Gov. Gretchen Whitmer on Tuesday offered excuses for her brutal mandates during the COVID pandemic, but told CNN that overall, she’s “proud of what we did.”

Whitmer joined CNN’s The Lead to discuss her new book True Gretch on Tuesday, when host Jake Tapper posed the question: “When you look back, would you have done anything different, if you knew then what you know now?”

“Oh, yes. If I could go in a time machine with the knowledge we have accumulated and make different decisions along the way, sure,” Whitmer said. “I think any leader worth their salt would say the same thing.

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“None of us knew what we were confronting. It was a novel virus. We were building the plane as we were flying it, in 50 different states, 50 different policies, and we had a White House that was not only disseminating misinformation, but they were pitting us against one another by telling us to go find our own masks and gloves,” she said.

Whitmer claimed the Spanish Flu a century before suggested kids could be vulnerable, “and one of our collective worries was … that they would start dying.

“We didn’t know it was respiratory in nature. We didn’t know it was people on the other end of the age spectrum who would be most vulnerable,” she said. “And so, I think that the education stuff, we would’ve been able to do a lot more to help our kids.”

“Knowing what we know now, if I could go back, I would certainly do some things different, but I’m proud of what we did,” Whitmer said. “I can tell you, the people of Michigan, I think, by and large, we got through this as well as we could and we’re seeing our economy growing and there’s a lot of good stuff going on, but it was a tough time.”

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In True Gretch, Whitmer detailed other regrets, as well, noting on page 134 that “one of my biggest flubs in politics” came when she visited East Lansing’s Landshark Bar in May 2021, violating her own social distancing executive orders.

“It was an own goal, as they say in soccer, a totally avoidable mistake that was mine and mine alone,” Whitmer wrote.

The Midwesterner founder Kyle Olson broke the story as a reporter for Breitbart News, posting an image of a maskless Whitmer huddled around a table with a dozen of her maskless friends.

“Not surprisingly, this caused a minor uproar,” Whitmer wrote in True Gretch. “As well it should have! I knew I’d screwed up, so the next day I made a statement, ‘Yesterday, I went with friends to a local restaurant,’ I said. ‘As more people arrived, the tables were pushed together. Because we were all vaccinated, we didn’t stop to think about it. In retrospect, I should have thought about it. I am human. I made a mistake, and I apologize.’”

While Whitmer has owned up to some of her leadership fails during the pandemic, experts have pointed to recent reports and court decisions that show the governor acted beyond her authority and sowed public distrust that has left a lasting impression.

Whitmer’s pandemic edicts ultimately cost the state a quarter of its small- and mid-sized businesses, and 81,900 jobs, resulting in a state economy that’s taking far longer than others to recover.

Her decision to close schools to in-person instruction for nearly a year also cost students years of lost learning that researchers predict will take decades to recoup.

Perhaps Whitmer’s biggest mistake during the pandemic, however, was directing seniors infected with the coronavirus to return to nursing homes and other care facilities, where they fueled a massive wave of deaths the governor has yet to acknowledge.

Despite widespread media reports that put the death toll at about 5,600, an investigation by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Charlie LeDuff found the real total is more than double, based on facilities omitted from the state’s data.

“The true number is more like 14,000,” LeDuff said. “That means Whitmer buried 7,000 corpses in a statistical mass grave.”

“That makes Michigan’s nursing home deaths by far the worst in America,” he said. “More than Florida, more than California, and almost as many as New York, which is twice as big and five times denser.”