Editor’s note: This conversation was recorded on Tuesday, October 20.
Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith discuss Jack’s October 19 piece on Senator Elissa Slotkin’s recent viral remarks at the University of Chicago, where she said she wanted accountability for the people who enabled President Trump, at least in part with the goal of sending a “deterrence message” to new graduates who might consider working for the administration. Jack explains why he thinks Senator Slotkin’s remarks were imprudent, and why he finds the prevailing reaction from pro-Trump quarters hypocritical. Bob presses on whether congressional investigation is different from weaponizing law enforcement, and whether worry about retaliation could lead to the most lawless conduct going unanswered. They also discuss Jack’s prediction that Trump will issue thousands of pardons, his case for prioritizing transparency, and why it is, and will continue to be, incredibly challenging for either side to de-escalate.
Mentioned:
Jack Goldsmith, “Senator Slotkin’s Imprudent Remarks and Republicans’ Hypocritical Reactions” (Executive Functions, October 19, 2026)
“Senator Elissa Slotkin: Live Recording of America, Actually!” (University of Chicago Institute of Politics, October 13, 2026)
“When Democrats Win Back Power, ‘Forgive & Forget is Over’ (with Susan Rice),” Stay Tuned with Preet Bharara (February 19, 2026)
This is an edited transcript of an episode of “Executive Functions Chat.” You can listen to the full conversation by following or subscribing to the show on Substack, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Bob Bauer: Good morning, Jack.
Jack Goldsmith: Morning, Bob.
Today we will be discussing your piece, published here on Executive Functions [on Monday], about a comment that Senator Elissa Slotkin made at the University of Chicago about how Democrats need to, if they regain control of the Congress, take steps to pursue what has occurred over the last few years in a way that would deter young people from considering joining that administration; that would, in effect, send them away from that administration because it would buy them trouble. They would see how problematic it would be for them to participate. Can you talk a little bit about what she said and what you wrote?
Sure. She gave a talk at the University of Chicago. There was an event on October 13th. And in the course of the event, she was talking about the Trump administration and accountability for the administration. And Senator Slotkin said—and I’m now reading from my article—she suggested the need for accountability for the people who enabled Trump in order to deter “people coming out of school” (that’s a quote) from working for the Trump administration. And then she further said, “I want them to be like, ‘Lord, that might be buying myself a ton of problems that I don’t want. And so let me avoid participating in that.’” And then she added, “I want that deterrence message sent.” So the upshot, as you suggested, is that in the context of talking about accountability for Trump administration abuses, she said she wanted that accountability to send a deterrence message to young people, to deter them from working in the Trump administration.
One line of very strong criticism from Trump quarters, from the right, has been that she is looking to discourage conservative activists from participating in politics. As I read the quote, she was talking specifically about the Trump administration, that it’s sort of one of a kind and it’s corruption, and that young people who might consider working for it or supporting it should think twice. And that was one of the objects of this deterrence strategy she was discussing. Does it make a difference that she’s talking about this specific administration in light of her profound objections to the way it operates?
Make a difference to whom? The Trump supporters have jumped all over this in an extraordinarily hypocritical way, in my view. We can talk about that later. And they’ve said that this is an escalation because she suggested that she’s trying to keep young people out of politics. But I don’t think that they would be any less upset and think it was any less appropriate if she were saying that she was trying to keep young people out of the Trump administration. My own view, which I expressed in the piece, is that it was imprudent of her to talk about trying to deter young people, even from going in the Trump administration.
I think the response to what she said, which I think has been over the top, shows why it was imprudent. But she can say whatever she wants, obviously. It’s fine for her to talk about forms of accountability for the Trump administration. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that at all. And I’m not even sure there’s anything wrong with what she said normatively. I mean, she has to live with it and own it. But it can be viewed as, and it has been interpreted as, she thinks there should be punishment of Trump administration officials to keep young people from going in the Trump administration.
So you anticipated my question, but I just want to clarify: So was the imprudence in the way she expressed it, or was the point itself questionable?
I’m not sure of the difference. I think she opened herself up for exactly what she’s been receiving by suggesting that she wanted to deter people from going into politics. And the reason is, as I said in the piece, that weaponization of government to cause trauma and therefore deter people from doing things has been the kind of main goal of the Trump administration in a second term. And I document how this has been President Trump’s philosophy from the beginning, how he likes to strike back at people harder than they strike at him. This has been the clear philosophy of the administration. They weaponized not just to stop and punish their enemies, but to also deter others from doing things that they don’t like in the future.
