How Elissa Slotkin, a Moderate Michigan Democrat, Is Fighting Trump Tooth and Nail

The scene inside the vault of the National Archives could have been scripted by Aaron Sorkin, then quickly dismissed as a cheesy throwback to a bygone era. On November 12, 2024, eight members of the newly elected freshman class of senators were on Constitution Avenue to tour the treasures of the archive, including handwritten drafts of the Bill of Rights and the original Emancipation Proclamation. The ritual is a moment for incoming Republicans and Democrats to come together, without their staffs, and literally hold the nation’s history in their hands.

But for one newbie senator, Michigan Democrat Elissa Slotkin, the visit was especially poignant, as were the contents of one pearl gray archive case. “Inside that box,” she told me later, “was the original George Washington pledge to not swear fealty to any king.” Surrounded by starving troops at Valley Forge as they battled for American independence, Washington had signed the first copy of that 1778 oath—signed, in turn, by officers and infantry—which would assert that the people of the United States “owe no allegiance or obedience” to the tyrannical despot George III.

“My fundamental split with Trump is that he doesn’t see American leadership as exceptional. American leadership is not perfect, but I will take American leadership over Chinese or Russian leadership any day of the week.”

“I began to vibrate,” the self-described “history nerd” told me, describing how she marveled at the tactile power of that fragile slip of paper. “Pictures weren’t really allowed, but I managed to get one to post on social media.” Slotkin was determined, she said, that her Michigan constituents be made aware of the vows and sacrifices that had shaped the young nation, whose democratic values were being grievously challenged as she took her seat in the Senate.

I had come to see her in early December as she ramped up plans for her first 100 days in office—and for confronting President Donald Trump’s return to power. She could already feel, she said, “the cold wind from the dragon swinging his tail up and down Pennsylvania Avenue.” It was the first of several lengthy talks we would have over the next three months as Slotkin, 48, found her footing. And indeed she did. A month into Trump’s second term she would become a persistent presence on the Hill, on social media, and on television (whether talking with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour or the panelists on The View), denouncing the excesses of the administration. Upon returning from the Munich Security Conference in February, she would go so far as to openly call out the Trump team’s “ignorance” (for sidelining Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy in peace talks) and Trump himself (for appeasing Russia’s Vladimir Putin). “Ronald Reagan must be rolling over in his grave right now,” she said, later adding, “If you’re Vladimir Putin, you’re popping Champagne in Moscow.”

And then all hell broke loose. In a shameful Oval Office takedown of a world leader fighting off a tyrant whose army had invaded his country, Trump and Vice President JD Vance bullied Zelenskyy like sullen toddlers, demanding fealty, then later announcing they were pausing all aid to Ukraine. Slotkin at the time was locked away with her advisers. She’d been tapped by party leaders to deliver the Democratic response to Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress, so she and her several aides were working on the final draft—only to look over and see her phone blow up with texts from her peers voicing their alarm. Shortly thereafter, she watched a replay of the televised encounter in disgust.

The following Monday—the day before she would face the nation—Slotkin hopped on a phone call as she was putting the finishing touches on her talk. Her anger was still palpable. “You better believe I strengthened the hell out of the national security [portion],” Slotkin told me, “to call him out. We have seen Donald Trump act as if he is in the thrall of Vladimir Putin. And it has gotten worse and worse. The [Zelenskyy] meeting was an absolute symbol of his cozying up to dictators and kicking our allies in the teeth.… To just give over all the cards to Vladimir Putin and then shift our foreign policy and our intelligence operations is so outside the norm of the last 80 years, I don’t even know how to process it.”

What’s more, she said, she was appalled that at least one of the Republican legislators who had been with her in Munich—and had met with Zelenskyy in Washington prior to his White House drubbing—had scrubbed his social media feed, cleaning it of the encomium he’d posted just hours before. “It’s not just Trump. It’s that the rest of them have capitulated to his approach. My fundamental split with Trump is that he doesn’t see American leadership as exceptional. American leadership is not perfect, but I will take American leadership over Chinese or Russian leadership any day of the week.”

On the next night, she gave her party’s response—live from Wyandotte, Michigan, a town that both she and Trump had won in the general election. She deftly reminded the country of the American dream that her home state symbolized. “You could work at an auto plant and afford the car you were building,” summoning a way of life now under threat from Trump’s first weeks of wreckage, epitomized by the gutting of government agency jobs by Trump and his Rasputin, Elon Musk. “Is there anyone in America who is comfortable with him and his gang of 20-year-olds using their own computer servers to poke through…your private data?”

an embarrassing and inchoate Democratic party, some holding silly paddles (“False,” “Musk Steals”), others stalking out, and one showboating Texas Congressman causing an uproar. In this fever dream of grotesque, paranoid politics, Slotkin’s normalcy and fierce love of country seemed to conjure the kind of Democrat forged in a much earlier era. Slotkin urged her listeners to attend town halls and mobilize on issues that matter. “Don’t tune out,” she admonished. “Doomscrolling doesn’t count.… It’s easy to be exhausted, but America needs you now more than ever. If previous generations had not fought for democracy, where would we be today?”

To secure her Senate seat, Slotkin prevailed by 19,000 votes in a purple Midwestern state that Trump carried by 80,000. Slotkin ran as “a radical pragmatist.” During her campaign, she cited bipartisan bills she’d helped get through the House during three terms in Congress and spoke of her membership in the Problem Solvers Caucus, a group established by Republicans and Democrats to draft legislation across the aisle.

