Deranged Democrat Senator wants to arrest Trump supporters
The Left has gone completely off the rails. Now they want political prisoners.
And a deranged Democrat Senator admitted they want to arrest Trump supporters.
Every so often a politician says out loud what a party’s activists have been muttering for years, and this week it was Michigan Democrat Elissa Slotkin’s turn. At a University of Chicago event on Oct. 13 about her political path and the future of the Democratic Party, the senator described a vision for what she would do with power, and it had less to do with policy than with fear.
Slotkin said she wants to pursue “signature cases” against people who “enabled” President Trump. “I want to look at these signature cases and not just focus on the president, but on the people who enabled him,” the Michigan Democrat said. Notice who the target is: not only the man at the top, but the staff, advisers and appointees who work beneath him.
Then she explained exactly what she hopes the prosecutions will accomplish. “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,” she said. And then she summed it up in three words: “I want that deterrence message.”
Read that carefully, because the key word is deterrence. Deterrence is the logic of criminal law, the idea that punishing wrongdoing discourages others from doing wrong. Slotkin is applying it to something that is not a crime: taking a government job. The goal she describes is not to punish illegal acts that have been proven, but to make a legal career choice feel dangerous.
Law professor Jonathan Turley blasted the remarks on X, writing that Slotkin had “said the quiet part out loud.” He argued that she wants to deter young people from supporting the administration. A clip of the exchange spread quickly online, and critics accused her of trying to frighten potential employees away from public service.
The sharpest response came from inside the government she would be talking about. Scott Kupor, director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, which manages the federal government’s civilian workforce, called the comments “disappointing and unprofessional.” “This is incredibly disappointing and unprofessional coming from a U.S. senator — endorsing political prosecutions to dissuade patriotic Americans from serving their country,” Kupor wrote on X. “In contrast, we at OPM believe in recruiting the best and brightest early-career prospects.”
A University of Chicago student, Michael Bicksel, said the remarks made him and other conservative students feel they could face political persecution for serving in the Trump administration. “Sen. Slotkin, a self-avowed “defender of democracy,” told me and other conservative students that we should live in fear of political persecution if we dare serve our country in the Trump administration. Sadly for her, we will never be intimidated by her Bolshevik-style tactics,” he wrote on X.
Whatever you think of Bicksel’s choice of words, his reaction points to a real problem. Young people deciding where to start their careers are supposed to weigh pay, mission and opportunity. A senator who wants them also to weigh the possibility of being investigated for doing the job a lawful president hired them to do is trying to change that calculation by threat rather than by argument.
There is a fair counterpoint, and it should be stated. Slotkin’s defenders would say that people who commit actual crimes while serving in government should face consequences, and that no administration is above the law. That is true, and every honest conservative agrees. The difference lies in the starting point. Prosecuting a crime means finding evidence of one. Designing prosecutions in advance in order to create a “message” starts from the conclusion and works backward.
The timing makes this all the more revealing. The debate arrived just as former President Obama was criticizing the administration’s scrutiny of Rep. Ilhan Omar, arguing she was being targeted for her political views. “The fact that any president, or any administration, is willing to engage in such transparent efforts to intimidate someone should outrage all Americans, regardless of how they feel about Congresswoman Omar’s political views,” Obama wrote on X.
One commenter noticed the tension. If intimidation by prosecution outrages all Americans when it is aimed at a Democrat, what should we call a Democratic senator who says she wants prosecutions to produce a chilling effect on Republican employees? The principle cannot apply only when the other side is holding the investigation.
For context, Omar is facing two separate federal inquiries: a search of her Washington home as part of an investigation into her immigration paperwork, and an examination by D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s office of her financial disclosures after businesses tied to her husband reported a sharp increase in value. It remains unclear whether the two probes are connected. The point is not that those inquiries are beyond criticism. It is that the standard for criticism should be the same in both directions.
With the midterms approaching, Slotkin’s comments have added to the debate over how Democrats would use congressional power if they win control of the House or Senate. Voters deserve to know whether a Democratic majority would conduct oversight in the ordinary way, or whether it would treat investigations as a weapon for discouraging an entire category of Americans from public service.
Washington already struggles to attract talented people to work for the government at all. Every honest reformer, conservative or liberal, should want more bright young Americans in public service, not fewer. A senator who says she wants them to think “Lord, that might be buying myself a ton of problems” has given them every reason to look elsewhere, and she has told the country exactly why she thinks that would be a good thing.
