Donald Trump is borrowing a strategy from authoritarian regimes to intimidate potential critics and discourage them from speaking out, according to a senator under investigation by his administration.
Elissa Slotkin, a Democrat from Michigan, faces questioning after she organised and appeared in a video with other Democrats imploring military service members to refuse “illegal orders”. Fellow senator Mark Kelly and three Democrats from the House of Representatives are also being investigated.
To Slotkin, a former analyst with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), it is a deliberate effort to chill free speech that rhymes with her experience of dictatorships around the world.
“They’re now using a well-worn playbook that employs physical intimidation and legal intimidation to get, A, you to shut up, and B, for other people thinking of criticising the president on such issues to be dissuaded from doing so,” she told the Guardian in a phone interview.
“It’s absolutely a strategy well used in other countries and other authoritarian governments. As a CIA officer I’ve served in places like this, I’ve studied places like this my entire life, and Trump is sadly using that playbook in the United States right now.”
Now 49, Slotkin completed three tours in Iraq with the US military before moving into national security roles at the Pentagon and White House under presidents George W Bush and Barack Obama. In 2018 she turned to electoral politics, winning a long-held Republican seat in Michigan and helping Democrats reclaim control of the House.
She secured re-election in 2020 and 2022, campaigning on issues such as access to affordable healthcare and efforts to bring manufacturing back to her home state. Her ascent continued in 2024 when she won an open Senate seat despite Trump carrying Michigan in the presidential election. Last year she delivered the Democrats’ rebuttal to Trump’s joint congressional address.
Then in November she was among six congressional Democrats, all with military or intelligence backgrounds, who in a 90-second video cited the Uniform Code of Military Justice and said no one has to carry out orders that violate the law or constitution. Trump branded the video message “treasonous” and amplified a social media post suggesting that the six Democrats be hanged.
Defence secretary Pete Hegseth is attempting to retroactively demote Kelly, a former navy pilot and astronaut, from his retired rank of captain. The Arizona senator is suing Hegseth to block those proceedings, calling them an unconstitutional act of retribution. Meanwhile US attorney Jeanine Pirro, the justice department’s chief prosecutor in Washington, has requested an interview with Slotkin.
Does she have any regrets? “Not at all. We issued that video and I pulled it together because of the sheer number of folks in uniform who were reaching out to us privately with questions, concerns, fears about things that they were being asked to do either in Southcom area – related to the Caribbean strikes – or national guard on our streets in the United States. They were raising those concerns to us directly and so we did that video for a reason.”
She added: “Actually, the president’s completely over-the-top response is exactly why we felt the need to issue that kind of a video. He literally threatened us with investigation, arrest and death and he did it over a dozen times. That is the president of the United States calling for someone to have corporal punishment and that kind of leader in that seat is exactly why we felt the need to send a message to the troops.”
Slotkin brings the language of national security to the home front. Last year she outlined an “economic war plan” to rescue the middle class. More recently she introduced a Senate bill that requires the president to declare a national housing emergency, slash regulations and invoke the Defense Production Act to build 4m homes.
She explained: “While we’re all fighting and debating in Washington about things like Greenland or Venezuela, the average American is desperate to have some sort of relief on the cost of living and the American dream writ large. There’s nothing more fundamental to Americans living the American dream than being able to buy your first home.”
Home prices have risen nearly 55% since 2020. Rents are up more than 30% across the country. The average first time home buyer is 40 years old; for Slotkin’s parents’ generation, it was 28. She said: “The Trump administration should be using the full weight of big, bold federal action to help deal with our fundamental problem, which is a supply problem. We do not have enough housing, particularly single-family middle-class housing.
“We’re down 4m units of housing for various reasons, but especially after Covid. The root of that problem is that it’s too expensive and too onerous because of regulation to quickly build a lot of single-family homes. That’s the problem when you talk to the builders, the developers, the folks who want to be building homes but just aren’t – or they’re only building McMansions.”
Slotkin’s emergency would freeze laws, rules or regulations that put a burden on housing development; reward communities who show they are pro-growth and stripping down regulations with federal dollars; and use the Defense Production Act to direct domestic industries to produce essential materials – such as lumber, steel and manufactured housing – and services.
Housing, a cornerstone of Zohran Mamdani’s successful mayoral campaign in New York, is suddenly a hot topic. Trump recently announced that he is taking steps to stop large institutional investors buying more single-family homes. He also proposed that the federal government, through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, should buy $200bn in mortgage bonds to make houses more affordable.
Meanwhile Chuck Schumer, the Democratic minority leader, unveiled a plan that would provide rental relief for tenants in need; measures such as down payment assistance lowering the cost of mortgage insurance to boost home ownership; a crackdown on predatory companies; and a nationwide mission to build more houses.
Slotkin applauds ideas such as preventing private equity companies buying up housing but notes that only 3% of homes fits that category. The underlying problem, she argues, goes beyond switching house ownership to the sheer number available.
“I’m not against what President Trump or Chuck Schumer are proposing – it’s just not big enough, it’s not bold enough. The president has had a year to declare emergencies on everything but why can’t he do it on housing? That to me is a real whiff. A year into the Trump administration, they’ve done literally zero on this problem.”
The senator continued: “The president ran on lowering your costs and preserving the American dream and he’s done extremely small amounts of work on this in the past year. He’s actually become a foreign policy president, as opposed to a domestic policy president.”
In his first year in office, Slotkin noted, Trump has ordered military operations in nine places – seven countries and two oceans – more than any president in history. “He ran against the very idea of being engaged abroad. He’s had precious little time on the domestic issues that most Americans feel are existential.”
Second term presidents often pivot the world stage to build their legacy but Trump has gone to extremes this month, bombing Venezuela and capturing its leader, Nicolás Maduro, then mulling strikes on Iran and threatening to seize Greenland by force despite warnings that Nato would unravel.
Slotkin said: “As someone who worked alongside our Nato partners my entire career, I’m embarrassed to take people’s phone calls. It is beyond the pale that we have the United States of America talking about using military action in a fellow Nato country.
“This president decided that domestic issues he ran on were going to be too difficult to change and tackle and so what makes him feel like a man and feel tough and show that he’s the president of the United States is by being commander-in-chief of the armed forces and taking military action in all these countries and putting troops and federal law enforcement on our city streets.”
Democrats including Mamdani gained traction in last November’s elections by focusing on pocket book issues. Many now regard affordability as a better blueprint for success in the midterms than sounding the alarm about the threat that Trump poses to democracy. But Slotkin is planning a speech next month to make the case that democracy, too, is a kitchen table issue.
“Democracy isn’t just some highfalutin concept,” she said. “If the rules of our democracy get broken or get rigged, fundamentally that will affect our freedom here at home.”
Over the past year Slotkin has been unsparing in criticism of her own party, accusing some fellow Democrats of lacking “alpha energy” and failing to meet the moment. She believes the common media narrative of a divide between moderates and progressives is no longer fit for purpose.
“The fundamental division and differences we have, even in my own caucus here in the Senate, is between people who believe that Trump is an existential threat to democracy and people who believe that Trump is bad but we just need to wait him out. I’m in the first camp and there’s moderates and progressives in that camp and those are folks who are really starting to get some of the alpha energy back.”