Her strategy was to keep her message character-driven, said her campaign manager Matt Hennessey: “Our move was to just go straight bio. Elissa, full face to the camera. What you see told the tale.” The grueling contest became one of the most expensive in Senate history. Slotkin and her allies spent $129 million, a good portion of it fighting off what she called “storms of disinformation” as her opponent—Mike Rogers, the former head of the House Intelligence Committee and a Trump critic turned MAGA warrior—returned from his residence in Florida to take her on. For his part, Rogers and his political supporters spent $76 million, with some of their media blasts seeking to link Slotkin—a centrist Democrat who claims to be decidedly outside the “woke” camp—to the progressive agenda and the Biden White House, even falsely accusing her of having connections to a Chinese-run electric vehicle battery company.

“We have seen Trump act as if he is in the thrall of Putin. It has gotten worse and worse. The Zelenskyy meeting was an absolute symbol of his cozying up to dictators and kicking our allies in the teeth. I don’t even know how to process it.”

“We would wake up every morning praying we wouldn’t be hit with another $5 million in attack ads,” her campaign communications head, Austin Cook, recalled. With each charge, her team pivoted with a new commercial: Barack Obama starred in one, describing Slotkin’s foreign policy expertise while she served on his national security staff. But that experience cut both ways, as did her background as a CIA analyst who’d clocked three tours in Iraq—not necessarily a selling point with progressives.

A few weeks before the election, Slotkin’s pro-Israel record and staunch stand against antisemitism threatened to implode the Michigan Democratic coalition as the war in Gaza escalated and Israel began major airstrikes in Lebanon; Lebanese Americans make up the largest segment of Michigan’s sizable Arab American community. But Slotkin stood firm. A fluent Arabic speaker, she told one reporter that she had “deep concerns about what’s going on with Israel’s military campaign…. You can express empathy and concern and nuance, even when conversations are difficult.” For her admirers, if any three words captured the candidate’s essence, it was these: empathy, concern, nuance. In the end, she carried the Arab American majority of Dearborn.

By December, Slotkin found herself in a demoralized Washington, DC, a deep blue city reeling from Trump’s popular-vote victory and his first cabinet picks (the ill-fated Matt Gaetz for attorney general, the TV he-man Pete Hegseth for defense secretary). Slotkin had already made a name among party mandarins. With her military and White House pedigree, easy rapport, and low-key Midwestern directness, she seemed to many insiders a future standard-bearer for a more moderate vision, a politician who might be able to bring back common sense to a Democratic party that was off its moorings. “If the party had more candidates like Elissa Slotkin, they would have won,” James Carville remarked. Another Democratic activist told me, “The question is, is Elissa Slotkin four years out or eight years out from party leadership? We all know she’s a star.” To former homeland security adviser Lisa Monaco, who worked with Slotkin in the Obama White House, the senator’s mastery of foreign affairs and lightness of affect “makes her, for me, someone whose leadership voice should be heard. And I mean now.”

Slotkin would have a promising start. Her appearances at Cabinet confirmation hearings highlighted her candor and insight. Other lawmakers were paying attention. Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer told me he’d been impressed by her insistence on rethinking the standard playbook in twice-weekly sessions held by the Democratic caucus. “Suddenly,” he said, “everyone is listening intently to what she is saying. And she has no issue of taking longtime Senate policy and saying, even though she is brand-new, ‘How do we challenge this?’” In March, she would go on Meet the Press and assert: “New senators, new representatives, new folks, who are like, ‘Hey, we need to do more and we need to be showing that we’re actually having a plan to stand up on really important moments of inflection.’ So that’s what I am trying to do from within.’”

Slotkin earned her uncommon reputation in the House while representing the district that surrounds the state capital of Lansing and tips into the farthest corner of the sprawling Detroit suburbs—Trump country. There, in the town of Holly (population 5,938), she lives down a dirt road in a modest two-story farmhouse bought by her grandfather in the 1950s as a cattle farm and weekend retreat. The barn is painted a muted red, not unlike the political leanings of many living nearby. While the cows have long been replaced by soybeans, planted in fields leased to neighbors, Slotkin’s granular understanding of the concerns of the rural middle- and working-class voters in her community had set her apart during her six years in Congress.

“My neighbors can’t give their kids the same quality of life they have had, and they are angry and ashamed—and blame the Democrats. I keep trying to get the party to understand this. I tried to warn the Biden team and got nowhere.”

She understood that Holly, with its combination of Detroit weekenders and blue-collar families, was a Rorschach for the country. Visiting almost every county in the state during her campaign, Slotkin would dive into farmers markets and diners with a sense of affinity—part therapist, part neighbor—taking in voters’ stories and sharing her own. “I am a people person,” she insisted. “I have been this way since childhood.” Her smile had a gravitational pull, even when she’d make jokes about carrying a Glock. Which plays well in Michigan.

At the height of her campaign, she told a group at a New York fundraiser I attended: “We are underwater. I’m not going to carry my own district. My neighbors can’t give their kids the same quality of life they have had, and they are angry and ashamed—and blame the Democrats. I keep trying to get the party to understand this. I tried to warn the Biden team and got nowhere. Kamala’s team is better but wasn’t great.”

Her words would prove prophetic for many Democrats. But, unlike many of her peers, this Michigander seemed in tune with the electorate.

At year’s end, Slotkin was setting up temporary quarters on the eighth floor of the Hart building, not far from the Committee on Indian Affairs. Cubicles overflowed with packing boxes. New hires sat on benches in a hallway. On one wall in a small conference room that Slotkin had commandeered as her office she had hung a red-and-yellow abstract painting of a hot dog—a tribute to her great-grandfather, an immigrant from Lithuania, who had started what would become the nationally known Hygrade Meat company.