And I think that basically Senator Slotkin sounded like she was adopting that strategy. Whether she was or she wasn’t is a matter of interpretation, but she left herself open to that interpretation. And that’s why I thought it was imprudent.
(4:09) So if we step back for a second and just assume, which I think in context is fair to assume, that she’s talking about Democrats in control of one or both houses of the Congress after November and beginning a process of investigation, an exercise in transparency. She was specifically focused on corruption, but I presume she means a whole range of abuses in this administration as she sees them. Weaponization, as we normally think about it, is the abuse of law enforcement. Here, it’s a congressional exercise of its oversight and investigative powers. Why wouldn’t that be precisely a legitimate exercise for Congress to engage in? And wouldn’t it want the public to know enough about what has taken place in this administration that young people who might otherwise join the Trump administration or look to support it would think twice about it?
She’s welcome to say and do whatever she wants. And obviously, I’m not questioning Congress’s ability to engage in oversight. In the piece, I talked about the importance of transparency as the first measure of accountability for the Trump administration.
The quotes I read were a little vague on exactly what steps she had in mind, but I thought it was imprudent to talk about deterring, and deterring in a way that actually—as the Trump people have jumped on this—went beyond even what Trump has been doing and saying. So I just thought it was a dumb thing to say. She didn’t need to say it. I note that when she defended herself the next day, she didn’t repeat the deterrence point. I think she realized it was not a great thing to say. It’s fine for her to talk about deterrence if she likes, but she invites comparison to what Trump is doing in saying that.
And then we get into the question of equivalency. I didn’t take a stand on that. Both sides—I don’t know how far you want to go back to, at least 2015, 2016—have been engaging in behavior that the other side can see as weaponizing the government. This has been growing worse. And the Trump administration, as I talked about in the piece, ratcheted it up significantly. The Democrats are now talking in some quarters about ratcheting up significantly in the next round.
The important thing about what Senator Slotkin said was that she’s, I think, considered to be a moderate Democrat. And I think it’s fair to say that this statement can be interpreted as saying, or at least it has been interpreted as saying, that she’s open to some of the more aggressive tactics that people in the Democratic Party have suggested. Again, whether that’s an appropriate response or not, I didn’t get into that. It’s not my preference. But as I said in the piece, it would be perfectly understandable and rational if the Democrats in the next round, if they get power, use the government in a way to try to punish and deter their enemies.
Last thing I’ll say is, one of the things you’re getting at, Bob, is that one point of accountability is to deter bad behavior. And that might be to deter third parties. So there’s nothing wrong with the idea that accountability for bad action deters. I just think it was an imprudent statement. That’s my basic point.
Of course, the Republican reaction could be taken to just dispute a fundamental point on which I assume Senator Slotkin would insist—an important context for her comments. And that is, there is something different about this administration, especially in this second term: that there is a degree of brazen, open lawlessness and pervasive corruption that justifies looking not just to expose it, but to deter people from thinking that that’s the normal way the executive branch is conducted. I mean, isn’t at the bottom of the complaint about what she said a fundamental disagreement that there is something radically different about this government?
The response from the Republicans was so over the top—pearl clutching, as Senator Slotkin put it—about the dangers of weaponization and the awfulness of weaponization, since there’s never been an administration, as I say in the piece, that has weaponized more brazenly and openly and broadly than the Trump administration. What the Republicans would say is that whatever Trump is doing now, that there was nothing that could be as bad as what the Biden-era Democrats did to the Trump administration—that whatever Trump is doing now, they weren’t trying to decapitate a president and a presidential contender using law, by one party and the Justice Department of one party, against a presidential candidate. They would say you can’t compare these things, and to the extent you can compare them, what Biden did was worse.
So each side is viewing what the other side did as much worse and much different. I’ll just leave it at that.
(8:21) Understood. You point out that behind this kind of escalatory tit-for-tat politics are several motivations. There is hateful revenge, as you put it, retribution, and also, as we’ve discussed, the goal of deterrence. But I wonder, isn’t there something also very distinctive in this kind of politics? And that is just the desire to win, to crush the opposition, to lock in a majority, to impede the possibility that the minority could become a majority. Isn’t weaponization, as we’ve seen over the last two years, whatever other themes might flow into it, also a strategy just for trying to win and to lock a win in?
