Calm. Sane. Sober. These were the notes Senator Elissa Slotkin was clearly aiming to hit in her response to president Trump’s speech to Congress last night. The first-term Democrat from Michigan – who served three tours in Iraq during her time with the CIA – was the safe, if not obvious, counter to Trump’s 90-plus minutes of bluster.
Slotkin’s message was direct and consequential without resorting to unnecessary theatrics – unlike her colleague, Texas Congressman Al Green, who was removed from the House chamber for disrupting Trump’s speech. Instead, Slotkin favoured brevity over bombast, highlighting her record of bipartisanship before launching into a Trump take-down that combined common-sense centrism – fixing the “broken immigration system,” “expand and protect the middle class” – with accusations of recklessness and cronyism, while raising the threat of rising prices “in every part of your life”.
A scion of a Michigan hot dog fortune who won a narrow victory last year in a state that voted for Trump, the choice of Slotkin to deliver the Democratic rebuttal made sense. After all, it was she who last September warned that Kamala Harris was “underwater” in her state. She was painfully correct.
The trouble is Slotkin’s response was almost too measured, too correct. She played it safe and sensible – an adult-in-the-room foil to Trump’s braggadocio. Slotkin avoided any noticeable missteps, noted The New York Times late Tuesday night, but “she did not take a strident tone of resistance that many Democrats have chosen amid a backlash from their core supporters, who want them to be more forceful in opposing Mr Trump”.
So while her ideas certainly failed to offend, they also failed to inspire. And inspiration – deep, meaningfully, impactful, actionable inspiration – is what Democrats need right now if they are ever to rebuild their party, win back America, and retake the White House. Her idea, for instance, that disaffected Democrats focus on one issue, rather than “doomscrolling” from cause to cause, sounded wise. But she never really articulated which issues matter most – or how to advance them amid a new Washington order in which many (if not most) of the conventional rules no longer apply.
As Trump alienates Ukraine, aims for Mars and wages war on woke, Slotkin and her party will need to offer far more than nebulous and exaggerated threats of “democracies flicker[ing] out” or America conceding its primacy to Russia and China. As he listed accomplishment after exaggerated accomplishment, Trump made clear that he does not care what his opponents think or how they feel.
“I realise there is absolutely nothing I can say to make them happy or to make them stand or smile or applaud,” said Trump last night. “Nothing I can do.” Sleepy Joe avuncularism is out – bad-cop tough love is in.
Ultimately, Slotkin delivered as intended – doing no harm and ruffling few feathers. She critiqued Trump with grace and intelligence, accusing him of poor leadership and stealing Ronald Reagan’s words. Slotkin distanced the Democrats from the extremism and identity politics that cost Kamala Harris the presidency and placed the economy and rising prices at the centre of the party’s message.
But the Democrats are up against a showman – a “carnival barker” as Barack Obama so infamously put it more than a decade ago. Trump is an accidental president with an extremely intentional agenda he is already making real. Slotkin makes sense for a Democratic party that cannot risk playing stupid after its calamitous defeat last year. But there is just as much risk for the Democrats if they play it too safe.
David Christopher Kaufman is a New York Post columnist
