No one elected you to enable Trump

An open letter to my US Senators—Gary Peters and Elissa Slotkin of Michigan.

Contact Senator Slotkin and Senator Peters yourself through their various offices. You can find your senators here.

Hello Senators:

First, I’d like to congratulate you and quickly remind you of a simple yet vital fact. Both of you were elected when Donald Trump was also on the ballot.

Senator Peters, your first victory as a Senator was the bright spot of another grim year, 2014. And in 2020, you won reelection with 84,716 more votes than Trump won in that year—the year when he and his MAGA allies did their worst to steal my vote, my wive’s vote, and the votes of the 2,804,040 Michiganders who helped elect Joe Biden. Senator Slotkin, you won your Senate seat in 2024 with about 104,000 fewer votes than Trump/Vance, who picked up about 12,000 votes over Joe Biden’s 2020 number.

Regardless of the math, your victories remain remarkable achievements. You share these successes with everyone in Michigan who worked to elect you and to rebuild our state by ripping up our gerrymandered maps and transforming the Mitten from one of the most challenging places to vote into one of the easiest. Good on you. Good on us.

But if there’s one thing Democratic Senators tend to notice, it’s a trend. And the numbers from 2024 for Democrats look bad almost everywhere. I understand why you—Senator Slotkin—entered the Senate feeling the ground quavering under you. And I get why you—Senator Peters—feel shaky about your chances in 2026, especially after watching many of the candidates you were charged with reelecting last year as the head of the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee get demolished, including stalwarts like Bob Casey Jr. and Sherrod Brown.

These were your losses. They are ours, too.

I also understand that you’re rattled by the unconscionable amount of money Elon Musk dumped into the swing states, using unconscionable methods of campaigning that would be considered illegal if we had any actual campaign finance laws.

But verily, I say to you, it’s time to shake off these heartbreaking setbacks and buck up for Michigan. You need to do this because two basic facts remain true:

1. No one elected you to enable Donald Trump.
2. Donald Trump will never be on a ballot again.

Let’s take these points separately:

No one elected you to enable Donald Trump.

It is already Groundhog Day. We all know how the Trump presidency will go. Will you be scared by your own shadow?

The next four years will be at least as disastrous as Trump's first four. They will likely end even worse than that disgrace, which you may remember concluded with him sending mobs to the Capitol to murder you and our democracy.

Even if you buy the canard that Trump has a mandate after being reelected with less than 50% of the vote, a whole percentage point lower than by the share of the vote George W. Bush won in 2004, the last time a Republican won the popular vote, you still won, Senator Slotkin.

Michiganders elected you deliberately because we didn’t want Mike Rogers to come in and give the Roman salute to anything Trump runs up the flag poll. Not enough newsless voters—who were lured to the polls by Musk’s money and Joe Rogan’s podcasts—cared to vote for Rogers. I’d wager that some of the Trump voters in our state also voted for you because they know he tends to go, let’s say, too far.

Even if Trump—in his transition with his appointments and the less than a week he’s been in office—hadn’t declared his intention to shred any remaining checks the Constitution puts on him, opposing him with everything you’ve got would be the right move both morally and politically.

More than anything, Trump was defeated in 2018 and 2020 due to the revulsion generated by his policies and failures. In 2017, he gave trillions in tax cuts to billionaires and their corporations while trying to uninsure tens of millions of Americans. In 2025, he will do the same. Except this time, House Republicans intend to uninsure even more Americans. And this time, they are likely to succeed.

Meanwhile, Trump is doing everything he can do to make us sicker by immediately “devastating” our world-leading medical infrastructure. He is waging war on federal workers and their expertise. And he is threatening our neighbors and NATO allies, teasing wars over absolutely nothing as a gift to tyrants like Putin and Xi, who want to again normalize wars of aggression over absolutely nothing but a lust for power. And just this weekend, he illegally fired a bevy of Inspector Generals, our only hope of monitoring the corruption he and his allies will infest the federal government with.

The disasters that Trump is intentionally engineering with standard Republican policies and his childish, brutal worldview are what the 2026 and 2028 elections will be about. And they will be worse this time because he has a Project 2025 playbook for undermining how the system contained his malice last time.

We haven’t even begun to discuss Trump’s blatant assault on the American people’s ability to rule ourselves. Thank you both for opposing Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense, a woman-hating drunk who has called for the US military to take sides against American citizens, unconstitutionally, as you well established in his confirmation hearing, Senator Slotkin.

With all the disasters that Trump is gleefully engineering, protests will be inevitable. And Trump now has a Secretary of Defense willing to invoke the Insurrection Act against our most fundamental right to redress grievances, as Project 2025 plans.

And let’s not look away from his worst betrayal: pardoning even the worst of the January 6th rioters, terrorists, and coup plotters, setting them free to commit more violence at his urging.