The Slotkin family story is about as American as it gets. Nine Jewish siblings, originally from the Pale of Settlement, would include Samuel Slotkin, a Minsk émigré who arrived in 1900 and eventually set up Hygrade, a behemoth that would fan out across America. In 1946, The New Yorker profiled him in a lengthy story, stating: Samuel Slotkin believes he succeeded in business because he has the soul of an “artist, creating beautiful frankfurters and sausage, and that money has crept up on him unawares.” In the late ’50s, his son, Hugo, would mastermind a new spice blend that would make a superior hot dog. Their family firm—sold before Elissa Slotkin was born—would become Ball Park Franks, an iconic brand carried in sports stadiums and supermarkets.

The company was featured prominently in her campaign commercials. Hot dogs were served at her Senate swearing-in party at Washington’s Spy Museum. The venue was a statement as well: Slotkin is the first former CIA officer to serve in the upper chamber, having been in and out of war zones for more than a decade. Indeed, during the race, images of a young Slotkin in a flak jacket deluged the Michigan airwaves. So, too, did her résumé: Under George W. Bush and Obama, she had served four defense secretaries, becoming Obama’s acting assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs.

In those first weeks, she would tell visitors: “I am the 64th woman senator, the fourth Jewish woman senator, and the youngest woman Democrat in the Senate.” That sense of awe would soon be eclipsed by the urgency of a crisis that threatened to upend all norms of governance through the sweeping rollbacks of Trump and his amanuensis Musk—the world’s richest man, deputized to bring the federal government to heel. Slotkin decried “a group of billionaires leading this administration around by the nose.”

Suddenly, Slotkin was engaged in activities way outside the usual portfolio for a freshman senator. Instead of devoting her efforts to angling for subcommittee opportunities, she was rigorously preparing for battle, studying case law about the separation of powers and joining other senators in legal actions against the new president. She is wary of using words like coup or putsch. But within her first days in office, Trump and Vance, a Yale Law graduate, issued stunning ukases contending that federal court judges did not have jurisdiction over the executive branch—an assertion that even most middle schoolers would find absurd.

As she had in the House, Slotkin would confer often with confidants from both parties. Her closest friends in politics are two centrist Democrats, former congressional colleagues who share her military and intelligence background: New Jersey’s Mikie Sherrill and Virginia’s Abigail Spanberger, both now running for governor. Slotkin at one point reached out to Monaco, Joe Biden’s deputy attorney general, to consult on legal strategy as 22 state attorneys general, including Michigan’s, filed multiple suits in federal courts to push back against Trump’s tide of executive orders. “I want her to come in and help run these cases,” Slotkin told me. But soon after their conversation, as if to underscore the gravity of the moment, the administration would revoke Monaco’s security clearance—and that of scores of other current and former officials, many of whom would suffer the added insult of being denied access to federal buildings.

In cramped offices, Slotkin’s staff was fielding nonstop messages from apoplectic Michiganders, Republican and Democrat. “We have had almost 5,000 calls in three days,” she told me. Mayors, veterans, sheriffs, cancer researchers, town superintendents, students, the elderly. All these lives had suddenly been upended, and constituents were turning to their senator, irate that their benefits had been cut, their jobs eliminated, their school funds halted. The word, she said, that best described her first month: chaos. A close second: overreach.

While she was getting settled in the capital, Slotkin was also opening an office in Detroit, hiring 40 new staffers and hoping that her committee assignments might include a coveted appointment for a junior senator: the armed services committee. In addition, she was trying to master the arcana of Senate protocol as well as preparing briefing books on her new peers to understand where they might share common ground for future legislation.

Her day-to-day agenda, though, still seemed forged in an era governed by a shared belief in the rule of law. She was speaking out against an attempt by a Japanese company to take over US Steel, a move that threatened Michigan’s auto industry. She was brainstorming with her legislative aide Ani Toumajon about what would become her first Senate bill: a ban on selling export oil to foreign adversaries like China and Russia, which she would cosponsor with Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman and Texas Republican Ted Cruz.

Slotkin was aghast at the sweeping rollbacks of Trump and his amanuensis Musk. She decried “a group of billionaires leading this administration around by the nose.”

“No one can out-hawk me on China,” she told me, sounding for a moment like Trump himself. But the next instant she seemed to echo Biden, who had stood with Wayne County autoworkers on the picket line. “The Venn diagram I am working in, for Michigan, is bringing back our manufacturing jobs—and protecting our national security.” She was clearly in overdrive, trying to keep Chinese-manufactured cars out of the US. “What do we want?” she asked. “A fleet of Chinese spy craft gathering information near our security sites?” She was especially focused on Michigan’s defense manufacturing and military bases; the state has the country’s largest National Guard training center. On the Senate floor, she would name-check Musk for allegedly placating China, which hosts Tesla plants in Shanghai. She blasted out a tweet on Musk’s own platform, X, then a post on Threads in support of her constituents and Detroit-area automakers: “Musk’s personal interests—from his vast investments in Communist China to his opposition to the Big Three—simply don’t align with the interests of the average Michigander.”

Then, in late January, the chill swept in—and with it the Trump avalanche. First came talk of tariffs, which would threaten to cripple the Michigan auto industry and affect virtually every consumer in her state. Then came the freezing of federal grants. Then Musk and his “Nerd Reich,” as several wags called it, unleashed a squad of 20-somethings—their security clearance status uncertain—across a raft of federal agencies. At the same time, there were moves toward large-scale deportations, purges, buyouts, layoffs, mass firings. Every day, it seemed, her team had to react to a new barrage of outlandish or illegal declarations. Trump proclaimed his designs on Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal. He called for the US to assume control of Gaza. By February, dozens of lawsuits had been filed against the executive branch, some of which had come after consultations with her office.

