When President Donald Trump delivers his joint address to Congress on Tuesday, he can be expected to highlight how he says he’s delivering on the “mandate” that he and Republicans say Americans gave them in the 2024 election.
Democrats plan to have a counter to that claim from one of the Senate’s newest members: Elissa Slotkin, a first-term senator from Michigan.
During her six previous years in the House, Slotkin earned a reputation as a moderate unafraid, at times, to challenge her party’s conventions.
Saying she’s “looking forward to speaking directly to the American people,” she’s promised a rebuttal to Trump’s speech focused on economic and national security.
“The public expects leaders to level with them on what’s actually happening in our country,” Slotkin said in a statement announcing her speech last week. “From our economic security to our national security, we’ve got to chart a way forward that actually improves people’s lives in the country we all love, and I’m looking forward to laying that out.”
She is also expected to take on Trump and Elon Musk’s efforts to shrink the size of the federal government. Democrats have invited a number of fired federal workers as their guests for the speech.
Slotkin’s guest will be Andrew Lennox, who served as a Marine in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria and was fired from his job with the Department of Veterans Affairs in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
“You spend 10 years trying to defend your country in terms of honesty, integrity, and justice and then you come back and get copy and pasted the same email as 10,000 other people about performance,” Lennox told ABC News.
Slotkin’s speech comes as Democrats look to collect themselves after a punishing 2024 campaign cycle that saw Trump handily defeat then-Vice President Kamala Harris’ bid for the White House. Democrats didn’t fare much better down ballot, losing control of the Senate and failing to recapture the House.
As Democratic leadership tries to zero in on a new strategy to reach moderate voters, they’re looking to beam the spotlight onto Slotkin, who pulled off a narrow win in purple Michigan this November, beating Republican nominee Mike Rogers, who had served seven terms in the House, in a race for the state’s open Senate seat, even as Trump won Michigan by 80,000 votes.
Her focus on reproductive rights and economic issues like lowering costs for families, coupled with her track record in the House, helped her eke out a narrow victory in the Senate race. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries took notice in selecting her to deliver the Democrats’ response.
Schumer called Slotkin a “rising star” of the Democratic Party.
“As you know, Elissa is a rising star in our party. The American people are going to love what she has to say. She’s just great — on both economic and national security. I’m excited, I think we’re all excited,” Schumer said following the formal announcement that Slotkin would deliver the response to Trump.
Slotkin is a former CIA agent who worked as a Middle East analyst. She served three tours in Iraq in this role. She then worked at the White House and Pentagon during the Bush and Obama administrations before launching a bid for the House.
She won her seat in the House of Representatives in 2018, ousting a two-term GOP incumbent. During her tenure, she flexed her national security bona fides, serving on the Armed Services, Homeland Security and Veterans Affairs committee.
During her time in the House, Slotkin was consistently ranked among the most bipartisan members of the chamber. She occasionally voted across party lines and, in her earliest votes in the Senate, demonstrated a willingness to continue that bipartisan streak. She was one of 12 Democrats who voted in favor of the Republican-led Laken Riley Act earlier this year, helping to send the bill to Trump’s desk.
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