“as a cold war kid, i’m happy that Ronald Reagan was in office” – Elissa Slotkin, the official Democratic response to Trump
— Matt Binder (@mattbinder.bsky.social) March 4, 2025 at 9:19 PM
Per the transcript and the video, here’s what Elissa Slotkin actually said: “As a Cold War kid, I’m thankful it was Reagan and not Trump in office in the 1980s. Trump would have lost us the Cold War.”
While she was subtly complementary of the awful president who spawned our current hell just before this quote, she did not say “I’m happy that Ronald Reagan was in office.” She presented a meaningless MSNBC-brained binary choice of Reagan or Trump. “I like apples” is simply not the same thing as “I like apples more than oranges,” as only one of those statements is a guarantee that you actually like apples. Anything that paints the man who began the destruction of the New Deal and Great Society in a good light is not a good line, but the generalized “I’m happy that Reagan was in office” is not what she was getting at there, or in her rebuttal. Slotkin started talking about Reagan because of how Trump has betrayed the line he stole from the architect of the modern GOP, “peace through strength,” and she did the classic braindead Democratic thing of implying that the previous horrible Republican president is good because the current horrible Republican president is bad. But the whole stupid Reagan thing that has people up in arms as supposedly the summary of Slotkin’s message was a quick aside in a ten-minute speech.
People need to understand that our very real and justified rage is being commoditized and exploited. We need to play that game too here at Splinter because that’s just how digital media works in a world where rage is exponentially more profitable than reason, but you can play this cynical game in a way that’s honest and informs your readers. The Democrats are not exactly a group of people you need to make up lies about to convince people how much they fucking suck, and in fact, doing so does the opposite as using fake quotes is a great way to destroy your credibility.
Speaking of people who fucking suck and have destroyed their credibility by voting for eight of Trump’s cabinet nominees, including proud puppy murderer Kristi Noem, the rest of Elissa Slotkin’s speech was…fine? Like all anointed Democrats, the messenger is as much or more of a problem as the message itself. Slotkin’s tryhard “I’m just a regular working-class Michigander who works for the CIA like all of you” anti-charisma erodes the attempted earnestness of her poll-tested messaging, but the poll-tested messaging was…fine? It’s not going to set the world on fire, but if Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Jasmine Crockett or Greg Casar said this with their earnestness and credibility, I doubt they would face any blowback.
While we’re on the subject of Elon Musk, is there anyone in America who is comfortable with him and his gang of 20-year-olds using their own computer servers to poke through your tax returns, your health information, and your bank accounts? No oversight. No protections against cyber-attack. No guardrails on what they do with your private data.
This video of lone elite Democrat Who Gets It, billionaire governor J.B. Pritzker, is being celebrated for calling Trump a liar, but it’s also not too different from what Elissa Slotkin said last night.
President Trump is trying to deliver an unprecedented giveaway to his billionaire friends. He’s on the hunt to find trillions of dollars to pass along to the wealthiest in America. And to do that, he’s going to make you pay in every part of your life.
Grocery and home prices are going up, not down — and he hasn’t laid out a credible plan to deal with either. His tariffs on allies like Canada will raise prices on energy, lumber, cars — and start a trade war that will hurt manufacturing and farmers. Your premiums and prescriptions will cost more because the math on his proposals doesn’t work without going after your health care.
While it’s important to yell at feckless Democratic leadership who are expressing more public disapproval towards Rep. Al Green for disrupting Trump’s firehose of lies at the State of the Union than at Trump’s illegalities, it’s also important to tell them when they’re on the right track. A carrot and a stick are a superior motivator to just the stick, after all. In just a few short weeks, Democratic messaging has gone from “we want to work with the brilliant Elon Musk to cut government waste” to “these guys are stealing from you to give it to their billionaire friends.” This is a good development, yelling at them is working.
To be clear, even though you can pull specific quotes out of context and they look good, the overall message from Slotkin was not great, because it was in the classic Democratic form of trying to be everything to everyone and ultimately becoming nothing to nobody. Democrats won’t open their mouths until they run a poll to tell them what to think, and polls have shifted recently against Trump (especially on the economy), and you could see the focus-group testing embedded in Slotkin’s lines. The Democrats can say all the right things, but because they are run by valueless people who will not move until they stick their finger in the wind to see which way it is blowing, no one will believe they actually mean it. Until elite Democrats get out ahead of public opinion and actually try to be leaders like much of their younger generation are, people will look at them as the feckless followers they have proven to be during their near-half-century-long death grip on the party.
Choosing Slotkin’s CIA training and not one of the more popular and charismatic rising stars in the House like former public defender Jasmine Crockett was another indictment in a long line of them for a self-defeating political party dedicated to winning elections in America’s wealthiest suburbs and nowhere else. The Democrats are crippled by a gerontocratic establishment run by fundamentally unserious people who do not how to communicate with normal human beings, and the underwhelming public response to Slotkin’s response is very logical because Slotkin is an ideal representative for an irrevocably broken Democratic establishment. Her voting record as a Trump enabler destroys her credibility as a Trump critic, to say nothing of her lack of talents as a messenger. The party message is at least on the right “Trump is a crook” track, aided by powerful governors like J.B. Pritzker pushing them to it, but until Democrats look at Rep. Al Green with more fondness than they do the CIA, they will continue to remain the most out of touch people in America.
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