Few White House events have earned the kind of instantinfamy that greeted Friday’s disastrous meeting between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. And few lines have been as revealing as the one Trump uttered as a benediction, of sorts, to the spectacle: “This is going to be great television.”
The boast was, as the line goes, shocking but not surprising. Trump’s deference to television—and the celebrity he has gained from it—are core elements of his brand, his biography, his mythology; his connection to the medium is so widely recognized that commentators were calling him the “First True Reality TV President” before his first term had begun. And he earned the epithet. Trump “cast” key roles in his administration based on candidates’ ability to “look the part.” He announced his choices to fill Supreme Court vacancies as if he were the Bachelor, offering a lifetime appointment as his final rose. He churned out ever more dramatic episodes of The Real White House of Donald Trump, and each was a ratings bonanza: Few things make for appointment viewing like a show whose arcs bend the lives of its audience.
“The reality–TVpresidency,” in that way, was accurate. But the characterization was also woefully premature. Reality TV, at its core, is a genre of total immunity. Its many contradictions (it is at once fact and fiction, anthropology and escapism, “unscripted” and highly produced) free it from the standards that might constrain other shows. Is it real? is a foolish thing to ask about a genre premised on a shrug, in which the foolishness is part of the appeal. Reality shows wink. They tease. They make everything delightfully suspect. Plausible deniability, in the hands of skilled producers, can be spun into TV gold.
But the ambiguities that make reality so engrossing as a mode of entertainment make it hazardous as a mode of politics. Trump, in his meeting with Zelensky, was not merely performing “reality” as a show. He was wielding it as a weapon, planting a new flag as he burned another.
The spectacle that resulted was a striking exception (to history, to world stability, to decency). Trump was abandoning an ally and bullying him in the process; he was rejecting frameworks that distinguished America’s friends from its enemies. The meeting declared the president’s—and thus everyone else’s—new reality: Trump’s earlier show was mere prologue. This is Trump’s reality-TV presidency. The new season will be darker, grimmer, and filled with ever more dizzying plot twists. It demands to be watched not as entertainment but as an omen.
Trump’s 2016 campaign, the rumor went, was a bid to control the news by becoming the news: He had hoped to convert his growing political following into an audience for a cable-TV empire. When he won the election, he adjusted course. Like an insult comic who had wandered onto the wrong set, the new president ad-libbed his way through the political drama. The improv explains, in part, why Trump focused so much on appearances while “casting” his Cabinet, and why he bragged about the “ratings” his COVID-related press conferences earned him: TV was the language he knew. Even The Apprentice, the series that had bolstered his image by claiming to show him as he was, had helped him hone his skills as a performer: The Donald Trump of the show was a character acted out by Donald Trump.
He treated the presidency, similarly, as a part to be played. And he prepared for the role with the help of TV—in particular, the channel that had served him so well. The “reality-TV presidency” was also, by conventional wisdom and in practice, the Fox News presidency. The Fox star Sean Hannity effectively operated as Trump’s “shadow press secretary” in his first term; Tucker Carlson, texts would later reveal, functioned as Trump’s mouthpiece. Many days, the president spent hours watching TV news, his staffers said, and Fox in particular. He was so influenced by the viewing that many claims he made in the afternoons could be traced directly—and verbatim—to claims the network had made in the mornings.
Through all of that, though, a fundamental distinction remained: The president was here; Fox was there. Yes, a revolving door spun between Fox’s green room and Trump’s White House. But revolving doors are necessary only when walls stand between the inner space and the outside world. Those walls, in Trump’s first term, remained largely intact. Trump watched the news and tried to influence it; he did not try to stage-manage and wholly subsume it.
Performance itself, in retrospect, served as one more democratic guardrail: Trump winged some lines and ignored many others, but he operated mostly according to an old set of scripts that worked as a check on executive power. He demeaned the role, yes—he twisted and tested it—but he performed the presidency and, in that most basic of ways, preserved it. He paid the role the smallest bit of courtesy by acknowledging it as a role in the first place, scripted and edited and honed over time—a single part meant to be interpreted by many actors.
