Two prominent Democrats offered sharply different messages on the use of government power against political opponents within days of each other, and, according to American Thinker, the contrast reveals a party comfortable with one set of rules for itself and another for everyone else. The conservative outlet, in a column by Andrea Widburg published October 18, argues that former President Barack Obama and Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) illustrated the double standard—Obama condemning what he called the selective targeting of a political ally, and Slotkin describing prosecutions as a tool to discourage young conservatives from entering public life.
Obama’s defense of Omar
Obama issued a statement defending Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) against an investigation that, according to his account, includes a search warrant approved by a Democratic judge. In the statement, Obama framed the matter as a fundamental test of American democracy.
“It is a basic principle of American democracy that the government can’t selectively target individuals simply because of their political beliefs or what they say. But that’s exactly what the Trump Administration is doing to Congresswoman Ilhan Omar of Minnesota,” Obama said, according to the column. He argued that Omar’s citizenship is not in doubt: she arrived in the United States with her father at age 12, and when he was naturalized five years later, she automatically became a citizen because she was 17—not 18, the age at which she would have had to apply separately.
Obama went on to describe federal agents raiding Omar’s home, confiscating personal records and seizing her phone, all in pursuit of what he called “a nonexistent smoking gun from 20 years ago.” He said the administration is trying to deport her “seemingly based solely on the unsubstantiated theory that she was actually 18 when her father was naturalized.”
He also placed the Omar case in a broader pattern, citing what he described as Justice Department actions against the New York attorney general, the former FBI director and members of the Federal Reserve—prosecutions he said “either stalled or were dismissed for having no basis in law.” Obama warned that if such targeting becomes normal, “there’s no reason to believe it will stop with her—or that future presidents, in either party, won’t do the same.”
American Thinker’s column was unimpressed by the rhetoric, calling Obama’s statement “banal” and “pontifical” and dismissing him as “so boring” despite his reputation as a great orator. The outlet’s core objection, though, was not stylistic. It argued that Obama’s appeal to principle sits awkwardly alongside Democrats’ own record—a point the column illustrated with a social media post accusing Democrats of having done “this” themselves and telling Obama to “STFU with your fake outrage hypocrite.”
Slotkin’s ‘deterrence message’
What made the alleged hypocrisy “so perfect,” in the column’s telling, was what Slotkin said at an event at the University of Chicago. According to a post from the campus event cited by American Thinker, Slotkin told the audience she hopes planned prosecutions of Republican leaders will frighten young conservatives away from politics.
“I want to look at these signature cases and not just focus on the president, but on the people who enabled him,” Slotkin said, per the column. “I want young people coming out of school to say, should I go work for the Trump administration? Like, that sounds fun. I might get an opportunity. 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. I want that deterrence message.”
American Thinker casts those remarks as an explicit threat to use the legal system to shape career choices—an ambition the column says goes beyond defeating individual opponents. “She doesn’t want to stop with taking down her opponents; she wants to destroy the party root and branch,” Widburg writes.
The charge of double standards
The column’s central claim is that Obama and Slotkin see no contradiction between their two positions because, in its words, “it’s never hypocrisy when Democrats do it.” It invokes the old saw that “if Democrats didn’t have double standards, they wouldn’t have any standards at all.” The outlet argues that for Democrats, “the only fixed principle is to attain and then keep power,” and that “anything in service of that goal is valid.”
To underline the point, Widburg reaches for a much-quoted line attributed to Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan: “Democracy is like a streetcar. When you come to your stop, you get off.” The column reads that sentiment as the essence of democracy as understood by “totalitarians of any stripe”—a means to an end rather than a governing principle.
That framing, of course, is the columnist’s opinion, not a neutral description of either Democrat’s stated views. Obama’s statement presents the Omar investigation as a departure from democratic norms, while Slotkin’s remarks—as quoted—describe deterrence through prosecution as a deliberate strategy. Whether those positions are contradictory depends on how one defines “political prosecution”: Obama’s objection is to targeting based on political beliefs or speech, while Slotkin’s stated aim is to deter participation in a particular administration by pursuing the people around it.
The column does not entertain that distinction. Instead, it closes by warning that the temptation to fight fire with fire carries its own moral risk. “The trick, of course, is to beat them back without ourselves becoming as immoral and hypocritical as they are,” Widburg writes. “The one thing we cannot do—and President Trump fully understands this—is show any weakness.”
Whether voters see the two statements as a contradiction or as a legitimate difference in emphasis may matter in the midterm fight ahead. For American Thinker, the episode is another entry in a familiar file: Democrats applying to their opponents standards they would never accept for themselves. For Obama and Slotkin, the arguments on the record are about protecting democratic norms on one hand and imposing consequences on the other. The distance between those two claims—just a few days apart—is the space the outlet is determined to exploit.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/10/obama-and-slotkin-it-s-never-hypocrisy-when-democrats-do-it/