Fast-forward to mid-February 2025. One by one, members of the GOP caucus would fall in line with the president’s decrees and nominees. Government officials were being dismissed en masse. Federal prosecutors were resigning rather than carry out constitutionally dubious orders. Agencies were being taken over by those who’d been advocating against their very existence. Slotnik, however, always takes the long view. Soon after, a veteran Republican senator came to reassure her that, given time, they could get some national security legislation done together. “He said, ‘Let’s talk again in March, because we have got to get all our craziness out. My colleagues do not realize we are about to own everything. So there’s going to be a lot of executive orders. A lot of ‘Sturming und Dranging’ within the Republican trifecta, and then we will get back to a more even footing.”
In our first conversation, I asked how she planned to function in the months to come, especially in a paralyzed Democratic party. “What do you know about game theory?” Slotkin responded, taking out a legal pad. “We were trained in this kind of analysis at CIA.” She drew a grid with four large squares. On the left side she wrote tactical and strategic. “That means, is it short-term—tactical or is it long-term—strategic”? On the right side she wrote reversible and, underneath that, irreversible. She then pointed to the box marked strategic and irreversible. She looked at me and said, “Strategic and irreversible is the box I am going to work in. I am not going to react to the five crazy things the president will say or do every day.”
And who or what, I asked, would come first in her strategic and irreversible grid? “Pete Hegseth,” she said, without hesitation. “I have staffed the departments at the Pentagon for four defense secretaries and seen them up close. I have traveled with them and been with them in the situation room.” With Trump’s then nominee for Pentagon chief, she went on, “there is the entire history of his sexual impropriety, drinking, all that stuff. I don’t approve. But it’s tactical.”
The tactical is not her worry. “My concern is what he’s going to do on the job based on what he has already said…. Trump has said that he might use the uniformed military inside the United States in a way that contradicts the Constitution. You start using the military as your own personal militia force. You politicize the military. That is a genie that cannot be put back in the bottle. That is strategic and irreversible. Of all the issues I have with Pete Hegseth, that’s the one I want to go deep on.”
It was mid-January when Slotkin found a day to take a break and return to Holly. She invited me to the farm for some downtime before heading to Detroit to catch the Lions’ NFC title game. When I arrived, ice covered the driveway. A barn was emblazoned with a sign for Hygrade Meats. In a fenced area nearby, Slotkin’s mixed-breed hounds started howling. It was a balmy 30 degrees. On icy Michigan days, Slotkin loves to tell visitors to “Buckle up, Buttercup,” then throw them into her open Jeep to tour the back 50.
She greeted me in jeans and ushered me past the cluttered mudroom into her kitchen. “I had no time to clean up,” she said, smiling. “This is how it is.” She had already zipped into town to pick up croissants.
The setting was rustic: furniture from Costco in the den, walls of family photos, the dining room with her grandmother’s walnut breakfront. It was here, as a toddler, that Slotkin began to get by on her own, out of necessity. She was left alone for hours, she told me, to roam the farm, which became her laboratory for self-reliance.
I was curious how the loss of the family business, which she rarely speaks about, might have impacted her early childhood. On the surface, the facts of Slotkin’s life suggest the wealth and privilege of a meat heiress, but the Slotkins were long out of the company by the time it eventually sold to Sara Lee for $140 million. Slotkin’s father, Curt, went out on his own and became a meat broker, starting his day at 5 a.m. and touring grocery chains. “We had real money problems when my father moved us here when I was four,” Slotkin said. “I am one of the senators with the least amount of money. Look it up.” I did. She ranks 79 out of 100.
Their financial status was secondary to a larger concern. Slotkin’s mother, Judy, a travel agent who was a vibrant, voluble Detroit native, was diagnosed with severe metastasized breast cancer not long after giving birth to her son, Keith, Slotkin’s brother. While Judy remained in New York for months undergoing experimental treatment, Curt took the toddlers to Holly. “We moved so my father could work in the meat industry,” the senator remembered, and from the age of five, she reveled in “the joy of being so free, doing everything on my own, with the farmhands somewhat aware of where I was.”