Trump proved his acceptance of the performance, in fact, by chafing against its scripts. The lawyers who constrained him, the generals who restrained him, the reporters who questioned him, the understudy who threatened him—the assorted producers and directors and designers and actors who had their own roles to play in the show—each, Trump fumed, dimmed his limelight. That first term, as a consequence, found him working as both the government’s headliner and its fiercest critic. He panned the whole thing for its complicated plots and its sprawling cast and, most of all, its failure to be a one-man show.
This was another reason Trump’s first season got the ratings it did. Each of his outbursts was also a cliffhanger, with democracy in the balance. But each, too, was a reminder that the imperiled government, for all its backsliding, had not yet succumbed to the abyss. Even as Trump railed against his castmates, he grudgingly accepted their right to share the stage. Even when he went off-book—even when he missed his marks and ignored his cues—he acknowledged that he was part of a broader production.
Only at the end of his first term did Trump try to torch the stage and shred the scripts. And only at the start of his second has he embraced the full license that comes when “reality” collides with democracy.
As Trump berated Zelensky under the guise of good TV, he also embraced the political force of reality TV. He was converting the genre’s core features—the refusal to distinguish between truth and lies, the ambiguities that verge into nihilism—into an exercise of unchecked power. Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance used the occasion to repeat misinformation so egregiously wrong that it mocked the very notion of “information.” Vance accused Zelensky of being “disrespectful,” of coming into the Oval Office and trying “to litigate this in front of the American media.” (It was the White House, of course, that had turned a meeting that would typically be conducted in a closed-door session into a media event.)
Reality affords total immunity in part because it creates environments that cannot be penetrated by the standards of the outer world. The Apprentice—a spin on Survivor, essentially, set in the kill-or-be-killed world of the corporate jungle—made no sense in practical terms; it reflected the executive-hiring process about as well as Survivor reflected bushcraft. But Does it make sense? is roughly as relevant to a reality show as Is it real? In the worlds established by reality TV, nothing makes sense, and everything does. Reality shows establish, and then are beholden to, their own rules. They are stridently insular. They are thoroughly self-rationalizing. That is the fun—and the danger. They will do whatever they want, because they can.
Trump brought that logic to his meeting with Zelensky—and the permissions of The Apprentice to the White House. Here was the Oval Office, remade as his “boardroom”; here were the confrontations that brought climactic closure to each episode, reconfigured as diplomacy. Here was Trump, the all-powerful executive, bringing his signature glare to the world stage and his signature phrase to a nation: You’re fired, he basically told Ukraine, as he posed and vamped.
The global viewership assured by the cameras in the room was complemented by a studio audience: members of the media who had been selected to join the show. Their presence was the fruit of a claim Trump had made earlier in the week, when his White House announced that it would be determining the makeup of the press pool that covers the president. The announcement, one of many recent White House attackson press freedom, wrested power from the independent organization of journalists that had overseen presidential reporting for more than a century. In the process, it destroyed a standard meant to ensure that the White House receives independent press coverage—and, with it, one more democratic guardrail. (“We’re going to be now calling the shots,” Trump said of the move.) The change also helped explain why, after witnessing a meeting that truly deserved to be called “historic”—one that concerned the future of Ukraine, the future of NATO, the ambitions of Russia, and the possibility of World War III—one member of the press gaggle chose to meet the moment by asking about Zelensky’s outfit.
In a coup, you first go for the media: You take over the radio stations, the TV channels, the papers. From there, you can do nearly everything else. You can steadily replace the journalists who would question you with ones who will do your will. You can replace the officials who might question you with ones who will serve you. You can create a world in which the president of Ukraine is to be blamed for the invasion of his own country; in which Zelensky, not Vladimir Putin, is the dictator; in which Ukraine, not Russia, is the villain; in which you are a president who operates like a king. You can air the new “realities” so relentlessly that, before long, they can seem like the only reality there is.
