Last Night's Democratic Response

It isn’t Trump’s speech from last night that I’m focusing on; many others are doing that, and I probably have little to add. It’s the 11-minute rebuttal by democratic Sen. Elissa Slotkin.

I must do this first: It’s possible you're tuning into this community for the first time on Substack. If so, I extend a heartfelt welcome. We are a group of writers trying to cut through the noise, lies, and disinformation you’re hearing through mass media with verifiable truth.

Slotkin’s response was mercifully shorter than Trump’s one hour forty-minute speech before Congress, I’ll give her that. It was well crafted, a work of political speech that appeared crafted by committee and watered down to be like unflavored oatmeal. Unlike Trump, she didn’t spit out lies faster than a SpaceX rocket loses parts during an “unscheduled rapid disassembly” explosion. She kept to the script. By all accounts, she was a good Democrat following the rules of decorum like they do.

She was a radical departure from Trump as well. He spewed misinformation all over the audience. He blamed Biden to evade accountability. He blamed trans people a lot – he really hates them, as his speech and many executive orders show. He took absolutely no responsibility for anything done during his first term that was ineffective or short-sighted.

Opposing Views

I recognize that my point of view about Slotkin’s response will have critics. I’ve already heard most of them on at least two social media platforms. It goes something like this:

1. She’s playing the cards she was dealt, so shut up.

2. She calmed down the Democrats who are very worried about all the rapid-fire goings on, including rumors tech bros are getting into their personal data, so double-shut-up.

3. Trump was speaking surrounded by his base of sycophants, with the ultimate home-field advantage, making it next to impossible for Democrats to respond with anything meaningful, so triple-shut-up

I agree with each of those in principle, but I still won’t shut up. I don’t understand how to resolve the deep cognitive dissonance her response created when I heard her words. My issue is with what is not there. Put another way, my issue is with what’s missing from the response that deeply concerns me.

BTW: Trump Could Have Done it In A Minute

Before we get into it, I’d like to recall this little gem of a quote from Trump’s campaign he made back on January 23, 2016:

"I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK? It's, like, incredible."

He could have just demonstrated that in front of everyone in Congress last night and accomplished everything his 100-minute speech did, with far fewer words.

The Supreme Court gave him King-like powers. All he really needed to do was be super-overt about showing us he’s willing to use them, because fuck you, he doesn’t need to explain himself at all. He’s free to do anything under the sun as long as he can say it was within his official duties.

Unsuspecting Target with Trump Pointing his Piece at Him

Wyandotte, We Have A Problem

I don’t fault the Democrats’ choice of having Slotkin give the rebuttal. Somebody had to do it. She was a logical choice – thank god they didn’t decide to put Chuck Schumer in that spot, with him staring down at his podium like he’s testing the stickiness of his glasses on his head. Or Hakeem Jeffries, telegraphing his profoundly defeatist demeanor while rhetorically whining, “What are we supposed to do? They [Republicans] literally have all three branches of government!” Nothing is as inspiring as seeing the minority leader roll over and play dead.

As she told us in her rebuttal, she comes from a town in Michigan called Wyandotte. I’ve never been to Wyandotte, although I live in a neighboring state to Michigan and could probably get there in about two and a half hours by car. Her point in delivering it from there? She and Donald Trump both won that city last November. She also highlighted in her intro that she worked at the CIA and the White House under George W Bush and Barack Obama, two “very different leaders who both believed that America is exceptional.”

Let me be clear: There is no universe, no reality, no dream that I can conjure where I compare the morally bankrupt, intellectually ignorant, factually challenged sociopath Donald Trump with George Bush or Barack Obama. The insult to my intelligence in the implied comparison is stellar. Yes, they both had serious shortcomings, as humans do. But to compare either of them to Trump is like saying FDR and Hitler both enjoyed fishing. Patently absurd.

It’s a thrust of a knife when they normalize the behavior of someone who is actively burning down the services and abilities of the federal government, citizens’ lives depend on. Trump is centralizing power with radical overreach of the executive branch. He is sending his lawyers in to lie to the faces of judges, telling them Elon Musk is not the head of DOGE on one end, yet blatantly saying he is in last night’s speech. He’s asking us not to worry about Musk’s team demanding access to sensitive IRS info for American.

That’s still a real thing by the way: Last week a fresh assault was mounted on the IRS with a new guy claiming he had the authority to get into the vast sensitive information the government holds about each of us. Gavin Kliger, a 25-year-old software engineer from DOGE, arrived at the IRS at 6 am, demanding access to the Integrated Data Retrieval System, which holds sensitive taxpayer information. Nobody can say for sure if he was ultimately granted the access. If he was, chalk up another potentially huge breach of trust and data privacy.

Trump is laughing at federal judges who are telling him to stop, openly defying the rule of law and being quite unapologetic about it. And the judges are not taking things to the next level by holding his attorneys in contempt of court.

So no, Trump is nothing like Bush or Obama.

Structural Problems

So let’s look at Slotkin’s response a little more structurally. She laid out “most Americans share these three core beliefs” at the beginning of her rebuttal:

1. The middle class is the engine of the country.

2. Strong national security protects us from harm.

3. Democracy is worth fighting for. It’s messy, but unparalleled.

I agree with all three. But what is missing, the foundation of worry that concerns most people I hear, read, and watch across the board, has nothing to do with this apple-pie-baseball-is-good American stuff. It’s much deeper. It goes like this:

1. The tech bros are staging a coup against the government intending to consolidate power in the Executive branch. This isn’t alarmist drama. The “unitary executive theory” and the blizzard of executive orders issued on and since his first day in office demonstrate this.

