OPINION:
Democrats are broadening their plans to prosecute and imprison Trump officials, augmenting that goal with a new one: Cut off the MAGA supply chain of young people needed to replenish it.
Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, a former CIA operative, announced this policy during a talk at the University of Chicago on Oct. 13. Democrats realize that if they are going to achieve a one-party America — with a coalition of liberals, Marxists and Islamists, a rigged Supreme Court and open borders — then they must derail President Trump’s “Make America Great Again” locomotive.
Ms. Slotkin told the audience that people around the president who act as enablers have no such immunity.
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She promised to shepherd criminal investigations. “I want to look at these signature cases and not just focus on the president, but on the people who enabled him,” she said.
Then, she outlined a Stalin-like deterrence strategy aimed at young professionals. “I want young people coming out of school to say, ’Should I work for the Trump administration? Like, that sounds fun. I might get an opportunity,’” Ms. Slotkin said. “I want them to be like, ’Lord, that might be buying myself a ton of problems that I don’t want.’ I want that deterrence message sent.”
Anti-Trump prosecution plans have been in the works ever since Democrats tried every political avenue imaginable — led by the Russian-supplied dossier in 2016 — and still failed to stop the outsider candidate.
Jennica Pounds, a computer engineer and former Pentagon special government employee who operates the platform DataRepublican, initially gained fame by tracking government money flowing to politically active, left-wing charities.
“They call it ’No Kings,’ but what they’ve built is an empire of tax-exempt organizations doing the Democratic Party’s work on the taxpayer’s dime,” Ms. Pounds told Fox News in August 2025. “They are using every excuse in the book, from immigration to Israel, to rage-bait America. There is nothing ’charitable’ about their professional protest enterprise.”
More recently, Ms. Pounds said she had uncovered a conspiracy by former government employees and leftist activists to examine whether they could declare the Trump government “illegitimate” and transfer its powers to state governors.
She has posted an archive of recordings and documents under the heading “The Democracy Files.”
Let us run down the plans by Democrats to put Trump supporters and officials in prison.
The J.B. Pritzker plan: Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker has described his opposition in stark terms. “What President Trump has done is, I think, operate like the president of a banana republic or as if he were an authoritarian,” Mr. Pritzker told The New York Times. “That is, now he’s got power, he’s going to vanquish his enemies and rule in favor of the people who will enrich him.”
He went on: “There should be a Project 2029 for Democrats. One is, we’ve got to restore the rule of law. That means holding people accountable who’ve broken the law.”
As for the targets, he said: “I’m talking about in this administration. When we get a new one, the people in this administration who have broken the law, and the federal agents who’ve broken the law, need to be held accountable. … Criminally prosecuted, civilly prosecuted. Whatever it is, we can do. It may be you cannot criminally prosecute somebody but that you can go after them civilly.”
The Susan Rice plan: Like Ms. Slotkin, Ms. Rice, an operative for Presidents Obama and Biden, announced a broader assault: going after corporate America.
“If these corporations think that the Democrats, when they come back in power, are going to … say, ’Oh, never mind. We’ll forgive you for all the people you fired, all the policies and principles you’ve violated, all, you know, the laws you’ve skirted,’” she told podcaster Preet Bharara. “I think they’ve got another thing coming.”
The Justice Department and Jack Smith plan: Mr. Trump expanded his family’s outer-borough real estate enterprise into a Manhattan skyscraper colossus, becoming a fixture of New York high society and a TV star (“You’re fired”).
Then he became an overt Republican running for president. New York Democrats replaced their social ties with a concerted campaign to put Mr. Trump in prison and challenge his business empire.
As federal investigations and state prosecutions proceeded, critics accused the administration of doing everything in its power to hobble Mr. Trump politically. With help from federal prosecutors, the Manhattan district attorney charged Mr. Trump with 34 felony counts related to hush-money agreements involving multiple people. The New York attorney general also sued him over bank loans.
Special counsel Jack Smith was let loose. His dragnet took in the broader Republican infrastructure: conservative groups, donors and people who wore MAGA hats. He also swept up communications involving journalists, including some from The Washington Times.
Stopped by Mr. Trump’s reelection and now out of office, Mr. Smith donned a “No Kings” T-shirt at an Oct. 3 anti-Trump music festival in Columbia, Maryland.
We now know Mr. Smith orchestrated a test case for the Slotkin plan.
Democrats are tyrants. Once in power, their “No Kings” protests will become “Yes Kings.”
• Rowan Scarborough is a columnist with The Washington Times.
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