Slotkin was already primed. George W. Bush’s national security adviser Stephen Hadley, describing Slotkin as “fearless,” told me that “her skill set as a leader is unique.” At the CIA, her portfolio had included countering Middle East terrorist groups. In 2007, as a member of Bush’s national security team, she was in Baghdad, fielding reports that 107-mm rocket shells had landed on the lawn of the American embassy. Were they coming from Iran? Slotkin was on the ground and told her then boss, Douglas Lute (later Obama’s NATO ambassador), who was in Washington, “I’ve seen the fragments and they are stamped with USA labeling. They could be legacy Saddam vintage stuff. They could be from Jordan.” The illicit arms trade in the region made it difficult to pinpoint their origin. Vice President Dick Cheney, Lute told me, wanted to retaliate. “‘You are coming home tomorrow,’” Lute recalled telling Slotkin. “‘Bring me something I can show the president.’ So Elissa, being Elissa, appeared at my office the next day and dropped a 20-pound, 18-inch shell fragment on my desk, marked with English munitions labeling. ‘Here is your evidence,’ she said. ‘I don’t like being shelled.’”

In Baghdad, she served with Corin Stone, who would later become the Pentagon’s deputy general counsel. Stone was among Slotkin’s first hires to help mastermind her Senate litigation strategy against a Trump team dead set on dismantling vital institutions. None of this came as a surprise to Lute. The disorder brought about by the government’s demolition crews “will look familiar to her,” he said, pointing out how she has been there “when countries slip toward authoritarianism and empower people like Musk, who are not responsible and not accountable…. She will recognize this by way of the dysfunction in places like Iraq and Afghanistan and Russia. Her international experience will give her touchpoints.” Russia was particularly germane.

In 2014, Slotkin was at the Pentagon when reports began to surface of Russian troops close to the Ukrainian border. “We wondered, is it possible this is cover for going into Crimea?” she recalled. “And then the tanks started rolling in. As an analyst, I understood this had been a failure of imagination—the same thing we are struggling with right now with Ukraine.” The following year, she said, “We also saw Russia mobilizing aircraft over Syria. They were there as ‘advisers.’ And we thought, are they really going to do their first deployment since Afghanistan?

“But we had much more imagination after Crimea. And Ash Carter”—Obama’s defense secretary—“was like, ‘Screw that, we are not going to yield to the Russians.’ He had me draw up rules so we would not have to risk two nuclear powers accidentally running into each other over Syria.” In a secure conference room, Slotkin was tasked with negotiating with the Russian generals in charge of the operation. “They didn’t want to lose their pilots either. I always wondered if Ash had me lead it because I was an American woman facing down three aging Russian generals.”

In the many hours we spent together, that was one of the only times that Slotkin mentioned her gender. During the campaign, she told me, she often pressed her predecessor, retiring Michigan senator Debbie Stabenow, 74, about what she went through as a woman in the Senate. “I was like, ‘Oh, my God!’ I have been in male-dominated fields my entire life. I can’t tell you how many rooms I have been in where I’m the only woman with three- and four-star generals, the CIA. There was never one day of my professional life that I was like, How do I get a man to champion this idea, so I can get it done? Not one day.”

It was hardly a surprise when Slotkin landed the plum post—armed services. She was also assigned to three more slots that play to her strengths: agriculture, homeland security, and veterans affairs. As a result, right after being sworn in, she would need to prepare to go one-on-one on national television, displaying her security and intelligence mettle during hearings for Cabinet nominees. Three would soon be in her crosshairs, and she in theirs: Hegseth; Russell Vought, the budget czar and a Project 2025 coauthor; and would-be homeland security chief Kristi Noem.

I first met Slotkin in the summer of 2022 at a New York fundraiser given by a cousin of mine. I had heard about her growing reputation from yet another cousin who was part of a group of dynamic Democratic Michiganders that also included former governor Jennifer Granholm, state attorney general Dana Nessel, and current governor Gretchen Whitmer. I was curious about this ballsy CIA analyst who was now running for her third term in Congress not long after Roe v. Wade had been reversed.

In front of a small group gathered in East Hampton, Slotkin radiated an uncanny political certitude. “What is it with the Democratic Party? Why wasn’t there a litigation strategy in place a decade ago to prevent this from happening? All of these pro-abortion groups and they couldn’t have figured this out? Why are we, as a party, always playing defense? My training in the CIA is about planning. You have to have a plan. A plan is everything.”

The next summer, Slotkin was back in the Hamptons, eyeing a Senate run. This time, I was curious about her interactions with Elise Stefanik, an ex-colleague on Bush’s national security team. Stefanik, a Harvard grad close to her in age, seemed to have a measured temperament and a core of constitutional values when compared with many in the GOP. Both Slotnik and Stefanik—Trump’s subsequent nominee for UN ambassador—had broad foreign affairs experience, though they differed on policy. Under Bush, their relationship, in Slotkin’s estimation, was distant but cordial.

In the House, they had worked together on several bills. And at the time, said Slotkin, “Elise was much more moderate” than she is today. But after a while, Stefanik threw in with a MAGA group that filed a brief to try to decertify the results of the 2020 election. She savagely attacked the January 6 committee and its vice chair, fellow Republican Liz Cheney, (calling her “a Pelosi pawn.”) Stefanik would soon turn full MAGA mean girl, later announcing that she “would not have done what Mike Pence did” in certifying the election in 2020.

