Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) likened the current state of the country to its “angry, teenage years” and said she just hopes the country gets through the next few years alive.
“We’re about to turn 250 years old, right? We’re still pretty young for a country,” Slotkin, who recently delivered the Democratic response to President Trump’s Congressional address, said in an interview on ABC’s “The View” on Tuesday.
“These are our, like, our angry teenage years,” she continued. “We are going through this push and pull, where we’re happy, we’re sad. We want this, we want that.”
“And what do you do when you have a teenager who’s threatening themselves and others? You just try to get them through this period alive, so that their brain can fully form,” she said, adding, when asked, that she wasn’t talking about Trump specifically, but about the country more broadly.
“We’re pendulum swinging. We’re pendulum swinging. And so for me, I think that this, I don’t think there’s a single American who feels like this is normal,” said the junior senator from Michigan.
The exchange came during a discussion about Rep. Al Green’s (D-Texas) disruption during Trump’s address before a joint session of Congress. The moment led to the congressman getting censured and divided many Democrats over whether his actions were appropriate.
Some have argued Green crossed the line and made Trump look even more presidential by engaging in what they describe as petty behavior. Others say that Green was right to call attention to the GOP spending cuts that nonpartisan estimates say will necessitate cuts to entitlement programs — even as the president pledges not to touch those benefits.
Slotkin was asked if she thinks the state of the country amounts to a “five-alarm fire,” as former Biden administration White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said recently.
“I think what the President is doing to our economy — you all just talked about it this morning — I mean, like, sorry, people may not know the federal budget. They know their own home budget, and they know exactly how much they’re spending,” Slotkin said in response.
“So I think whether it’s the economy, whether it’s our national security, right — cutting people who keep us safe, and then handing over places like Ukraine to a guy like Putin — or our democracy, right — threats to who we are as a democracy — I think that we are absolutely in extraordinary times and it requires an extraordinary response,” she added.
