Senator Elissa Slotkin, a Democrat who won the US Senate seat in the swing state of Michigan last year, will provide her party’s response to President Donald Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday.
A former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analyst, Slotkin became the youngest Democratic woman elected to the Senate at 48 when she won her seat in a state that former Vice-President Kamala Harris lost last November.
Slotkin will give her speech after Trump’s, which is not a traditional State of the Union address but is expected to serve the same purpose.
She is due to lay out the Democrats’ vision for the US to rebut Trump’s speech.
“From our economic security to our national security, we’ve got to chart a way forward that actually improves people’s lives in the country we all love, and I’m looking forward to laying that out,” Slotkin said in a statement.
In her rebuttal, she plans to “communicate that Democrats are fighting to lower the cost of living and protect Social Security and Medicaid while Republicans cut taxes for their billionaire donors and Elon Musk”, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, a Democrat, said.
Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer called Slotkin a “rising star” in the party last week as he announced her as the pick to provide the Democratic Party’s rebuttal. He said she was “great on both economic and national security” topics.
Slotkin is new to the US Senate, but she served in Congress as a member of Michigan’s delegation to the House of Representatives. She was first elected in Democrats’ 2018 wave of success, flipping a Republican seat.
Prior to her political career, she held a variety of government jobs. She held national security positions in Presidents George W Bush and Barack Obama’s administrations.
She served in Bush’s National Security Council, and, under Obama, she served as acting assistant secretary of defence for international security affairs and in the State Department.
The CIA recruited Slotkin, who is fluent in Arabic and Swahili, shortly after she earned a graduate degree in international affairs at Columbia University in New York City. She served three tours in Iraq as a CIA analyst.
The moderate Democrat focused her 2024 Senate campaign on lowering costs for Americans, a move that helped propel her to a narrow victory over former Congressman Mike Rogers, even as Trump won the state.
Slotkin is a member of the committees on Armed Forces; Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs; Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry; and Veterans Affairs.