“A Republican colleague said, ‘People in my district are forming militias, threatening my staff, my family. So I had to vote against [certificating Biden’s victory].’ I said, ‘Congressman, do you know what we call that in my district? Wednesday. I get threatened all the time. We have militias. I mean, Michigan.’”

That summer of 2023, I was researching the motivations that drove collaborators to throw in their lot with authoritarian regimes. I was trying to understand the moral amnesia that had taken hold of many levelheaded legislators who, once in Trumpworld, had abandoned their humanist values. Slotkin looked at me closely, surprised by my naivete. “There’s one word that explains it,” she said. “Ambition.”

“So what do you say to Elise,” I asked, “when you see each other in Congress?”

“If I am in the elevator with her,” she said. “I will look down and get busy with my phone.” A while later, when Stefanik posted a petty anti-Biden tweet with Slotnik pictured in the background, she had had enough. “After that, it was a full metamorphosis…. I realized we can no longer have a serious conversation.”

Insurrection Day would become for Slotnik the ultimate test of character.

The violence of January 6 was a turning point. “Before that, I would have said, ‘Look, there’s two types of Republicans I work with: the true believers, who really feel strongly and deeply that they love Donald Trump and believe and support a lot of what he says. Then there’s the other category, and they know better and they don’t like him. Sometimes they dislike him as much as we do.

“January 6th, you barricade yourself in your office and look for a weapon and it gives you some clarity. That, to me, was like, ‘If you don’t say anything and you vote with him, you are actually maybe worse, because you are covering.’”

A while later, she said, she was on a call with “a Republican congressman I know and I like who had voted against certification [of Biden’s victory] that night. He said, ‘Elissa, you don’t understand. People in my district are furious. They are forming militias, they are threatening my staff, my family. So I had to vote against certification.’ And I said, ‘Congressman, do you know what we call that in my district? Wednesday. What do you think those of us in rural America are getting every day? I get threatened all the time. We have militias. I mean, Michigan. People literally took over the capital nine months before January 6th.’” Her Republican friend was saying, as she saw it,“‘I’m too scared to stand up to it’.… It was just such a sad moment.”

Fast-forward to mid-February 2025. One by one, members of the GOP caucus would fall in line with the president’s decrees and nominees. Government officials were being dismissed en masse. Federal prosecutors were resigning rather than carry out constitutionally dubious orders. Agencies were being taken over by those who’d been advocating against their very existence. Slotnik, however, always takes the long view. Soon after, a veteran Republican senator came to reassure her that, given time, they could get some national security legislation done together. “He said, ‘Let’s talk again in March, because we have got to get all our craziness out. My colleagues do not realize we are about to own everything. So there’s going to be a lot of executive orders. A lot of ‘Sturming und Dranging’ within the Republican trifecta, and then we will get back to a more even footing.”

In our first conversation, I asked how she planned to function in the months to come, especially in a paralyzed Democratic party. “What do you know about game theory?” Slotkin responded, taking out a legal pad. “We were trained in this kind of analysis at CIA.” She drew a grid with four large squares. On the left side she wrote tactical and strategic. “That means, is it short-term—tactical or is it long-term—strategic”? On the right side she wrote reversible and, underneath that, irreversible. She then pointed to the box marked strategic and irreversible. She looked at me and said, “Strategic and irreversible is the box I am going to work in. I am not going to react to the five crazy things the president will say or do every day.”

And who or what, I asked, would come first in her strategic and irreversible grid? “Pete Hegseth,” she said, without hesitation. “I have staffed the departments at the Pentagon for four defense secretaries and seen them up close. I have traveled with them and been with them in the situation room.” With Trump’s then nominee for Pentagon chief, she went on, “there is the entire history of his sexual impropriety, drinking, all that stuff. I don’t approve. But it’s tactical.”

The tactical is not her worry. “My concern is what he’s going to do on the job based on what he has already said…. Trump has said that he might use the uniformed military inside the United States in a way that contradicts the Constitution. You start using the military as your own personal militia force. You politicize the military. That is a genie that cannot be put back in the bottle. That is strategic and irreversible. Of all the issues I have with Pete Hegseth, that’s the one I want to go deep on.”

It was mid-January when Slotkin found a day to take a break and return to Holly. She invited me to the farm for some downtime before heading to Detroit to catch the Lions’ NFC title game. When I arrived, ice covered the driveway. A barn was emblazoned with a sign for Hygrade Meats. In a fenced area nearby, Slotkin’s mixed-breed hounds started howling. It was a balmy 30 degrees. On icy Michigan days, Slotkin loves to tell visitors to “Buckle up, Buttercup,” then throw them into her open Jeep to tour the back 50.

She greeted me in jeans and ushered me past the cluttered mudroom into her kitchen. “I had no time to clean up,” she said, smiling. “This is how it is.” She had already zipped into town to pick up croissants.

The setting was rustic: furniture from Costco in the den, walls of family photos, the dining room with her grandmother’s walnut breakfront. It was here, as a toddler, that Slotkin began to get by on her own, out of necessity. She was left alone for hours, she told me, to roam the farm, which became her laboratory for self-reliance.

“No one in the family talked about my mother’s sexuality. My mom was flamboyant. Hallooo! It was very Nathan Lane! I loved it. I think this is why I am such an extrovert. I got that from my mom—and, I think, the seriousness from the Slotkin side.”

I was curious how the loss of the family business, which she rarely speaks about, might have impacted her early childhood. On the surface, the facts of Slotkin’s life suggest the wealth and privilege of a meat heiress, but the Slotkins were long out of the company by the time it eventually sold to Sara Lee for $140 million. Slotkin’s father, Curt, went out on his own and became a meat broker, starting his day at 5 a.m. and touring grocery chains. “We had real money problems when my father moved us here when I was four,” Slotkin said. “I am one of the senators with the least amount of money. Look it up.” I did. She ranks 79 out of 100.