Power grabs, when made by those who already have power, can be harder to detect. They can occur gradually, bureaucratically, cut by cut and claim by claim—and they can look, from the outside, innocent, ordinary, and unscripted. The meager distance that once remained between Fox News and the White House has been, in Trump’s second term, obviated; the president has now brought the full weight of “reality” to bear on his relationship with the network. Why watch Fox as a viewer, painstakingly translating the televised content to reality, when you can cut out the middleman and simply integrate TV into the daily operations of your administration? Why allow a division between the Fourth Estate and the First when you can simply incorporate the one into the other?
By one recent count, Trump has appointed 21 Fox News personalities to his staff—many, like Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, at the highest levels of his administration. The president announced the latest addition to his cast last week (around the time he announced that “White House correspondent” would effectively mean, for his presidency, “White House loyalist”): He appointedDan Bongino—Fox contributor, radio host, purveyor of conspiracy theories, partisan in good standing—to serve not in a media role in the White House but as the deputy director of the FBI.
Bongino, like many of his fellow appointees, is qualified for his new role mostly to the extent that “personality” is a job description. But in a politics governed by “reality,” qualification will be whatever the producers claim it to be. Loyalty can be its own line in the résumé. And Bongino quickly proved his worthiness within the standards of the show: On the same day that Zelensky visited the Oval Office, the White House announced that the FBI, with Bongino installed in its top ranks, was in the process of returning a cache of documents that the Justice Department had previously held as evidence while it investigated Trump’s potential mishandling of classified information.
This was “justice,” in the insular world of Trump’s show. It corrected a “hoax,” as Trump’s lawyer called the investigation, that had put the president in legal jeopardy. In the reality that has no scare quotes, though, the reclamation of evidence might also look like impunity. It might look like the power afforded to Trump when the Supreme Court—three of the nine justices owing their spots on the bench to one Bachelor and his final rose—made his broad immunity a matter of law and judicial precedent. In the context of history, this is an emergency. In the context of the show, however, it is simply one more twist in the story. Government by “reality,” like the TV genre, has no obligation to be factual. It has no obligation to be moral. It has no obligation to be anything at all. Wisdom, cruelty, accountability, democracy—in the bleak politics of “reality,” these things no longer exist. They can’t exist. Only one thing matters, as the show goes on: Is it great television?
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American politicians of both parties have always known that giving the response to a presidential address is one of the worst jobs in Washington. Presidents have the gravitas and grandeur of a joint session in the House chamber; the respondent gets a few minutes of video filmed in a studio or in front of a fake fireplace somewhere. If the president’s speech was good, a response can seem churlish or anticlimactic. If the president’s speech was poor or faltering, the opposition can only pile on for a few minutes.
So pity Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, who got handed the task of a response to Donald Trump’s two-hour carnival of lies and stunts. Slotkin gave a good, normal speech in which she laid out some of her party’s issues with Trump on the economy and national security.
It was so normal, in fact, that it was exactly the wrong speech to give.
But first, it’s important to note that it was a good speech. Slotkin wisely decided to forgo any stagey settings, appearing in front of neatly placed flags instead of in her office or a kitchen. She gave a shout-out to her home state while managing to avoid folksy familiarity or posturing. She also stayed away from wonkery, speaking in the kind of clear language people use in daily conversation. (Okay, there was some thudding language about investment and “jobs of the future,” but these are minor speechwriting offenses.)
And to her credit, Slotkin reminded people that Elon Musk is an unaccountable über-bureaucrat leading a “gang of 20-year-olds” who are rummaging through the personal data of millions of Americans. As a senator from a state bordering Canada, she asked if Americans are comfortable kicking our sister nation in the teeth.
