Senator Slotkin says she wants prosecutions of Trump officials to deter young people from serving in his administration

The senator said the quiet part as a strategy, and said it on a campus. Speaking at the University of Chicago Institute of Politics during a live recording of the Vox podcast America, Actually, Senator Elissa Slotkin argued that accountability for what she called the unbelievable corruption of the current administration cannot rest on the president alone, because the president holds immunity and the people around him do not.

We do have to have accountability, she said. But you cannot just make that your whole personality. So you have to pick signature cases, and you have to go after people and projects that are just super egregious. The people around Donald Trump who are doing his bidding and enabling this have no such immunity, she added. He could not do any of this stuff without all of those people saluting and supporting it. So you go after the people who do his bidding.

Then she stated the purpose plainly. I want young people coming out of school to say, should I go work for the Trump administration, 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 do not want, and so let me avoid participating in that. I want that deterrence message set. The language was not new for her. In a September 30 speech at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, she had already argued that Democrats should pursue prosecutions of Trump officials if they retake power, drawing on the experience of countries emerging from authoritarian rule.

The clip, posted on October 17, moved fast. University of Chicago student Michael Bicksel wrote that a self described defender of democracy had told conservative students they should live in fear of political persecution if they dare serve their country in the Trump administration, and answered that they will never be intimidated. Republican operative Nathan Brand called the remarks gross, and conservative commentator Greg Price said her stated goal is for young conservatives to be afraid of working in a Republican administration.

The stakes she described are already part of the Washington argument. President Trump has openly discussed a broad use of pardons, including for himself, near the end of his time in office. Slotkin voted twice to impeach him and watched the criminal cases against him fail to remove him. Her answer, stated in public and on the record, is to move the legal risk down the chain of command and to say so loudly enough that the next class of graduates hears it before they apply.