Their financial status was secondary to a larger concern. Slotkin’s mother, Judy, a travel agent who was a vibrant, voluble Detroit native, was diagnosed with severe metastasized breast cancer not long after giving birth to her son, Keith, Slotkin’s brother. While Judy remained in New York for months undergoing experimental treatment, Curt took the toddlers to Holly. “We moved so my father could work in the meat industry,” the senator remembered, and from the age of five, she reveled in “the joy of being so free, doing everything on my own, with the farmhands somewhat aware of where I was.”

An electric fence protected the cows that still grazed the land. One day she asked her dad, “Is the fence off? I want to play outside.” “Yes,” he said. “I got the shock of my life,” she recalled. “I ran into the house and screamed my head off.” It was an early lesson in how to rely on her own instincts. “It was the first time I stood up to him.” Slotkin is close with her father, a strict disciplinarian and Reagan Republican who was passionate about wanting his children to understand current events. Family dinners, Keith told me, “were eaten in silence during Tom Brokaw’s Nightly News. And when it was over we all discussed. And we were awakened in the morning with my dad’s announcing who had won the last night’s football and basketball games.”

Her mother, on the mend, had rejoined the family. Slotkin, the first girl in two generations of many cousins, was doted on by her grandmother and Judy. “She wanted me to be a Broadway star,” she told me. “My middle name is Blair. She knew Slotkin would never work on the stage, but Blair? She stuck me in dance classes, permed my hair. I was a total tomboy—and that drove her insane.”

When Slotkin was nine, her parents divorced, though she and Keith were not told why until much later. “My mother came out. But this being Detroit in the ’80s, it was more or less a secret.” Children often learn to compartmentalize the complexities that lurk under family silence. “Many of my father’s closest friends were homophobic,” Slotkin said. “These were people I knew and loved.”

Judy moved into a condo in Bloomfield Hills, decorated in Art Deco style by a beloved friend whose partner wound up getting AIDS. Their apartment became “a kind of social center for the Detroit gay world, such as it was,” Slotkin said, relating how her mother took care of dying friends. Slotkin began to realize that Judy had never been careful with money; she needed her daughter, in many ways, to become the adult in charge. Slotkin also felt a different kind of support when her father remarried and new brothers came into the family. “Things got looser and more fun,” she remembered. “Baseball caps and torn jeans and making jokes at the table.”

Even so, Slotkin told me, “No one in the family talked about my mother’s sexuality. My mom was flamboyant.” Slotkin would pick up traits from her persona. “Hallooo! It was very Nathan Lane! I loved it. I think this is why I am such an extrovert. I got that from my mom—and, I think, the seriousness from the Slotkin side.”

Perhaps the family turbulence and her early independence set her on a course to excel. She became president of her class four years in a row—and a star athlete. (“I wouldn’t be here,” she said, “without the leadership training that I got in women’s sports.”) Even though her father, citing the expense, resisted his ex-wife’s insistence that Slotkin attend the elite Cranbrook School in Bloomfield Hills (Senators Mitt Romney and Alan Simpson were alums), Judy managed to get family funds to cover the costs.

Then, at 16, Slotkin was a counselor on a wilderness hiking trip in the Smoky Mountains when 94 Cranbrook students were trapped in a freak blizzard, becoming disoriented in avalanche conditions. Some were trapped for days. Slotkin, assigned to one group, was able to rig tarps and help get her charges down the mountain to a base camp, which quickly filled with National Guard members, who worked with her and the school librarian to rescue others. One teacher lost his hands and feet. As the first hikers were found and rescued, they congregated at a motel playing video games. “I stayed in the war room with the adults,” Slotkin said. “To be engaging with the US military for the first time in my life, seeing the media swarm the motel and being in the crew telling the authorities, ‘We think the helicopter run should be in that section of the mountain.’ Looking back, I know, that was formative.”

At Cornell, Slotkin focused on global development, mastered Swahili, and went to Kenya to do relief work. She landed a job in an Arab village in Israel. The day she arrived, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, she recalled, went to Jerusalem’s Temple Mount and “the bombs started falling for the first intifada. They closed off access to the village, and I was in Haifa working with Palestinians, with no money, sharing a bedroom with an Irishman with a curtain divider. There were suicide bombers hitting the bus stops and the beach. It was my first-time war experience.” Not long after, she took off for Cairo to master Arabic.

Slotkin would return to the States, moving to New York to register for an international masters program at Columbia. Two days later came 9/11. “I knew immediately from the first report of a plane hitting the World Trade Center this was terrorism. By the end of the day, I knew that fighting terrorists was my future.”

Four months after graduation, having been recruited by the CIA, she was at Langley, joining a few dozen newly hired analysts who worked out of a trailer with green Mylar on the window. Soon she would be on the way to Baghdad, where she filed terrorist evaluations for the president’s morning briefing books while working in Saddam Hussein’s former palace, which US forces had turned into a command center and temporary embassy.

“I was the lowest-level briefer,” she told me. “But not long after I arrived, my boss slipped on the marble floors and had to be airlifted back to the States.” Suddenly, at 27, Slotkin was briefing the CIA station chief and the new ambassador, John Negroponte. A few months later, Negroponte told her, as she recounted, “‘The president wants a new cabinet post. They are naming me the first national director of intelligence…. We are leaving Monday. You will be my deputy.’ We were a team of five and we set up every aspect of the agency, the staffing and the seal. So you can only imagine how I feel about the appointment of Tulsi Gabbard to be Trump’s director of national security [DNI]…. I am not sure what her path is. When she was a Democrat, she was on the House armed services committee with me and she didn’t really show up a lot.”

