Dem Senator Warns It’s Time Her Party Fights Back As If Trump is Not ‘Survivable’ For U.S. Democracy

Senator Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) spoke at a Friday event hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations on national security policy, but inevitably weighed in on President Donald Trump.

“Hi, thank you very much, Senator. I want to build on your response to the first question and sharpen it a little bit and ask what you and/or your colleagues in the Congress intend to do to restore and enforce Congress’s constitutional war powers,” asked the moderator, PBS NewsHour’s Nick Schifrin.

“I would say, just to tell a little bit of the behind-the-scenes, there is certainly debate going on, certainly among Democratic leaders, on how to respond to Trump. I don’t think it’s a secret that Democrats are on their heels since Trump was elected and haven’t found their footing,” Slotkin began, adding:

Behind closed doors, the debate is no longer the, like, 2017 debate—progressive versus moderate Democrat, right? Are we going to go progressive, or are we going to go moderate? That’s not the debate anymore.

The debate now is: how do you answer the following question? Do you believe that Trump’s second term is an existential threat to democracy? Or do you believe Trump’s second term is bad, but like Trump’s first term, survivable if we just wait it out and let bad things boomerang on the American people? That’s the question.

And how you answer that is the debate that’s happening among my colleagues. So I’m in team one, okay? Trump two is different than Trump one. And therefore, if I see that—if I believe that he’s an existential threat to democracy—the tools that I want to bring to the fight are very different than some of my peers who are like, “Elissa, we’re in the Senate. Let’s just wait him out.”

To me, it is true we are in the minority, so there’s not a lot of great tools in the Senate. The question is: what is the responsibility of an elected senator in 2025 in Trump’s America? Is your job more than just the kind of pulls and takes of a normal Senate—the tools of the Senate? Or do you have a responsibility to lead, right? Do you have a responsibility to work with the legal community on the court cases that are going up? Do you have a responsibility to work with the grassroots to actually coordinate a plan, right?

For people who are Democrats, I hear all the time, like, “What is the plan?” And it’s not by accident that there’s no coordinated plan. It’s because we’re doing the storming and norming behind closed doors to figure out who we want to be and how we want to respond. So the answer to the question is: A, you decide that you’ve got a real threat on your hands, and then B, you open up the toolkit and coordination so that we actually act as a united front, as opposed to every elected Democrat and every group doing their own thing. And that’s what we currently have right now.

Watch the clip above via C-SPAN.