Democratic Sen. Elissa Slotkin Wants Graduates Afraid to Work for Trump. She Put the Plan in Writing First.

Elissa Slotkin is a first-term Democratic senator from Michigan, a former CIA analyst who served three tours in Iraq. On Oct. 13, at a University of Chicago event, she told the audience what she wants Democrats to do if they win power in next month's midterms: go after the people who work for President Donald Trump, so that young graduates think twice before joining his administration.

"I want to look at these signature cases and not just focus on the president, but on the people who enabled him," she said. "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 campus paper The Chicago Thinker posted the clip on Oct. 17. It has since been viewed more than 8 million times on X.

Think of it as a "Beware of Dog" sign hung on the front door of public service. The dog never has to bite anyone. The sign does the work. That is what a deterrent is for.

"That's a hell of a statement"

Asked about Slotkin at the White House on Monday, Trump didn't mince words. "Slotkin is a lowlife who's ruining her state, just destroying her state," he said. "But what they're doing is really discouraging people from going into politics."

He added: "That's a hell of a statement. Slotkin said that there should be prosecutions in order to scare people from going into politics. That's a Democrat, and that's what they do. That's all they're good at. And you know what? That's why they're getting their a**es kicked."

The pushback came fast. Scott Kupor, whose Office of Personnel Management oversees the federal civilian workforce, called it "incredibly disappointing and unprofessional coming from a U.S. senator — endorsing political prosecutions to dissuade patriotic Americans from serving their country," Fox News reported. Law professor Jonathan Turley said she had "said the quiet part out loud." Utah Sen. Mike Lee's reply has passed 1 million views:

The students she was talking to answered too. "We will never be intimidated by her Bolshevik-style tactics," University of Chicago student Michael Bicksel wrote on X. Harrison Fields, a two-time Trump White House aide who took a fellowship at the same Institute of Politics, put it plainly in The Daily Signal: "Conservative students on campus have long been implicitly told in a hundred ways to keep their heads down. Slotkin just said it out loud."

The clarification said it again

Asked on CNN about Lee's post, Slotkin called it "manufactured outrage" and said she meant only lawbreakers. "You're not breaking the law? No problem," she told Jake Tapper, per Fox News. On MS NOW, she suggested "there's something about being a woman" behind the criticism.

But her written response on X ended with the same warning, aimed at the same audience: "people looking to work for his Administration should realize that while the Supreme Court has granted the President immunity, it has not done the same for those who do illegal things at his behest," she wrote. That isn't a walk-back. It's the deterrence message, sent a second time.

What the viral clip left out

The viral clip stops one sentence early. In a longer recording, the next line, which The Chicago Thinker attributes to moderator Astead Herndon of Vox, spells out what those "problems" would look like: "you can make it a pariah politically, socially, maybe even legally, even if that doesn't lead to the kind of high bar of impeachment." Then the conversation moved on to immigration.

It wasn't a slip, either. In Chicago, Slotkin framed accountability as step two of a three-part plan "if we manage to win the House, and especially the House and the Senate." Two weeks earlier, on Sept. 30, she laid out the same plan in a speech at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, a point Miranda Devine flagged in the New York Post.

The text, posted by her own Senate office, calls for "a list of 'signature cases'" and names three Trump officials: Kristi Noem, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro. She even borrowed a label from Poland: "In Poland, they called this plan the Iron Broom – cleaning the place up." And she added: "Abusing taxpayer money for personal and political gain can land you a sentence of up to twenty years in prison."

What comes next

Voters go first. Election Day is Nov. 3, and Michigan's early in-person voting runs Oct. 24 through Nov. 1, Michigan News Source noted.

Then there's the pardon pen. Trump told Newsmax's Rob Finnerty last week, "I don't want to see people that work for me go through years of nonsense, hire lawyers and everything else, all for nothing," the New York Post reported. The Daily Wire's Ben Domenech wants him to go further and pardon "every single Schedule C political appointee in his administration" before leaving office. Democrats set the precedent: Joe Biden issued preemptive pardons on his last day, covering Anthony Fauci, Gen. Mark Milley and the House Jan. 6 committee.

Slotkin wanted graduates to hear a warning. Judging by the students who answered her, plenty of them heard a dare.