Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) said Tuesday at the University of Chicago that she wants planned prosecutions of Trump administration officials to scare young people away from working in the administration, according to a clip of the event circulating on X.
Slotkin made the remarks during a live recording of Vox's America, Actually! podcast with editorial director Astead Herndon at the university's Institute of Politics.
"I want to look at these signature cases and not just focus on the president, but on the people who enabled him," Slotkin said, according to the clip. "I want young people coming out of school to say, should I go work for the Trump administration? Like that sounds fun. I might get an opportunity. I want them to be like, Lord, that might be buying myself a ton of problems that I don't want, and so let me avoid participating in that. I want that deterrence message."
The account @ThinkerChicago, which posted the video, characterized the senator's remarks as a hope that planned political prosecutions of Republican leaders "will scare young conservatives from getting involved in politics." The conservative account Libs of TikTok shared the clip with a blunter assessment: "Elisa Slotkin wants Conservatives to be scared of working in the Trump admin because Democrats will retaliate against them. This is a threat."
The comments are not a one-off. In a September 30 speech to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Slotkin argued Democrats should pursue prosecutions of Trump officials if they retake Congress, comparing the effort to post-authoritarian cleanups in Europe, Breitbart reported.
She also called for what she described as a "radical reform and ethics package," including banning corporate PACs, establishing term and age limits for Supreme Court justices, and restricting stock trading by members of Congress and their spouses. "We have to Trump-proof the government going forward, so that no president of any party can ever abuse the system the way he did," Slotkin said, according to The Gateway Pundit.
The timing is hard to miss. Slotkin's remarks come months after she was herself the target of a Trump Justice Department investigation. As Breitbart reported, U.S. Attorney Ed Martin's office sought to indict Slotkin and five other Democratic lawmakers over a 90-second video urging military members to refuse illegal orders — a video Trump called "seditious" and "punishable by death." A federal grand jury declined to return an indictment in February.
A sitting U.S. senator using a university stage to describe prosecution as a recruiting deterrent is a remarkable thing to say out loud. It treats the federal government not as a place to serve, but as a hazard to be avoided — and it treats the people who staff it as targets to be picked off once power changes hands.
Whether Slotkin's fellow Democrats embrace that message, and whether voters reward a party running on locking up its opponents' staffers, is an open question. What is not in question is that she said it, on the record, in front of a camera.
Our Take
Strip away the academic phrasing and look at what Slotkin actually described: a plan to make an example out of young conservatives so that the next generation thinks twice before answering a call to public service. Not prosecute the guilty — prosecute the enablers, the 25-year-old policy aide, the scheduler, the press assistant. The people with the least power and the most to lose.
This is the same playbook the Left has run for years, dressed up as "accountability.
And notice the hypocrisy: Slotkin was the beneficiary of a grand jury that refused to indict her when the Trump DOJ came knocking. She knows exactly what it feels like to face a politicized prosecution. Her response? Build a bigger one and point it at college kids.
Patriots, this is the fight. They are telling you, out loud, on camera, at a prestigious university, in a Vox podcast, that they intend to criminalize working for the other side. Believe them the first time. The only thing standing between that vision and reality is a Republican Congress — and voters who remember this clip in November.