Sure. I mean, you can see that as vengeance, but you can see it as the aim of crushing the opponent so they can’t get back in power. Both sides—I’ve seen people from both sides of the aisle say things like that. They put it in terms of accountability. We have to make sure that accountability is brought to bear on these illegitimate actions so they can never do it again. You can see this as trying to crush the opponents. You can see it as trying to deter the opponents. It’s basically trying to impose costs that are high enough such that either your opponent won’t do the bad thing to you again or that you crush your opponent so much that they just won’t get power again. I think that’s caught up in this for sure.
By the way, you previously noted some comments that Susan Rice had made to this effect and maybe more aggressively. And that was her reference to corporations having to understand that the world will be different when the Democrats are back in power. I thought of this just a moment ago when you said that the Trump people were saying she’s basically doing something we’ve never done before. But I did note she was talking about those in the executive branch who enabled what she believed to be just intolerable executive branch behavior in this administration. She didn’t mention corporations, universities, law firms, the civil society sector. So it does seem that the suggestion that this is pure tit for tat isn’t quite true when matched against the record of the last two years. Would you comment on that?
Are you talking about Senator Slotkin?
I’m talking about Senator Slotkin. She didn’t go beyond those who were enabling the executive branch in the executive branch. She didn’t talk about a widespread strategy directed at civil society as well.
She did not, to my knowledge. I agree.
(10:45) You raised this question about what should the strategy of accountability be. And you think it should be focused on, or at least you suggest it may be focused on, transparency. And you have a doubt about avenues of legal redress based on how you read the experience of the last several years. And you point out that the avenue to legal redress will be blocked in part by the potential that Trump will issue thousands of pardons to protect himself and other self-pardons and pardons of who knows how many, but in the thousands. And that maybe that is, as you put it, a blessing in disguise. But wouldn’t his resort to this extraordinary self-protective pardon power, the way you describe it, just be an incentive to even more pushback—the use of state and local claims, the use of private civil actions, even more aggressive congressional investigations and hearings—precisely because he sought to insulate himself with a massive use of the pardon power?
So several points. There’s going to be a massive incentive—assuming the Democrats get in power in the presidency, and especially if they control both houses of Congress, in ‘29—there’s going to be a massive incentive for full legal accountability, whatever that means. And if the criminal options are open, I think they’ll be pursued. I think that President Trump will take steps to block that by issuing very, very, very broad pardons. I think there will be thousands of them. And so, as you say, that might block federal prosecutions, but it won’t block private actions to the extent that are available, although some private actions will be blocked by a pardon, depending on what remedies are sought—or state actions can be sought.
But I think beyond that, that every other tool—bar scrutiny, attempts to bring social pressure so that people can’t get jobs, to ostracize people—I think there’s going to be an effort to have maximum punishment to deter, as Senator Slotkin said. I think that should be expected by the Democrats. It’s clear that many of them are thinking it. My prediction is that that’s what will happen.
I think that—and this is very hard, and I want to acknowledge that this is very hard. There’s the path of full, maximum legal accountability. That path did not work very well from 2021 to 2025. In fact, I think it caused many of the problems we’re having now. It failed. And I don’t think that it’s going to be very fruitful for the country if we do that in yet another round. But I don’t think there’s anything that can stop it from happening to some large degree.
My preference would be, in the first instance, to have maximum transparency. I think the most important thing that we find out is what happened in the administration, both with regard to the executive branch abuses and also—I believe just as strongly—about Trump’s financial self-aggrandizement. But I don’t kid myself in thinking that that’s going to suffice. I don’t know if the pardons—just to finally answer your question—I don’t know if the pardons will lead to more legal actions on these other dimensions. It’s just very hard to know. I think it’s all going to happen to the greatest extent possible. And I think it’s going to be a mess.
(13:52) Well, let me ask you one last question on the rule of law point. This comes up a lot in conversations that I’ve had. And that is, if an administration—and I’m going to express what many Democrats and many independents believe to be true—if an administration behaves outlandishly, if it engages in overtly lawless behavior and is ruthless about it, and, by the way, along the way is also very corrupt in its conduct, then that is the administration that is likely to be most vicious in response to any attempt to hold it accountable. So you point out in your piece, Democrats have to be aware that whatever accountability regime they institute may be met down the road by another Republican administration looking to settle scores.
And Susan Rice said that that’s exactly what the Democrats should do as well. I mean, parts of both sides are saying that this is the right strategy for this behavior. I agree.
