Slotkin Has A ‘war Plan’ To Beat Trump. Don’t Be ‘weak And Woke.’

Elissa Slotkin, the former CIA analyst turned battleground senator, will on Thursday start road-testing what she calls a “war plan” to “contain and defeat Donald Trump.”

In the first of a series of speeches about the Democratic Party’s path out of the wilderness, the Michigan senator said she will span everything from strategy to tactics and tone, acknowledging public perception of the party as “weak and woke” needs to change. She is urging Democrats to “fucking retake the flag” with appeals to voters’ sense of patriotism, to adopt “the goddamn Alpha energy” of Detroit Lions coach Dan Campbell and to embrace an “airing out” of potential 2028 presidential candidates in a broadly contested primary.

Slotkin’s description of the speech as a “war plan” came in a recorded dry-run of the remarks viewed by POLITICO. In an interview, she hedged on whether she would continue to call it that, saying “it's a military-style operational plan. I don't understand how to rally us into a coherent approach if we aren't on the same page on where we're going.”

“Trump is doing a whole bunch of things that I think are a threat to our economy and a threat to our Democracy and I have a responsibility on behalf of my state to point that out and try to do something about that,” the first-term senator told POLITICO in an interview outlining her speech ahead of delivering it to an audience of home state Democrats and volunteers in Lansing on Thursday afternoon.

Of the stark and militaristic language featured in a draft version, she added: “I thought it was very important to put something down on paper, but it wasn’t to liken him to ISIS or anything like that. It was just to say if you want to counter something that you see as a problem, you got to have a plan or what else are you doing?”

Slotkin won her seat last year in a state that Trump carried (and where Trump will return to for a 100 days event Tuesday), defeating Republican challenger Mike Rogers to replace retiring Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow. That has given her some cachet among party leaders, operatives, donors and activists following an election in which Democrats wiped out. After delivering Democrats’ official rebuttal to Trump’s speech to a joint session of Congress last month, Slotkin decamped to her farmhouse in Holly, Michigan last month to develop what she is branding as a more robust strategy to oppose Trump.

In an acknowledgment of Democrats’ long odds of retaking the Senate next year, she said the party should focus on the House. “My definition of success,” Slotkin said, “includes free and fair elections in 2026, retaking the House, defending the seats we have in the Senate.” In the best-case scenario, she said, Democrats could perhaps gain one or two seats in the Senate.

She urged Democrats considering running for president in 2028 to get in early — “not waiting until 2027, start getting people kind of in circulation —and a broad group of people.”

An aide described her forthcoming remarks as a part buck-up, part come-to-Jesus speech.

Slotkin’s plan lays out why she thinks Democrats suffered sweeping setbacks last year, including focus groups of home-state voters who she said described her party as “weak and woke.” It defines success as winning a number of upcoming battles, including at the Supreme Court.

Most immediately, she said, Democrats could secure a court victory in the most high-profile deportation in recent history by forcing Trump to obey an order in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland resident mistakenly deported to El Salvador by the Trump administration.

“We need to have this fight as a nation about whether we should still uphold the Constitution and still believe there are three co-equal branches of government and the president is blatantly ignoring one of those branches right now,” Slotkin said. “I wouldn’t have picked this case myself, because it’s hard with the El Salvador piece. He’s in another country, but the case picked us.”

Among other ideas, Slotkin proposes a Democratic “shadow Cabinet” made up of ranking members on congressional committees to aggressively bracket Trump’s own Cabinet.

Her strategy also focuses on language and tone. She said Democrats should stop using the term “oligarchy,” a phrase she said doesn’t resonate beyond coastal institutions, and just say that the party opposes “kings.” And to beat their weak and woke rap, Democrats should channel the “no-bullshit” energy of the Lions’ Campbell, she said, “A wonderfully sappy guy with his players,” but who is also “smart and tough and lovable.”

Slotkin plans to deliver another speech — which is set to focus on “killing sacred cows” — sometime next month.

“I don’t think we need to hide the fact that Trump is flooding the zone and making us look 12 different ways at the same time,” Slotkin said. “But again, because I come from the national security background, there’s no end to fighting unless you’re dead.”