When President Donald Trump gives his joint speech to Congress on Tuesday, it can be expected to highlight how he says he is fulfilling the “mandate” that he and Republicans say that Americans gave them in the 2024 elections.
The Democrats plan to have a accountant of that claim of one of the newest members of the Senate: Elissa Slotkin, a Michigan first -term senator.
During his previous six years in the house, Slotkin won a reputation as a moderate without fear, sometimes, to challenge his party’s conventions.
Saying that “he hopes to speak directly with the American people,” promised a refutation to Trump’s speech focused on economic and national security.
“The public expects leaders levels with them about what is really happening in our country,” Slotkin said in a statement announcing his speech last week. “From our economic security to our national security, we have to draw a path to follow that really improve the lives of people in the country that we all love, and I am anxious to put that.”
Senator Elissa Slotkin speaks during an audience at the Capitol in Washington, DC, on January 14, 2025.
I CURTIS/AP
It is also expected to face Trump’s efforts and Elon Musk to reduce the size of the federal government. Democrats have invited several federal workers offered as their guests for speech.
Slotkin’s guest will be Andrew Lennox, who served as Marine in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria and was fired from his work with the Department of Veterans Affairs in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
“You spend 10 years trying to defend your country in terms of honesty, integrity and justice and then you return and get copies and fight the same email as 10,000 people about performance,” Lennox told ABC News.
Slotkin’s speech occurs when the Democrats seek to meet after a punishing 2024 campaign cycle that saw Trump easily defeat Vice President Kamala Harris by the White House. The Democrats were not much better in the vote, lost control of the Senate and did not recover the camera.
As the Democratic leadership tries to concentrate on a new strategy to reach moderate voters, they seek to reveal the Slotkin Care Center, who achieved a limited victory in Purple Michigan this November, beating Republican nominees Mike Rogers, which had served seven terms in the camera, in a race for the open state of the state, even when Trump Won Michigan for 80,000 votes.
Her approach to reproductive rights and economic problems such as reducing costs for families, along with her history in the camera, helped her get a limited victory in the Senate race. The leader of the Senate minority, Chuck Schumer, and the minority leader of the representatives chamber, Hakeem Jeffries, realized by selecting it to deliver the response of the Democrats.
Schumer called on a “rising star” of the Democratic Party.
“As you know, Elissa is a rising star in our group. American people will love what they have to say. It’s great, both in economic and national security. I am excited, I think we are all excited,” Schumer said after the formal announcement that Slotkin would give Trump the answer.
Slotkin is a former CIA agent who worked as an analyst in the Middle East. She served three Iraq tours in this role. Then he worked at the White House and the Pentagon during the administrations of Bush and Obama before launching an offer for the house.
She won her seat in the House of Representatives in 2018, expelling a head of the Republican Party of two periods. During his mandate, he flexed his good faith of national security, serving in the Armed Services, National Security and Veterans Committee.
During his time in the house, Slotkin constantly qualified among the most bipartisan members of the Chamber. Occasionally he voted through the lines of the party and, in his first votes in the Senate, he demonstrated the will to continue that bipartisan streak. It was one of the 12 Democrats who voted in favor of the Laky Riley Law led by Riley earlier this year, helping to send the bill to Trump’s desk.
