After Trump's speech "Organize yourselves, become active"

It is a thankless task. Every year, when the US President has delivered his State of the Union address to both houses of Congress to the always demonstratively enthusiastic applause of his own party colleagues , it is up to the respective opposition party to deliver a counter-speech - not in the same place, but somewhere, recorded on video or broadcast live, often in an office or a living room with a fireplace in the background.

The opposition party itself decides who gives the speech, and this year the US Democrats chose Elissa Slotkin. The 48-year-old, who was just elected to Washington as a senator from Michigan for the first time, rightly began her speech by saying that probably no one knows who she is.

Born in New York, she grew up on a farm in Michigan. Her mother was a lifelong Democrat, her father a Republican, but that was perfectly fine because shared values ​​are stronger than party affinities.

After graduating from school, she first studied sociology, then international relations, and learned Arabic at the same time. During the attacks of September 11, 2001 , she reports in her video response to Donald Trump's speech, she happened to be in New York, saw the twin towers of the World Trade Center collapse, and after that she realized that she wanted to work in the field of national security. This was followed by a job as a political analyst at the CIA, three deployments to Iraq, promotion to the staff of the Director of Intelligence, from 2007 Chief of Staff for Iraq Policy, and from 2011 in the Ministry of Defense.

In 2017, she returned to Michigan, founded a consulting firm, and in 2018 ran for the first time as a Democrat for a seat in the House of Representatives, which she then defended several times in a row, most recently with the support of Trump-renegade Republican Rep. Liz Cheney, before winning her Senate seat last year - after a close election campaign and in a state that Donald Trump clearly won.

Her answer, broadcast by several US TV channels directly after Trump's endless speech, lasted just over ten minutes. Her core message: Trump's policies only help his billionaire friends, everyone else will have to pay for it. And addressed to Trump opponents across the country: Don't give up, don't give up, don't retreat, but organize yourselves and take action. But she delivered it in a calm voice, without pathos or tearful personal stories, as Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the conservative governor of Arkansas, did last year when she responded to Joe Biden's last State of the Union address for the Republicans.

It is doubtful that this speech will make Slotkin a "rising star" for the Democrats, as the Democratic leader in the Senate, Chuck Schumer, subsequently put it. She is unlikely to play a role in the fight for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028.

And at least on YouTube, someone else has received more support than Slotkin, who also simply spoke a response to Trump into the camera: Bernie Sanders, left-wing senator from Vermont, took Trump's speech apart for over 20 minutes - it already has a few million views.