So what’s not to like? Slotkin—like so many in her party lately—failed to convey any sense of real urgency or alarm. Her speech could have been given in Trump’s first term, perhaps in 2017 or 2018, but we are no longer in that moment. The president’s address was so extreme, so full of bizarre claims and ideas, exaggerations and distortions and lies, that it should have called his fitness to serve into question. He preened about a Cabinet that includes some of the strangest, and least qualified, members in American history. Although his speech went exceptionally long, he said almost nothing of substance, and the few plans he put forward were mostly applause bait for his Republican sycophants in the room and his base at home.
It’s easy for me to sit in my living room in Rhode Island and suggest what others should say. But in her response, Slotkin failed to capture the hallucinatory nature of our national politics. As a former Republican, I nodded when Slotkin said that Ronald Reagan would be rolling in his grave at what Slotkin called the “spectacle” of last week’s Oval Office attack on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. But is that really the message of a fighting opposition? Is it an effective rallying cry either to older voters or to a new generation to say, in effect, that Reagan—even now a polarizing figure—would have hated Trump? (Of course he would have.) Isn’t the threat facing America far greater than that?
Slotkin’s best moment was when she pleaded with people to do more than be mere observers of politics, and said that doomscrolling on phones isn’t the same thing as genuine political engagement. And she issued her own Reaganesque call to remember that America is not just “a patch of land between two oceans,” that America is great because of its ideals. But her admonition to her fellow citizens not to fool themselves about the fragility of democracy, while admirable, was strangely detached from a specific attack on the source of that menace.
Did Americans vote for Kash Patel to lead the FBI, or Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to run the Department of Health and Human Services, or Pete Hegseth to be secretary of defense? Trump took time to recognize and praise all three of those men in his speech. So why not ask that question—directly and without needless throat-clearing about the importance and necessity of change?
Slotkin’s response reflected the fractured approach of the Democrats to Trump in general. Some of them refused to attend tonight’s address, some of them held up little Ping-Pong paddles with messages on them (a silly idea that looked even worse in its execution), and others meandered out. One, Representative Al Green of Texas, got himself thrown out within the first minutes, a stunt that merely gave Speaker Mike Johnson a chance to look strong and decisive, if only for a moment.
I’m not a fan of performative protest, and initially I thought the Democrats who chose to attend the address made the right call. But when Trump referred to Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts as “Pocahontas,” they could have left en bloc, declaring once they were outside that they would take no part in any further demeaning of the House chamber—or, for that matter, of American democracy. Instead, they sat there and took it, their opposition to Trump a kind of hodgepodge of rage, bemusement, boredom, and irritation.
Slotkin’s address suffered from the same half-heartedness that has seized the Democrats since last November. Her response, and the behavior of the Democrats in general, showed that they still fear being a full-throated opposition party, because they believe that they will alienate voters who will somehow be offended at them for taking a stand against Trump’s schemes.
Slotkin is a centrist—as she noted, she won in areas that also voted for Trump—and her victory in Michigan proved that centrism can be a powerful anchor against extremists. But centrism is not the same as meekness. America does not need a “resistance,” or stale slogans, or people putting those slogans on little paddles. It needs an opposition party that boldly defends the nation’s virtues, the rule of law, and the rights of its people.
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Eight years ago, President Donald Trump got generally good reviews for his first speech to a joint session of Congress. Back then, it would have seemed both incredible and churlish to suggest that the man who delivered that relatively conciliatory, relatively presidential speech might within four years try to overturn an election by violence.
But that’s what happened. And that attempt remains the single most important fact about Trump’s first term as president.
Eight years later, not even Trump’s staunchest partisans would describe his 2025 address as conciliatory. He mocked, he insulted, he called names, he appealed only to a MAGA base that does not add up to even half the electorate. But in 2025, the big question hanging over the nation’s head is not one about oratory, but about democracy. In 2017, Americans did not yet know how far Trump might go. Now they do. They only flinch from believing it.
