Sen. Elissa Slotkin warned that President Trump could usher the U.S. economy into a recession with his tariffs and other fiscal policies.
The 48-year-old Michigan Democrat delivered her party’s response to Mr. Trump’s joint address to Congress on Tuesday.
“The president talked a big game on the economy, but it’s always important to read the fine print,” Ms. Slotkin said. “Do his plans actually help Americans get ahead? Not even close.”
Ms. Slotkin said grocery and home prices are going up and the president has not laid out a credible plan to deal with either.
She criticized the president’s tariff policies, saying his “trade war” against allies like Canada will raise prices on energy, lumber and cars and hurt manufacturers, farmers and other businesses.
Mr. Trump is “on the hunt to find trillions of dollars to pass along to the wealthiest in America,” Ms. Slotkin said, saying he will make working Americans pay for it by targeting their health care.
“Meanwhile, for those keeping score, the national debt is going up, not down,” she said. “And if he’s not careful, he could walk us right into a recession.”
Ms. Slotkin is a former House member who won her Senate seat in November by less than half a percentage point in one of the seven swing states Mr. Trump swept.
She delivered her response from Wyandotte, Michigan, a working-class town just south of Detroit that split its ticket by backing her but also going for Mr. Trump.
“It might not seem like it, but plenty of places like this still exist across the United States, places where people believe that if you work hard and play by the rules, you should do well and your kids should do better,” she said.
Ms. Slotkin said Americans made it clear during the “fraught election season” that prices are too high and the government needs to be more responsive to their needs.
“America wants change, but there’s a responsible way to make change and a reckless way,” she said, before she launched into her explanation of the president choosing the latter.
Ms. Slotkin warned Americans that Mr. Trump “could very well come after your retirement, the Social Security, Medicare and VA benefits you worked your whole life to earn.”
“The president claims he won’t. But Elon Musk just called Social Security the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time,” she said.
The senator also slammed Mr. Musk, the head of the new Department of Government Efficiency, and “his gang of 20-year-olds” for poking through Americans’ tax returns, health information and bank accounts with “no oversight, no protections against cyber attack, no guard rails on what they do with your private data.”
She said she supports eliminating waste but opposes DOGE’s “mindless” firings of government workers who serve in critical roles.
Echoing a common Democratic theme of the 2024 campaign season, Ms. Slotkin said democracy is at risk under Mr. Trump’s leadership.
“It’s at risk when the president decides you can pick and choose what rules you want to follow, when he ignores court orders and the Constitution itself, or when elected leaders stand by and just let it happen,” she said.
“But it’s also at risk when the president pits Americans against each other, when he demonizes those who are different and tells certain people they shouldn’t be included,” she added.
Ms. Slotkin touched on the president’s top priority, securing the border, saying there’s bipartisan support for better vetting of the people coming into the country but said Mr. Trump needs to do more to expand some immigration programs.
“Securing the border without actually fixing our broken immigration system is dealing with the symptom and not the disease,” she said.
“America is a nation of immigrants. We need a functional system key to the needs of our economy that allows vetted people to come and work here legally. So I look forward to the president’s plan on that.”
On foreign policy, Ms. Slotkin accused the president of stealing President Reagan’s policy of peace through strength but not following his lead in supporting American allies with “moral clarity.”
“After the spectacle that just took place in the Oval Office last week, Reagan must be rolling in his grave,” she said, referring to Mr. Trump’s dust-up with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as “a bad episode of reality TV.”
“It summed up Trump’s whole approach to the world,” she said. “He believes in cozying up to dictators like Vladimir Putin and kicking our friends like the Canadians in the teeth.”
Before she ran for Congress in 2018, Ms. Slotkin served three tours in Iraq as a CIA analyst working alongside the U.S. military. In between her tours, she held national security roles under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
Democrats in both chambers brought guests to the president’s address that they said highlight the harms his agenda has and will cause, including fired federal workers, constituents who rely on government programs he has cut or plans to, and business owners hurt by his tariff policies.
Sen. Bernard Sanders, a Vermont independent who caucuses with the Democrats, delivered his own response to Mr. Trump’s address, accusing the president of repeatedly lying and promoting “absurdities” to push “hateful, right-wing ideology” and try to divide America.
“It is a masterful effort — and you saw that tonight — to deflect attention away from the most important issues facing the people of our country,” he said, referring to the cost of living and other economic issues.
