A Democratic senator told a University of Chicago audience last week that her party should use criminal cases to make a job in the Trump White House look like a career mistake.
Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, a former CIA analyst, said Democrats should aim past the president and at the officials working under him.
“I want to look at these signature cases and not just focus on the president but on the people who enabled him,” Slotkin said.
Her target audience, she explained, is the pool of young Americans finishing school and weighing where to work. Slotkin laid out the thought process she hopes those graduates go through when a Trump administration job crosses their radar.
“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,’” she said. “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 sent,” she added.
Slotkin placed limits on her own proposal.
She told the crowd that Democrats should not let investigations consume their entire political agenda, and that the party should choose its battles.
“We do have to have accountability for the unbelievable corruption that we are living under right now,” she said. “But you can’t just make that your whole personality, right? So you have to pick signature cases, and you have to go after people and projects that are just super egregious.”
The senator also drew a legal line between the man at the top and the people beneath him. She said the president carries an immunity that his aides and appointees do not.
“The people around Donald Trump who are doing his bidding and enabling this have no such immunity. They have no immunity the way the president does,” she added. “And to me, he couldn’t do any of this stuff without all of those people saluting and supporting it. So you go after the people who do his bidding.”
The Chicago appearance was not the first time Slotkin pitched the idea.
In September, she gave a speech at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace that carried a similar message.
At that event, Slotkin told Democrats to pursue Trump administration officials if the party wins back control of Congress.
She likened the effort to clean-up campaigns carried out in authoritarian European states.
She also put names to the concept.
Slotkin singled out former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum as examples of the kind of officials who could be targeted.
The Poland comparison came with its own label, which Slotkin spelled out in the Carnegie speech.
“In Poland, they called this plan the Iron Broom, cleaning the place up,” Slotkin said. “The goal here is to have a list of signature cases that go after some of the most obvious and harmful abuses of taxpayer dollars.”
Taken together, the two speeches describe a plan with three parts.
Democrats would pursue the people who carried out the president’s directives, confine the effort to a short list of high-profile cases, and use those cases to discourage others from signing on with the administration.
President Donald Trump spoke to a related issue in the same week as the Chicago event.
He indicated he could pardon officials who worked for him after he leaves office, and he included himself in that possibility.
Trump made the comments during an interview with Newsmax. He described what he wants to spare his staff from if they face legal action after his time in office.
“I don’t want to see people that work for me go through years of nonsense, hire lawyers and everything else, all for nothing.”
Neither Slotkin’s office nor the White House has been quoted here beyond the remarks made at the events described above.
