Picture the kid. Twenty-two, maybe twenty-three. Political science degree, some debt, one good suit bought on sale. He’s been refreshing USAJobs at midnight. He wants to be in the building where the country gets run, even if all he does is collate binders for a deputy assistant secretary nobody’s heard of.
Now picture a United States senator telling him, more or less: Go ahead. See what happens.
That’s the gist of what Michigan Democrat Elissa Slotkin told a University of Chicago audience last week. She wants graduates to look at a job in the Trump administration and see trouble, not opportunity. She means legal trouble, high-profile prosecutions of the people who helped the president.
Then she put it in a sentence: “I want that deterrence message.”
The clip sat quietly for a week. On Saturday it went everywhere. By Tuesday it was an ethics complaint.
The Center to Advance Security in America, a watchdog group that has gone after Democrats before, sent the complaint to Senate Ethics Chairman James Lankford and Vice Chairman Chris Coons. Its case is simple. Criticizing a president is politics. Threatening the people who work for him is something else.
Senate ethics complaints usually die in a drawer, and this one might too.
But it asks a fair question, and you don’t need a committee to answer it.
Slotkin has her own account, and she’s entitled to it. When Sen. Mike Lee said it was disgraceful to threaten young people for serving their country, she answered that Republicans who cheered this president’s use of government against his enemies had no standing to lecture her.
She said she meant only people who break the law or help steer taxpayer money to the president and his family. The Supreme Court gave him immunity, she noted, but it didn’t give his staff any.
All right. Lawbreakers should answer for it. Nobody serious says otherwise. Inspectors general, courts, and prosecutors with actual evidence handle that.
But that isn’t what she said to the students.
She didn’t tell them not to break the law. She told them she wanted them afraid of the job itself. A rule against breaking the law is a standard people can meet. Fear of the job just hangs over everyone who might take it.
She knows that fear firsthand. Slotkin has spent this year under federal investigation over a video she organized telling troops to refuse illegal orders. She called the probe intimidation, an effort to scare lawmakers out of doing something legal. She may well be right. That’s what makes this so strange. She has been on the receiving end of exactly this, and now she wants to do it to someone else’s kids.
Think about what happens when you need a lawyer before you can take a government job. The careful, talented young people don’t come. They go to the law firms and the consulting shops and the startups, where nobody threatens to make an example of you for answering the phone in the wrong building. The people who stay are the ones who don’t scare easily, and that usually means the zealots and the reckless. No one who believes in public service should want that.
The administration’s personnel chief, Scott Kupor, called her remarks unprofessional and said his office is trying to recruit the best early-career talent it can find. You don’t have to love every hire this White House has made to see that he’s right about this.
There will be another president. He or she will need 24-year-olds willing to take the job. Slotkin, who gets mentioned for 2028, might someday need them herself. Right now she’s teaching them that serving your country means a target on your back, depending on who wins next.
Washington has always been rough on the people at the top. They signed up for it. The people at the bottom, the schedulers and junior analysts and the kid in the one good suit, were supposed to be left alone. That isn’t because they’re saints. It’s because the country needs them to show up.
Slotkin should take it back. She doesn’t owe that to an ethics committee. She owes it to the students.