Second-term Trump has opened his administration with a round of actions likely to prove drastically unpopular: tariffs that raise prices; budget cuts that will reduce services for veterans, at national parks, for anyone who depends on weather services. Prices are rising, measles is spreading, airplanes are falling out of the sky. His effective co-president and chief policy maker, Elon Musk, is widely distrusted and disliked. Trump’s repeated claims of massive fraud within Social Security strongly suggest that he’s got something big and radical in mind for the most popular program in American life.
Trump knows he’s steering into political trouble. He alluded to “disruptions” ahead because of his policies. His party holds the narrowest of margins in the House of Representatives. Yet he’s governing without the slightest concession to majority opinion, even to a majority sense of decency. He talks of the Democrats as remorseless enemies. At the same time, he is making political choices that would normally seem certain to deliver those enemies a big majority in the House after the midterms. Is he delusional? Crazy reckless? Or is this a signal that the man who tried to overturn the election of 2020 has some scheme in mind for the 2026 midterms?
Maybe Trump has turned over a new leaf. There was, however, a tell in this speech that Trump’s attitude to other people’s consent remains as contemptuous as ever.
In his joint-session speech, Trump returned to his fancy of annexing Greenland to the United States. He read aloud from the teleprompter some perfunctory language about respecting Greenlanders’ right to decide their own future. But when he came to the end of the section, he apparently ad-libbed a thought of his own: “We’ll get it one way or another.” That’s not the language of a man who has learned his lesson about respecting democratic choice.
In the second term, unlike the first, Trump has swiftly and methodically installed do-anything loyalists at the FBI, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Defense. Given Trump’s 2021 record, that seems something to worry about now.
Had Trump lost the 2024 election, he would right now be facing sentencing for his criminal convictions in the state of New York. He would be facing criminal and civil trials in other states. He was rescued from legal troubles by political success. Now Trump’s acting in ways that seem certain to throw power away in the next round of elections—if those elections proceed as usual. If they are free and fair. If every legal voter is allowed to participate. If every legal vote is counted, whether cast in person or by mail. Those did not use to be hazardous “if”s. But they may be hazardous in 2026.
Trump is keenly alert to his legal danger, deeply committed to keeping power by any means necessary. He also seems to be sleepwalking toward a stinging political loss that will expose him to all kinds of personal risk. He’s not trying to expand his coalition, to win any votes he does not already have. So what is his plan to preserve his immunity and his impunity? Trump’s behavior in 2021 showed that there were no limits to what he would do to keep power. What will 2026 show?
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The most striking images from Donald Trump’s second inauguration were not of the president himself. Rather, they featured the array of tech billionaires who occupied some of the best seats in the crowded Capitol rotunda. There was X’s Elon Musk, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Apple’s Tim Cook, and Google’s Sundar Pichai—all sitting alongside one another, their proximity to Trump sending a decidedly unsubtle message about the new power structure in America. The scene set up the possibility of “a new kind of American oligarchy,” my colleagues Michael Scherer and Ashley Parker wrote in The Atlantic that afternoon. Trump’s empowerment of Musk, the world’s richest man, to rampage through the federal bureaucracy in the weeks since has only deepened the sense that in America right now, a wealthy few are governing the many.
Since its earliest editions, The Atlantic has been preoccupied with the specter of oligarchy. The word appeared in this magazine’s endorsement of Abraham Lincoln in 1860—its only presidential recommendation for more than a century—when James Russell Lowell, The Atlantic’s first editor, wrote: “Theoretically, at least, to give democracy any standing-ground for an argument with despotism or oligarchy, a majority of the men composing it should be statesmen and thinkers.” Two years later, in the midst of the Civil War, Ralph Waldo Emerson contrasted America’s “two states of civilization”—the free, “democratical” North and the South, “a lower state, in which the old military tenure of prisoners or slaves, and of power and land in a few hands, makes an oligarchy.”