Slotkin’s public-facing attitude about Gabbard has been no less forgiving. On the Senate floor, she dispensed with the limp euphemisms that muted her Republican colleagues to scorch the calumny of the notion that Gabbard would even be considered for the DNI post. Gabbard, Slotkin said, “has shown a repeated preference for our adversaries… most notably a surprise trip to visit the now-ousted president of Syria, Bashir al-Assad. Imagine the decision-making that goes into planning a secret trip to visit a man who has killed thousands of his countrymen, thousands of relatives of Michiganders that I represent…to go and visit this man, throw flowers at his feet…. The same goes for her seeming glorification of Vladimir Putin…. It is an insult to people who have dedicated their lives, and put themselves in harm’s way, to have her confirmed into this position.”

At her farm in Michigan, a large walnut desk in the living room’s bay window has pride of place. The desk, which belonged to Slotkin’s great-grandfather Sam, Hygrade’s founder, had once belonged to Lindley Garrison, Woodrow Wilson’s secretary of war. Sam, the senator said, had “donated to Wilson’s campaign and someone gave it to him. He worked at it every day of his life.”

It was at this desk, she told me, that she’d read through the entire set of The Federalist Papers before deciding to join her colleagues to vote to impeach Trump. “I wasn’t sure that the constitutional mandate reached that far,” she said, but the essays of Hamilton, Jay, and Madison helped persuade her that the president, in her view, had violated his oath. It was here as well that she was watching TV, only to see her congressman, Mike Bishop, smirking into the camera, as she put it, saying that he had cast his vote against Obamacare. Trump was already in the White House, but Bishop’s seat was coming up. “That was it,” she said. “I was so angry. I made the decision to run. No one was going to stop me.”

Her motivation was personal. For years, she’d watched her mother struggle with breast and ovarian cancer. In Washington in 2009—while dating her future husband, Dave Moore, a former helicopter pilot she had met in Iraq—Slotkin discovered that Judy, in desperate financial straits, had not renewed her medical insurance. As a result, the couple—along with Keith, who by then was working as a research geneticist—would cover their mother’s bills. “She went five years without medical insurance, without telling us. It was pre-Obamacare, where it was perfectly legal to gouge someone with a pre-existing condition. I learned to be outraged. It was horrible. I mean, it’s a blur now…. I was doing all the paperwork for her to declare bankruptcy.”

Judy’s picture in the hospital appeared in her daughter’s first campaign ads—and in those for last year’s Senate run. “Everywhere I go in Michigan, people think they knew my mother,” Keith told me. Slotkin sped up her wedding plans so that Judy could attend. She died six months later. While Slotkin and Moore, 12 years her senior, stayed together through her first years in Congress, their marriage could not take the strain of the demands of her life in politics. She told me her relationship with her ex-husband was “congenial. That’s all I have to say.”

At one point I inquired if there was anything important I hadn’t raised with her. She replied, “You haven’t asked me why I am a Democrat.”

“So, why?” I asked. Again, Slotkin went back to her mother, whom she described as a gay man trapped in a gay woman’s body: “The way I watched her taking care of her gay friends who got AIDS. At the time, Ronald Reagan was president and he wouldn’t talk about the disease. When we would have mock elections at school, my father always told me to vote Republican. But I never would. I swore then that I would never have anything to do with a party that had that kind of cruelty.

“The thing I pride myself on the most is that I am independently minded. I’m hard to put in a box. But on social issues, I don’t try to tell other people how to live. I don’t always agree with my party on fiscal issues, national security issues, but on who gets to be in the club? I have a pretty expansive view of who gets to see themselves as equal citizens. And I never like the bullying that went on in certain Republican circles. It really bothers me.”

After Trump put Hegseth forward to be his defense secretary, Slotkin had meetings at the Pentagon and was alarmed: Many considered him unqualified and opposed his nomination. In mid-January, she made her public debut as a United States senator and, from her post on the armed services committee, began grilling Hegseth.

Only moments into her opening remarks, she pushed out the term posse comitatus, a clear reference to the potential use of American troops in a law enforcement capacity at the southern border. Slotkin’s gifts as a speaker include her flawless manners; she rarely condescends, though she can throw out some zingers. She never comes across as didactic, even when she reminded Hegseth that the 1878 posse comitatus act was meant to underscore that “our founders designed the system so that…we weren’t going to use active-duty military inside the United States and make Americans scared of their own military.”

“Do you believe that there is such a thing as an illegal order?” she continued. “Is there anything a commander-in-chief could ask you to do with the uniformed military that would be in violation of the US Constitution?” Her intentions were obvious.

Hegseth stared at her and said, “I reject the premise that…”

“You’ve done your genuflecting to him,” she shot back, then reminded him that one of his predecessors, Mark Esper, had to issue an apology for using the military to clear peaceful protesters near the White House at Trump’s command. “Was he right or wrong to apologize?” she asked. Hegseth punted. “What are you scared of?” she asked him. “Did he do the right or wrong thing by apologizing?”

Back and forth they went. “You said that JAG officers are potentially people who put their own interests in their own medals and promotions ahead of the troops. Senator Lindsey Graham was a JAG officer for most of his life. Is that what you believe about those who implement our justice system in the US military?” Just as she finished her spirited questioning, one cable anchor called her performance “incisive”; the entire exchange would light up social media and be replayed on multiple news shows. “I could book her all day long if she would allow it,” her then senior adviser Gordon Trowbridge told me. Slotkin had arrived. But so had Hegseth. He got through the Senate by a tie vote, broken by Vance.