2. Traditional media are completely normalizing this illegal behavior, using subtle words and an antiseptic tone. It’s good to have coverage like the Meidas Touch Network (MTN) to counter the information blitz with accurate reporting.

3. The focus on border security is being entirely staged on a false premise: to keep drugs out from the north and south. It’s been a weak position since someone dreamed it up in Project 2025. It was, and is, about starting a trade war with our closest partners – Canada and Mexico.

4. We’re not being honest at all by casting Trump and his cronies as protecting democracy. They have all the world's interest in protecting their wealth and establishing a strong autocracy. It’s the oligarch class taking control, that simple. But Slotkin’s speech doesn’t use that word once.

5. Notably, the words “autocracy”, “religion”, “graft”, “conflict of interest”, “corruption”, “tyranny”, “fraud” and “abuse” don’t appear anywhere in her speech, either.

6. Musk clearly has no plan or interest in creating one while he roots out all that waste, fraud, and abuse. Former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley, who was a Social Security Administration (SSA) administrator, warned that DOGE’s cuts at the SSA led to intermittent technology system outages. More worrisome, some employees were erroneously fired from the group that guards the stockpile of America’s nuclear weapons by accident. That’s malpractice of the highest order.

So, she sets up a premise that doesn’t align with the disturbing actions happening in America right now.

To put a finer point on it, the tone of her entire speech appeared complacent to Trump & Co.’s behavior.

She talked about growing up, as a now 48-year-old Gen Xer, and having a mom who was Democrat and a dad who was Republican. Keep in mind, that was the 1980s. She characterized it as “no big deal”. I did a double take, because that’s my generation. Has she somehow awoken from a coma of 40 years and not been informed of the realities of the Republican/MAGA base today? “Because we had shared values that were bigger than any one party.” What?! She needs to follow her own advice not to tune out (more below), apparently: Nobody has told her the fact that entire families are now regularly divided by political division – precisely because Republicans have masterfully dominated a narrative that twists the knife into that division with brute force.

Then she goes on to tropes that are solidly boilerplate Democratic and very tired right now: Bring prices down. Buy the car you just helped to build at a plant near Detroit. Be able to afford things like groceries, housing, and healthcare. Good paying union jobs. American supply chains. And so on.

But nothing was said about how Democrats might deliver us there differently than Trump’s vision for our future.

The Old Ideology’s Time Has Passed

The beliefs and methods we, the people of the U.S., need to adapt to are based on how we solve problems that are multi-level in scope. We need a mental framework that is better than just an ideology. It has to deal with nearly constant evolutionary stressors – thinking systems that manage the pressure to change form, function, and priorities, all in real time. Ideologies – liberal and conservative, are old and incapable, built for a generation that is not even alive anymore (despite what Elon thinks of SSA payments).

Oligarchs Want a Monarchy – We Are In The Way

She talks about Trump delivering an unprecedented giveaway to his billionaire friends. But that’s not true. In a very literal sense, Trump’s 2017 tax cuts are not a giveaway. It’s a law that expires at the end of this year unless Congress renews it and finds a way to pay for it. Sure, she covers that he’s looking at Medicaid, Social Security, and Medicare to cut, because he has to pay to keep those tax cuts permanent. But what are Democrats doing to stop it?

Be clear and sharp in your thinking: The entire system is being rigged to implode, not for dramatic effect. Everything I say here should be examined with clinical detachment and the highest skepticism. As a mentor taught me many years ago: “Always ask what isn’t there, what’s missing. And when you see it and know what it is, ask yourself if there is human intentionality to its absence.”

The lack of a visible plan makes the entire rebuttal fall on its face. Democrats have lost a vision for the future that is:

• Different than what Trump is offering in a meaningful way, and,

• This is obtained through specific actions for which they can gather support.

Even admitting they don’t know what to do but are working on it and will have some ideas for us soon would have improved what was offered to the American public last night.

Lastly, she implores us not to tune out. I don’t think that’s a problem to go after as the big closing plea to Americans. When I read social media, Substack posts, or any newspaper, our problems are not about tuning out. The problem is we’re tuned in, but to what we hear the Republicans are talking about today. They’ve captivated us with chaos.

Amidst all this opportunity, Democrats appear despondent, depressed, and out of tune.

At the top of this article, I mentioned structural issues and that Americans share three core beliefs. As you can see, by shifting the narrative a little, the Democrats continue to lose by not following through: She never gets around to laying out how those three things we care about will be achieved and in what timeframe. The problems above bely the complexities of our time.

I invite your thoughts on this piece, so please leave a comment. Even if you disagree, thoughtful feedback is important to me, so kindly leave a comment as well!

Be Well

Rick Herbst

March 05, 2025

---

SOURCES

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/read-sen-elissa-slotkins-full-democratic-response-to-trumps-joint-address-to-congress

https://www.npr.org/2025/02/27/1234145488/doge-work-could-cross-extreme-ethical-and-legal-lines-says-former-employee