If you could measure the Democrat Party’s appetite for weaponizing the government against Donald Trump, it’s always been at ten. They impeached him twice, and tried to put him prison… multiple times. Well, they’ve they’ve cranked the dial to 11, and they’re no longer satisfied with going after Trump himself.

They want everyone who works for him, and may work for him, too.

And Trump knows it’s coming.

In an interview with Time earlier this month, the magazine asked Trump whether he'd consider pardoning administration officials if Democrats regain power and come after them. "Yeah, sure I'd do that," Trump said. He pointed to former President Joe Biden, who handed out preemptive pardons in the final hours of his presidency.

Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) just made Trump's case for him.

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Speaking October 13 at the University of Chicago during a live taping of Vox's America, Actually podcast with editorial director Astead Herndon, Slotkin laid out how Democrats plan to deal with Trump and the people who serve under him.

This should terrify anyone who values a free country.

"I want to look at these signature cases and not just focus on the president, but on the people who enabled him," Slotkin said in a 26-second clip of the exchange that began circulating Saturday. "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.'"

She kept going. "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,'" she continued. "I want that deterrence message sent."

Slotkin calls it a "deterrence message." What it actually is is a warning that, as far as Democrats are concerned, working for Trump is a crime that merits punishment. The students she described haven't done anything. Some of them may never work in politics at all. Slotkin hasn't accused a single one of them of wrongdoing, yet she wants the threat of prosecution hanging over their career choices before they ever accept a federal job working in the Trump administration.

Think about that for a second. A sitting U.S. senator wants to frighten young Americans away from public service by dangling criminal exposure over their heads. How evil and authoritarian is this? This is what weaponization of government really looks like.

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The Chicago remarks built on a blueprint Slotkin unveiled two weeks earlier at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. There, she urged Democrats who return to power to assemble a list of "signature cases," modeled on Poland's "Iron Broom" campaign.

Make no mistake about it, Democrats have already picked their targets for prosecution, and actual evidence of wrongdoing isn’t even required. The hypocrisy is staggering. Slotkin once denounced this exact kind of legal pressure as authoritarian intimidation when it was aimed at her for an actual crime. Curiously, she didn’t have a problem when the Biden administration arrested Trump repeatedly in the hopes of putting him in prison and stopping his return to the White House. Now that her party sees a chance to wield that power again, she's openly bragging about pointing it not at President Trump and people who work for him, but at recent college graduates who might consider working for the Trump administration, preemptively declaring them guilty.

A party that claims to be saving democracy from authoritarianism has decided that serving in the other side’s government is itself a punishable offense. That is how free countries stop being free. If Democrats treat every election victory as a license to weaponize the government against their political enemies, we won’t have a republic for much longer, just an endless cycle of revenge.