Yes, he campaigned on all this. But he won by swaying Americans who consume no news. But you both won by winning the far more informed voters who will turn out in 2026 and 2028 and don’t want any of this. And no election voids any future election.

Americans must know the danger we’re facing from Trump’s overreach. And your abetting of Trump sends the exact opposite message and must stop. Voting for the Laken Riley Act, for instance, is one of the most depressing, cowardly, and ill-considered acts any Democratic members have taken since the vote for the Iraq War.

This bill, which even ICE says is “impossible to execute,” gives the Trump administration vast new powers to target and torment immigrants, many of whom are now here legally and will soon lose that legal status because of Trump. The Trump administration wants to pass these indiscriminate powers to local law enforcement, which we know in Michigan varies wildly county-by-county in their "commitment" to civil liberties.

Your desire to give Trump a win on immigration must please your pollsters. But please let them know that Harris/Walz tried running on the MAGA border bill last time, and voters decided they’d rather have genuine MAGA as president and not settle for an unconvincing imitation.

Your continuing desire to give Trump ANOTHER win on persecuting immigrants has me worried to the point that I fear Democratic voters in the Mitten will have to consider different candidates for the US Senate (if we’re ever given a chance). I’ve read the letter both of you signed calling for negotiations on “strong, commonsense, and fair immigration enforcement accompanied by the necessary resources to effectively secure our borders.” And I’m worried.

You do refer the DREAMers and farmworkers we need to honor and protect. But you never once mention “a path to citizenship.” That basic demand is something Democrats have long fought and won and what we might be willing to trade for the punitive and excessive “enforcement” measures Trump wants to use for Cruelty Theater and to centralize his power and intimate anyone who might oppose him. Your pollsters need to let you know that those words “path to citizenship” poll better than mass deportations ever will, besides being the right thing to do.

A basic understanding every Democrat should have right now is that Trump doesn’t care about immigration as anything other than a cudgel to take power. His wife and closest ally, Musk, appear to be immigrants who worked here without legal authorization. Trump has never stopped importing foreign workers for his businesses because underpaying workers is maybe his most closely held belief. And the deportations he’s promising will inevitably lead to camps, chaos, and completely unnecessary atrocities, all for spectacle, while savaging one thing that actually has made America great—immigrants and immigration.

But this entire discussion ignores the fundamental truth that must bind any discussion of Donald Trump:

Donald Trump will never be on a ballot again.

More than anything, your willingness to bend to a lame duck who left office the first as the most unpopular human alive sends a toxic message to anyone who believes in the American experiment. Trump wants to act as if he is not bound by the most basic constraints of the Constitution. Acting as if you must cower toward this past-and-future failed president only props up that filthy myth.

Your pollsters must tell you that opposing Trump will doom your reelection. Yet two huge problems with that kind of prognostication disqualify anyone who sticks with that squishy approach.

NO ONE WILL BE VOTING IN 2026 BASED ON WHETHER OR NOT YOU CONFIRMED A WOMAN BEST KNOWN FOR MURDERING A DOG AS DHS SECRETARY.

No one will vote on how much you pantomimed as if everything is normal. Worse, if you give in too much—if we surrender all opposition to Trump—the now very real nightmare where elections either don’t happen or don’t count seeps closer to reality.

The politics you’re attempting to approximate only exists in a timeline where Trump serves out his term and leaves peacefully. That is by no means assured. It is your job to make sure that happens, regardless of what it means for your individual careers.

You will be defined for the rest of history by how you dealt with Donald Trump. That means you must state with all your being that we are already in an emergency. And if Trump begins to operate within the Constitution, you will still not obey him. But you will work with him when it benefits Michigan and America.

Your reelection depends on preserving the American system and not surrendering to the MAGA perversion of this country and our Constitution.

Republicans will never again have a con man as sickly practiced at warping our politics, with his decades of branding his facade into brains. Yes, they will have Musk’s money. That’s why your case to voters must be based on empathy contrasting Republican cruelty. It must be clear, consistent, and repetitive. That’s the only way to break through the morass of billionaire-funded disinformation we must purge from our elections. It’s an arduous task and a scary time. And if you’re not up to it, few are. The right thing to do is step aside in favor of someone who can and will stand up.

I imagine you are up for this fight and believe you may win—your track record vouches for that belief. But I beg you to step back and see that there is no time to waste.

As public servants deeply committed to our country and skilled at winning over swing voters, I know your urge is to lean into a “compromise” approach that props up the norms that gave us the advances of the 20th century. Verily, I tell you that there is no decent compromise with a vicious wannabe dictator who relentlessly sucks up more and more gains for himself and his billionaire buddies while inflicting “consequences” on everyone else.

When the history of a wannabe strongman gets written, there are no bonus points for those who erred in their “moderation.” At best, they are known as appeasers. At worst, co-conspirators.

Please rise to this occasion.

Everything counts in large amounts,
Jason Sattler