For decades thereafter, The Atlantic’s writers occasionally referred to the postwar southern political and economic hierarchy—wealthy, white landowners who dominated a disenfranchised Black population—as an oligarchy. In the early-20th-century trust-busting era of Theodore Roosevelt, oligarchy became a byword for the threat of corporate power. “The corporation has subverted law and honesty between individuals,” the writer Robert R. Reed warned in 1909. “It can and will, if unrestrained, subvert the basic ideal of American government, the happiness and welfare of unborn generations of American people.”
A generation later, Arthur E. Morgan, the first chairman of Tennessee Valley Authority under Franklin D. Roosevelt, approached the idea of American oligarchy with a slightly more open mind. Writing in 1934, he noted that some institutions that Americans held in the highest regard were hardly democracies. Henry Ford, then the revered titan of the automobile industry, was both an “economic dictator” and a “popular hero.” Harvard University, governed by a “selfperpetuating” board of wealthy trustees, was essentially an oligarchy. “The American people has sized up this situation and is not worried about political theories,” Morgan wrote. “It tends to give its loyalty to the institution which best serves the public good, whether it be controlled by a democracy or by an oligarchy.”
Only around the turn of this century, as economic inequality increased to the point of crisis, did warnings about the dangers of an American oligarchy reemerge in these pages. Some appear quite prescient. A 1990 cover story profiling the economist Lester Thurow described a speech he addressed to members of the Washington, D.C., “establishment,” warning that they risked becoming an oligarchy of greedy profiteers that could bring economic ruin to America. Surveying the global landscape in 1997, Robert D. Kaplan wrote that “democracy in the United States is at greater risk than ever before … Many future regimes, ours especially, could resemble the oligarchies of ancient Athens and Sparta more than they do the current government in Washington.”
Perhaps Thurow was presaging the financial collapse of 2008, which helped spawn a revival of anti-government populism that propelled Trump and his wealthy allies to power. And maybe Kaplan, writing in the relatively halcyon period of 1990s economic expansion, had people like Musk and his fellow tech tycoons in mind when he warned that the accumulated concentration of wealth and the “productive anarchy” of the technological revolution would need to be supervised—“or else there will be no justice for anyone.”
Right around the time that Donald Trump was arriving at the U.S. Capitol to address a joint session of Congress—the longest such speech, it would turn out, in the history of the presidency—Elissa Slotkin, the newly elected Michigan senator tasked with delivering the Democratic Party’s rebuttal, was telling me all the things she wouldn’t be talking about.
“You’ve gotta say this! You’ve gotta say that!” Slotkin said, mimicking the outside voices that began bombarding her office moments after her selection was announced last week. “I’m not gonna make my speech a Christmas tree of every single issue of the Democratic Party,” the senator added, shaking her head, “because that’s what helped get us in this position in the first place.”
I have known Slotkin since 2018, when she first ran for Congress as an ex-CIA officer attempting to flip a safe Republican seat in southeast Michigan. Having covered her rise in the years since—including embedding with her operation during the 2020 campaign—I knew that she possessed fundamental, long-festering concerns about the Democratic Party’s brand. Slotkin feared that, to the extent that Democrats stood for anything in the eyes of the electorate, it was a blur of abstract, ideologically charged activism that was hopelessly detached from kitchen-table concerns.
Last November, even as she won her own race for Michigan’s open Senate seat, Slotkin’s worst-case scenario came to pass. Trump reclaimed the White House—this time with wholly subservient Republican majorities in Congress—and Democrats were heading deep into a cold, dark political wilderness. A fight over the future of the party was imminent; when Slotkin, barely six weeks on the job, was chosen to deliver the Democratic response to Trump’s prime-time address, it seemed likely that the first shots would soon be fired. This is how I came to be chatting with Slotkin yesterday, in the hours before the biggest moment of her political career.
