Sen. Elissa Slotkin stood on the University of Chicago campus on October 17 and explained, in plain English, what she wants to do to young Americans considering a career in public service: terrorize them out of it.
"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."
That's a sitting United States senator — not a pundit, not a campaign operative — describing a strategy to use the threat of criminal prosecution to prevent American citizens from serving in their own government. She wasn't caught on a hot mic. She wasn't paraphrasing someone else's position.
Slotkin framed prosecution not as accountability for wrongdoing but as deterrence against employment. "I want to look at these signature cases and not just focus on the president, but on the people who enabled him," she said. The word "enabled" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. In Slotkin's formulation, staffing a duly elected administration is enabling. Answering a job posting from the Office of Personnel Management is complicity.
"I want that deterrence message," she added.
Law professor Jonathan Turley responded that Slotkin "said the quiet part out loud." He's right, but the quiet part has been operational for years. Trump administration officials have faced investigations, legal fees, and career destruction not for crimes but for proximity. What Slotkin did was upgrade it from an unspoken norm to an announced platform.
Scott Kupor, Director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, fired back directly: "This is incredibly disappointing and unprofessional coming from a US Senator — endorsing political prosecutions to dissuade patriotic Americans from serving their country. In contrast, we at @USOPM believe in recruiting the best and brightest early career prospects."
Slotkin listed three goals during her University of Chicago appearance: prosecuting Republican leaders, "Trump-proofing" government, and legislation on housing and healthcare. Two of those three are about punishing political opponents. The housing and healthcare line reads like it was stapled on so the list wouldn't sound entirely like a purge agenda.
The prosecution-as-deterrence model has a name in other contexts. When governments threaten citizens with legal consequences for associating with the wrong political faction, we usually call it authoritarianism. We certainly called it that when other countries did it. But Slotkin delivered it at a university — the exact pipeline she's trying to poison — and framed it as responsible governance.
A 22-year-old policy graduate weighing a GS-7 position at a federal agency now has a senator telling them the job comes with a target on their back. Not because of what they'd do in the role. Because of who won the election.
Slotkin won her Michigan Senate seat in 2024 by running as a moderate. The University of Chicago remarks put that branding in a different light. Moderates don't typically announce prosecution strategies aimed at entry-level government employees.
