‘Seditious’ Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) said the quiet part loud this week, admitting at the University of Chicago that she wants prosecutions of Trump administration officials specifically designed to scare young people away from ever working for a Republican president.
During a live recording of Vox’s America, Actually! podcast at the university’s Institute of Politics, Slotkin spelled out her vision with zero ambiguity. “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. “I want that deterrence message.” So there you have it. Not justice. Deterrence. Using the court system to keep conservatives out of government. Perfectly normal stuff from the loyal opposition.
This wasn’t a slip of the tongue either. Slotkin’s prosecution deterrence plan has been in development for a while. Back on September 30, she pitched the same idea to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, comparing her scheme to post-authoritarian housecleaning in Europe. “In Poland, they called this plan the Iron Broom, cleaning the place up,” Slotkin said at the time. Nothing says “we’re the good guys” like borrowing your political strategy from post-communist Eastern Europe.
In that same speech, Slotkin named specific targets, including Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, and U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, warning the audience that misusing taxpayer money “can land you a sentence of up to 20 years in prison.” Her broader goal, she said, is to build “a list of signature cases” targeting “the people who enabled” President Trump, not just Trump himself. Casting a wide net, to put it mildly.
Here’s where it gets rich. Slotkin made these remarks just months after she herself was on the receiving end of a Justice Department investigation. Pirro’s office sought to indict Slotkin and five other Democrat lawmakers over a 90-second video urging military members to refuse what they called illegal orders, something Trump described as “seditious” and “punishable by death.” A federal grand jury declined to indict in February. So Slotkin survived a brush with prosecution and came out the other side thinking, “You know what, let’s do more of that, but aimed at the other team.”
The account that posted the clip on X, @ThinkerChicago, noted that Slotkin’s goal appears to be frightening young conservatives away from politics altogether, not just one administration. The senator, a former CIA officer, framed the whole thing as accountability. Critics might use a different word for threatening an entire generation with prosecution to keep them out of public service.
Democrats will keep pushing this strategy as the 2026 midterms approach, betting that voters see “Iron Broom” politics as a winning message. Republicans will likely be happy to let them keep talking.