The next day, Slotkin took her seat on the homeland security committee, surrounded by briefing books, waiting to square off against Russell Vought, selected to lead the Office of Management and Budget. Vought had written chunks of the right-wing playbook Project 2025, which called for a kind of sweeping presidential authority not attempted since the Nixon years. Vought—the insider’s insider, who had led OMB during Trump’s first term—said repeatedly that in his new position he would have a mandate to override congressional acts with which he disagreed. Before the hearings began, Slotnik had told me: “Mr. Vought literally believes in impoundment. He believes that even if the Congress—a Republican Congress—appropriates money for an issue, that he has the right, through Donald Trump, to decide whether we actually spend the money.”

At the hearing, Slotkin was no less assertive. “My concern with you and with potential Secretary Hegseth,” she remarked, “is that when asked clear constitutional questions about the allocation of money, you can’t answer a straight constitutional question…. Can you confirm for me, please, that you will abide by the Constitution, and current law, as it is, not what you wish it to be?”

Vought lobbed back an answer that included the term “extensive policy process.” An exasperated Slotkin said, “You can see how this [is a] bureaucratic, wonky answer you keep giving, right? You’re claiming to be an outsider that says you’re going to shake things up…. I just want to hear that when you hold up your hand, you are going to protect and defend the Constitution…. and that’s what bothers me about you.”

Slotnik burrowed down on Vought’s record of seeking to cancel a long-fought bipartisan effort to maintain and clean the Great Lakes, which comprise “20 percent of the fresh water in the world…. Can you confirm you submitted a ‘zeroing out’ of that program three years in a row the last time you were OMB director?”

“It’s been a long time, Senator, I would have to go back and refresh my memory,” he said, staring back at her.

The high drama would come on February 5, the night before the floor vote on Vought’s confirmation. In a theatrical move, Schumer, the leading Senate Democrat, scheduled an all-nighter—a made-for-TV Democratic talkathon—in an attempt to stall the ascension of the man many considered to be the most radical of Trump’s Cabinet appointments. The minority leader’s gambit turned out to be a futile attempt to push back the inevitable. It also had an unfortunate repercussion. Slotkin and others in her freshman class—who had been scheduled to give their traditional coming-out speeches to the full Senate—would now have to do so to an empty chamber, well past midnight.

The political theater accomplished little. Vought would be confirmed the next day. But Slotkin, nonetheless, would have her moment. At 6 a.m. she walked to the podium and, in a bright red blazer and matching blouse, spoke to a hall of ghosts. “What has disturbed me the most in my first month here,” she said, “is the willingness of the people in this city and in this body to roll over as the Constitution, our most sacred document, is pushed aside…. To me, the only thing that matters is that any administration uphold the Constitution, because if not, what are we? What are we doing here?”

It would become a theme: If you’re not going to exercise your authority, she said—to block nominees you believe to be unworthy of Cabinet positions; to assert legislative roles typically denied the executive branch; to exercise the constitutionally sanctioned power of the purse—then “what is the point of being an elected person”?

On and on it went, this quadrennial ritual. That week, Slotkin also questioned Kristi Noem, whose nomination for homeland security chief the senator finally signed off on. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, Slotkin, who’d spent her career in intelligence, worked vigorously to oppose Gabbard for DNI. There again was Slotkin on the Senate floor after midnight, slamming Gabbard for her baffling pronouncements on Russia and her 2017 meeting with Syria’s Assad. Said the senator: “More egregious than anything, she has shown a repeated preference for our adversaries over the intelligence community in the United States of America.”

None of it would matter. All were confirmed. All would join the government payroll. And the job slashing, the norm busting, and the constitutionally questionable maneuvers would commence in earnest. One of Hegseth’s first actions, for instance, as the new secretary of defense, was to send US troops to the southern border.

Then, on February 7, Slotkin received an alert. That day, the news broke that the president had fired the director of the National Archives, Colleen Shogan, the woman who, three months before, had welcomed Slotkin to explore some of the nation’s Rosetta Stones. The reasons behind the dismissal were all too clear. Even though she had not been at the helm in 2021 or 2022—when representatives from the archive, in the interests of national security, had requested that Trump return classified documents he had kept at Mar-a-Lago—Shogan would take the fall.

Slotkin is well aware that she has been elected to the Senate at a moment when every facet of her skill set will be brought to bear on maintaining America’s 249-year-old experiment in democracy. In January, she had two separate encounters at the Capitol that reminded her of the bigger picture: the need to move forward and the unexpected curves of chance and destiny. At one point she unexpectedly ran into Elise Stefanik. And in the spirit of new beginnings, the two shook hands, congratulating each other warmly on their recent committee appointments.

The second meeting was even more telling. En route to her Senate confirmation, Slotkin was riding the Capitol subway, which transports legislators between the Capitol and congressional office buildings. She carried a book-bound facsimile of the Torah—the five books of Moses—which had been signed by rabbis from across the state of Michigan. Suddenly, a young Capitol Police officer boarded the car. She looked up and saw his name tag: Slotkin. “Slotkin?” she said, “That’s my name.” “I know, Senator,” he replied. As they rode along, they began to exchange family stories and quickly discovered that their great-grandfathers had been brothers. Upon arriving at the ceremony, she joined her father, Curt, now in and out of a wheelchair. When she told him about the encounter, he wept. A while later, the senator posted a picture of her and the officer on Instagram with the caption: “Sometimes, amazing coincidences happen that are hard to fathom.”

And, sometimes, history summons those who’ve come to serve.