, appeared in the White House as Trump held a press conference and announced a bevy of executive actions Wednesday.

One of Trump's Wednesday measures directed U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate Christopher Krebs, the former head of the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, who has publicly defended the integrity of the 2020 presidential election.

Trump lost that election to Democrat Joe Biden, but Trump has maintained false claims that widespread fraud both nationally and in battleground states, including Whitmer's Michigan, swayed the outcome. The memo against Krebs was titled "Addressing Risks from Chris Krebs and Government Censorship."

Krebs, through his agency, "falsely and baselessly denied that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen," Trump's memo said. Read that sentence from Trump's memo on Thursday, Whitmer said her presence in the Oval Office "was not an endorsement of any of the actions he took or the comments that were made."

"I was going in for a meeting, and they walked me into a press conference, and I sat there thinking about the people of northern Michigan who still don't have power ... I thought about Michigan businesses that are paying a price because of the tariff fluctuation. I thought about Selfridge Air Base, which we need to get recapitalized," the governor said.

Whitmer delivered a speech about tariffs in Washington, D.C., Wednesday morning before showing up at the Oval Office press conference with Michigan state House Speaker Matt Hall, a Republican from Richland Township and an outspoken Trump supporter. With television cameras rolling in the Oval Office, Trump engaged in banter with Hall and Whitmer about the threat of Asian carp to the Great Lakes and future of Macomb County's Selfridge Air National Guard Base.

During her speech, Whitmer touted bipartisanship and said she agrees with Trump that "we do need to make more stuff in America," including ships. Then, at the White House event later Wednesday, Trump signed an executive order that aimed to revitalize the country's ship-building industry.

With Whitmer standing nearby, Trump told reporters he was "honored to have Gretchen Whitmer from Michigan, the great state of Michigan, and she's been, she's really done an excellent job, very good person."

Five years ago in 2020, Trump posted on social media that Whitmer had done a "terrible job." In 2022, he endorsed Republican Tudor Dixon who ran against Whitmer in the gubernatorial election.

In a statement in 2022, Trump labeled Dixon a "conservative warrior" and said she is ready to take on Whitmer, whom Trump described as "one of the worst governors in the nation."

It wasn't clear what caused Trump's apparent change of heart about Whitmer. However, she has attempted to seek common ground with him in recent months after he won the 2024 election over Democrat Kamala Harris. Other Democratic governors have been more outspoken against the GOP president.

Meanwhile, two of Trump's top advisers, his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, and his deputy chief of staff, James Blair, both worked on Dixon's unsuccessful campaign against Whitmer and likely know Michigan's governor quite well.

Some national media outlets and Democrats criticized Whitmer for her actions Wednesday. NBC News published a story with the headline: "A 'disaster': Gretchen Whitmer's talk on tariffs and meeting with Trump anger fellow Democrats."

"There is no middle ground to be found with an administration that is wiping its ass with the constitution," tweeted state Rep. Laurie Pohutsky, a Livonia Democrat.

Trump signed another memo Wednesday directing federal agencies to suspend any active security clearances held by the law firm Susman Godfrey.

Susman Godfrey represented Dominion Voting Systems in a defamation lawsuit against Fox News over conspiracy theories that the company's technology was at the center of voter fraud in the 2020 election. In 2023, the two reached a $787.5 million settlement.

"Susman spearheads efforts to weaponize the American legal system and degrade the quality of American elections," Trump's memo said.

Many of the false theories about Dominion Voting Systems originated with problems that occurred in Michigan's Antrim County in November 2020. There, human errors — not the equipment itself — led to incorrect initial tallies that showed Biden had won the conservative area. The incorrect numbers were corrected before certification, and Trump overwhelmingly won the county.

Election officials had failed to update all of the equipment in the county after the ballots' designs were changed.

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