Lawfare nearly swallowed the Trump movement whole after January 6.
Prosecutors chased lawyers, aides, and grandmothers. Voters finally shut that machine down in 2024.
But one Democrat senator just told a room full of college students what comes next if her party grabs power.
Elissa Slotkin Wants Young Conservatives to Be Afraid
US Senator Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) showed up at a University of Chicago event in October 2026 to talk about her political career and where the Democrat Party goes from here.
The students probably expected the usual kitchen-table talking points. Slotkin sells herself back home in Michigan as a self-described moderate with a national security résumé, even though she votes with the left when it counts.
Instead, she laid out a plan to go after the people who work for President Trump.
“I want to look at these signature cases and not just focus on the president, but on the people who enabled him,” Slotkin said.
Then she got specific about who she wanted to scare.
“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.
And she wrapped it up with a line that should chill every young conservative in America: “I want that deterrence message sent.”
Read that one more time. A sitting US Senator wants to use prosecutors to frighten 22-year-olds out of public service.
She even explained why she wants it done this way. Slotkin told the crowd she doesn’t trust Republicans to cooperate if Democrats win only one chamber of Congress. “I don’t have a ton of faith that my Republican colleagues are going to have any more strength,” she said.
So the House gavels and the subpoena power become the weapon of choice.
Trump Wasn’t Going to Let This One Slide
A reporter brought the remarks to President Trump, and he didn’t need long to size them up.
“That’s a hell of a statement,” Trump said.
“So 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,” the President continued. “And you know what? That’s why they’re getting their ***** kicked.”
He wasn’t alone.
Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor called the comments “incredibly disappointing and unprofessional coming from a US Senator – endorsing political prosecutions to dissuade patriotic Americans from serving their country.”
US Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) wrote on X, “It is absolutely disgraceful to threaten young Americans for participating in politics and serving their country.”
George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley said Slotkin “said the quiet part out loud.”
But the best response came from one of the students she was talking to. Michael Bicksel, a senior editor at The Chicago Thinker, the campus outlet that posted the clip, said Slotkin told him and other conservative students they should fear persecution for serving their country. “Sadly for her, we will never be intimidated by her Bolshevik-style tactics,” he wrote.
Good for him.
Slotkin Knows Exactly How Investigations Feel
Slotkin didn’t back down. She fired back at Lee, telling critics to “Spare me the pearl-clutching” and accusing Republicans of cheering what she called Trump’s “weaponization of the government against those he doesn’t like.”
She insisted she only wants accountability for anyone who “violated the law in order to carry out guidance from the President.”
And here’s where things get strange.
Slotkin has complained loudly about her own brush with federal investigators. In 2025, she joined a group of Democrat lawmakers in a video urging service members to refuse unlawful orders. The Trump administration labeled that video sedition, and Slotkin said in January 2026 that investigators were looking into her. A grand jury declined to indict the lawmakers in February 2026.
Slotkin calls her own case a free speech fight. Fair enough. Plenty of conservatives have a soft spot for anybody who defends free speech.
But think about what she’s saying now. She knows firsthand what it feels like to have the government breathing down your neck. And her takeaway from that experience is that she wants a whole generation of young people to feel it too, as long as they’re conservatives.
Maybe that’s reading too much into one campus event. Then again, she used the word “deterrence” herself. Nobody put it in her mouth.
Biden’s Lawfare Machine Is Waiting for a Sequel
Americans have watched this movie before.
Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Jack Smith in November 2022 to lead the classified documents investigation and the January 6 investigation. Smith rushed constitutionally dubious charges against President Trump into heavily Democrat Washington, DC, in a transparent push to drag him through show trials and put him behind bars before the 2024 election.
Smith brought baggage to the job. He ran the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section when it prosecuted former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell, and the US Supreme Court unanimously threw out that conviction in 2016. Prosecutorial overreach followed him everywhere.
And the Biden Justice Department never stopped at Trump. It charged more than 1,500 Americans over what happened at the Capitol on January 6. It sent Peter Navarro and Steve Bannon to prison for contempt of Congress. Democrat prosecutors in Georgia and Arizona charged lawyers like Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman.
Slotkin’s own home state got in on it too. Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel charged 16 Republicans who served as alternate electors in 2020. A Michigan judge tossed the case in 2025.
The same crowd that called January 6 an “insurrection” spent the summer of 2020 shrugging while cities burned, rioters torched a Minneapolis police precinct, and mobs attacked a federal courthouse in Portland. Nobody in Democrat leadership talked about sending a “deterrence message” then.
The pattern never changed. The targets were aides, lawyers, staffers, and ordinary supporters. Democrats wanted every Republican in America to understand the price of standing next to Trump.
Voters threw that whole operation out in 2024. Trump pardoned the January 6 defendants. The cases against him collapsed.
The Next Round Is Already on the Drawing Board
Democrats keep telling voters they’re focused on grocery prices and health care costs. Some of them swear impeachment is off the table.
They said the same thing in 2018. Then they won the House and impeached Trump twice.
Slotkin just gave the game away. Her plan doesn’t stop at the President. It reaches down to the intern answering phones, the policy aide fresh out of law school, and the kid from Ohio who wanted to serve his country.
And the logic doesn’t end there either. If Democrats can scare graduates away from the Trump administration, the contractors, law firms, and donors come next.
The whole point is to make conservatism so expensive that nobody under 30 wants to touch it.
Trump called it what it is. So did a college student who refused to be scared.
Slotkin wanted to send a message. She did. Just not the one she planned.
Sources: RealClearPolitics, “Trump: ‘Hell Of A Statement’ From Slotkin–That’s Why Democrats Are ‘Getting Their ***** Kicked’”; The National News Desk, “Sen. Slotkin says she wants prosecutions to deter graduates from working for Trump admin”; Fox News; The Chicago Thinker; Politico