But if the concern in instituting that regime of accountability is, look, people like Trump will go to the limits to settle scores, so let’s, you know, let’s take a step back and be thoughtful about this—I mean, the thoughtfulness point is fair enough. However, doesn’t that just basically mean that the more vicious an administration, the more outlandish its conduct is, the more essentially gets away with it, because of the concern that that kind of politics, when it returns, is just going to exact an unacceptable cost? And therefore, any accountability regime has to sort of—I wouldn’t say tread lightly—but have to be very mindful of that. That seems like a huge concession to the kind of politics that we’ve seen Donald Trump practice.
Listen, I don’t like it. I agree completely. There’s no good solution here. But that exact argument was made in 2021. We have to bring accountability because Trump has acted so outrageously. We’ve got to do everything using every legal tool to put him away, to keep him off the ballot. And it went back before then about how his outrageous behavior required extreme means.
And I understand the argument. I mean, the argument is that the rule of law is hurt if outlandish behavior is not redressed and held accountable, and also that they, quote unquote, get away with it. And so I understand the argument. I understand the impulse. And that also comports with the other side’s desire for vengeance and winning and crushing the opponent and deterring and the like. And all these things get mixed up together. So I understand the argument.
And as I argued in 2021, and I think I was right about this then, I fear that what was happening to Trump was going to make the rule of law worse, was going to leave the Justice Department in a worse place, that it wasn’t going to succeed in its goals of vindicating the rule of law. And I believe that that same thing will happen again in 2029 if the argument you just made prevails.
But let me say that I get it, and I think there’s something to it, completely. And at some point, there are no good solutions. I will say that at some point there needs to be de-escalation, because the Republicans see the world—justifiably or not, they see the world exactly the opposite as the Democrats do. And they’re just as convinced of their worldview, and they’re just as convinced about the Democrats’ illegitimate actions against Trump. At some point, if we’re going to get out of this, there needs to be some sort of de-escalatory action.
And the tragic problem is, is that it’s very hard for one side to back down because of the types of arguments you’re making. And also because it’s considered unilateral disarmament that won’t be reciprocated. And there’s no way that it can be credibly committed to be reciprocated. And so I think basically that we’re in for rounds of this, which I think is going to be very destructive for our institutions, which are already fragile. I think we’re facing rounds of this stuff, basically until one side or the other is wiped out. And who knows when that might happen. But I just don’t think it’s a pretty future. I get the argument you made, and it was exactly the argument that was made in 2021, and it worked out terribly there, in my opinion.
(17:51) But people will argue about whether it did or it didn’t.
May I just say, is there any claim that the legal strategies against Trump vindicated the rule of law or left the Justice Department or the rule of law in a better place? I don’t see the argument.
Well, those who are unhappy about it will point to a whole host of things. I mean, there are all sorts of claims that they may make about obstacles that the administration faced in going about doing this in a dutiful and fair way—
All foreseeable.
Conceivably, including in the courts. But without necessarily going to that point, I would only say in your piece, you note that whatever accountability regime has to be exercised or has to be implemented with, as I think you put it, something to the effect of exquisite judgment. So one possibility is you could have the accountability without failure, or without perceived failure, if it’s just done the right way. And that will have to be part of the debate, too: not whether there is going to be accountability, but whether, in fact, it can be done in a fashion that at least mitigates some of the harms that you pointed out.
I agree with that completely. When I say that transparency should be the main task, I’m not suggesting there shouldn’t be legal liability for gross abuses of power. I think it needs to be done highly selectively in cases that are clear legal violations, where there can be a consensus that there were clear legal violations. And I would be very discreet and targeted in bringing that accountability. As I said a long time ago, I think that the documents case against Trump in his first term was much more justified than the January 6th case, for example, although that perhaps could have been conducted a little bit differently. So, yes, these things require exquisite judgment.
They require restraint, I believe. And it’s the restraint part that I think is just going to be very hard, because the Democrats are angry and they have incentives to be very aggressive. They have a good normative argument that you just made, and they have political incentives. And I think all of those things are going to push for very, very aggressive—a very, very aggressive response. And frankly, the Trump administration has responded to what they perceive has happened to them in such a—in my view—outlandish and abusive way that it’s understandable that the Democrats would want to do that. And then both sides are going to be on their high horses about how the other side is engaged in vicious, unprecedented weaponization. And that’s where we are.
Well, and you close your piece by saying it could be a bleak future. Thank you, Jack, very much.
Thanks, Bob.