A week earlier, when she was summoned to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s office, Slotkin wondered whether she was in trouble. She is one of several freshmen in the Democratic caucus who came over from the House, where intra-party politics are a comparative blood sport, and she thought maybe she’d already ruffled some feathers. If she had, Schumer approved: He wanted Slotkin to speak for the party in prime time. She recalls feeling stunned, then honored, and finally somewhat mortified. “It’s typically thought of,” she told me, “as a cursed speech.” Slotkin asked for the day to think it over before ultimately accepting Schumer’s offer.
Escaping quickly thereafter to her family’s farm in Holly, Michigan, the senator holed up with a few trusted staffers to begin preparations. Two decisions needed to be made: substance and setting. Slotkin had no shortage of metaphor-rich locations from which she could stage the event: her farm, representing everyman roots; nearby Detroit, with its diversity and manufacturing iconography; the Canadian border, to underscore the chaos being unleashed by Trump’s new tariffs. But the senator never truly entertained any of those possibilities. To her, the questions of substance and setting were one and the same. Slotkin wanted to showcase a message that was built to do one thing—win tough elections—and that meant going to a place where she’d done just that.
Driving the main drag of Wyandotte, Michigan (population: 24,057), yesterday afternoon, I couldn’t help but notice the bait shops and dive bars and white dudes with tattoos on their neck. This place would appear, to the typical Democratic consultant parachuting into its downtown, like a lost cause. One of several manufacturing villages clustered along the Detroit River just south of the city, Wyandotte is the kind of place—working class, culturally conservative, racially homogenous—that has turned new shades of red in the Trump era. And yet, this past November, both Trump and Slotkin won here: Each of the candidates carried seven of the city’s 10 precincts, a rare example of ticket splitting in one of the nation’s premier battleground states.
Slotkin’s formula has never been a secret. Her campaign for Senate last year—essentially a scaled-up version of her three heavily contested and tactically celebrated campaigns for the House—was built around one organizing theme: the middle class. Everything she talks about, be it health-care costs or the January 6 insurrection, comes back to the economic security of everyday Americans. Slotkin argues that the surest way to heal the country—to defuse identitarian struggles, pacify the culture wars, uncoil our hypertense politics—is by restoring the confidence of working families. When people feel assured of their financial welfare and of their children’s future, she insists, they become far less receptive to the type of strongman demagoguery that thrives on scapegoats and feasts on anxiety.
This approach sets Slotkin apart from many of her fellow Democrats, though the difference is better measured by degree than kind. She is quite familiar—as a woman, as a Jew, as the daughter of a woman who came out late in life as a lesbian—with the plight of certain constituencies within her party’s coalition. It’s simply a matter of emphasis: Slotkin sees electoral success as the path to addressing America’s injustices, not the other way around.
This is what brought her to a sleepy event space in Wyandotte (the owners, fearing political retaliation, requested that I not reveal the name of the business). It’s also what brought Slotkin to reject all of the suggestions she received about her speech: that she should use it to take up the cause of USAID workers, of undocumented immigrants, of the transgender community, of the environment, of the Education Department, and so on. The problem isn’t with any of these particular causes, she said; the problem is that everyone seemed focused more on the people she might name in her remarks and less on the people who would be at home listening to them.
“There are a lot of people, including in this town, who will never scream on the internet, who will never go to a rally, who will never get involved in partisan politics, but just want their government to run,” Slotkin said. “I’m speaking to them—not to just the hardcore base of the party. And if they wanted someone to speak to the hardcore base of the party, they picked the wrong gal.”
There would be no performative shout-outs, no box-checking patronage. As the envoy for a party that has long operated as a syndicate of identity-based advocacy groups, Slotkin wanted to try something different. Charged with countering 100 minutes of Trump’s trademark fanfaronade, the senator aimed to use the fewest words possible to speak to the largest number of Americans she could. Slotkin would talk, for just 10 minutes, about bringing prices down, holding American values up, and remaining civically engaged.
None of this would seem a revolutionary approach to rhetoric. Still, it was fraught with risk all the same: Democrats “have been on their heels since the election,” Slotkin told me, and the party faithful have been agitating since January 20 for someone, anyone, to stand up to Trump. The announcement of Slotkin had already been met with grumbling from progressives online; anything short of oratorical firebolts would confirm the complacent, feckless approach of the D.C. governing class.
Slotkin viewed the stakes somewhat differently: This speech could, at least symbolically, commence a new chapter of Democratic Party opposition to a president whose success is inextricable from the tone-deaf ineptitude of Democratic Party opposition. If her team’s resistance to Trump’s first term was marked by hysteria and hashtags—all the land acknowledgments and pronoun policing and intersectionality initiatives—Slotkin saw last night the opportunity to set a different tone.
Naturally, not everyone was thrilled with what they heard. “Slotkin’s address suffered from the same half-heartedness that has seized the Democrats since last November,” my colleague Tom Nichols wrote in The Atlantic, capturing some of the criticism online. “Her response, and the behavior of the Democrats in general, showed that they still fear being a full-throated opposition party, because they believe that they will alienate voters who will somehow be offended at them for taking a stand against Trump’s schemes.”
I suspect that Slotkin might cringe at being lumped in with “Democrats in general.” In truth, I’ve noticed a certain unease she feels with her partisan identity. She struggles to mask her contempt for far-left organizations; she has little patience for colleagues who, she once told me, run Very Online campaigns in safely blue districts that blind them to the reality of what it takes to earn a ticket split from Republicans.
Watching yesterday evening as she rehearsed in front of staffers, I noticed that only once did she identify herself as a Democrat—in the final line of the speech. As we spoke a few minutes later, in a cramped corridor just beyond the set, I asked whether that was intentional.
“I think, at least in this part of the world, there’s real skepticism about Democrats. That they’re weak—” she paused, perhaps noticing her usage of the third-person plural.
Slotkin continued: “That we’re too careful … That we’re …” She trailed off.
“Weird?” I asked.
“Weird,” Slotkin confirmed. She rolled her eyes. “Whatever. I’m just trying to be the opposite of that. You know, my campaign motto was ‘Team Normal.’ And I think that’s still what I’m trying to do. And I think that that represents a bigger part of the country than people actually know.”
The president’s speech would not begin for nearly an hour, but already I could detect a certain angst in Slotkin’s voice. It had nothing to do with her own speech; she had run through it half a dozen times that day, pausing and tinkering and restarting until she knew that it was fully cooked. Instead, like a family member preemptively contrite for what their relatives might say or do at the Thanksgiving table, Slotkin betrayed an apprehension about how her fellow Democrats might respond to Trump.
As it turned out, she was right to worry. Between all the awkward and impotent demonstrations—Representative Al Green of Texas angrily waving his cane at the president; some pink-clad lawmakers protesting silently with popsicle-stick signs, others staging a disordered walkout during the speech—verdicts were rendered about the party’s pitiable state before its messenger could even say her piece.
Not that Slotkin paid that verdict much mind. After her speech, the senator and her team were headed down the street to a Teamster bar, and Slotkin told me the highest praise they hoped to hear from the owner and his patrons was: “That sounded pretty normal.”
Perceptions of her party were never going to shift in one night. Slotkin came into yesterday accepting, if not explicitly addressing, the realities of the brutal two-front war in which she is now a high-profile combatant: opposing Trump’s executive and legislative blitzkrieg while simultaneously battling with other Democrats who have their own visions for returning the party to power.
Slotkin insists that she isn’t “one of the 100 people” preparing to seek the Democratic Party’s nomination for president in 2028. She was chosen to speak last night for a more compelling reason: She wins, time after time, in places where other members of her party simply cannot. If they want to model her success at the ballot box, Slotkin told me, they should stop ignoring half the country.
“It doesn’t win elections to just speak to the base of the party,” Slotkin said. “If it did, Kamala Harris would be president.”
