Slotkin’s Story Unravels With Time
Pull a thread, any thread, and the Slotkin family quilt unravels a little bit more.
This much we do know: There is a woman named Elissa Blair Slotkin. She’s a Democrat, a congresswoman, and running for the U.S. Senate.
Everything else is questionable or untrue.
Slotkin’s Green Acres is just a house with an empty field. There’s not a corn stalk or soybean planted at her Holly home, and there hasn’t been a head of cattle there since Jimmy Carter was president.
Yet the tall tales of Elissa Slotkin, country farmer, continue on the campaign trail. She continues to take a property tax exemption for the farming she does not do.
In front of a group of farmers, Slotkin didn’t let the facts get in the way of a good story.
She looked them in the eye and said she was one of them. She inflated her 10-acre spread to 300 acres, including an adjoining property where there is also no farming done.
Slotkin also claims her father, Curtis, is a Republican. She said so on the debate stage against Rogers. This is meant to offer Slotkin an air of bipartisanship, as if her ability to reason with Republicans is congenital.
When Slotkin made her closing argument in the Oct. 8 WOOD-TV debate, she used Curtis’s story as a platform.
“Let me make one particular appeal to the Republicans watching today, like my dad,” Slotkin said. “For the Republicans who feel like their party has left them over the last few years, you will always have an open door in my office. You will always have a place at the table, because I want to hear from you.”
But Curtis’s donation record says otherwise. Even the Lincoln Project guys, who have claimed to be saving the Republican Party from its nominee in the last three races, used to be Republicans. There’s no proof Curtis ever was one, except his daughter saying so.
Federal Election Commission records show that Curtis has made donations to each of his daughter’s four campaigns: seven contributions, totaling $17,600. This is expected.
Mike McCray Sr. was a captain on the 1988 Ohio State football team. When his son Mike Jr. went to Michigan, Mike Sr. became a Michigan fan and wore maize-and-blue. We do things we would never expect for the ones we love.
Even if we give Curtis grace for donating to his daughter, other donations make less sense for a Republican.
Curtis’s two other federal contributions were made in 2020, when he made two $500 donations to the Biden Victory Fund on Oct. 6. If he made that donation on Jan. 7, 2021, I’d get it. It could be argued as a statement against Trump, specifically.
But an Oct. 6, 2020, donation to Biden? That’s not crossing the aisle. That’s not taking a stand. That’s a Democrat donating to a Democrat.
Curtis’s campaign donations within Michigan tell the same story. In 2008 and 2016, he donated to University of Michigan regent candidate Lawrence Deitch. He made two donations totaling $1,125 to Deitch, who is a fellow Bloomfield Hills resident and a Democrat.
In June 2020, Curtis donated $500 to Gretchen Whitmer’s re-election campaign.
My colleague J.Z. Delorean pulled another thread in the quilt this week, taking on a story Slotkin tells often: That medical debt drove her mother into bankruptcy.
It’s a sad story, it’s just not a true story. The Michigan media has printed and reprinted the Judith Slotkin story, as told by Elissa. Turns out, the documents paint a different picture.
Delorean wrote: “Enjoyer found federal court records that did verify Judith Slotkin filed Chapter 13 bankruptcy 16 years prior to her passing in 1995; however, no medical debt was found to be discharged. In fact, the bulk of her debt appeared to be owed to business associates, property management vendors, and credit card companies.
“No evidence was found indicating a bankruptcy in the years leading up to Judith Slotkin’s passing, and no evidence was found indicating she or her domestic partner were struggling with mounting medical bill debt as a consequence of her terminal cancer.”
The Slotkin family farm exists only in speeches on the campaign trail.
Curtis Slotkin, Republican patriarch, is not a thing, and never was.
And Judith Slotkin’s bankruptcy was not driven by medical debt.
Pull a thread. Any thread. If Elissa Slotkin is talking, another piece of her narrative will soon unravel.
James David Dickson is host of the Enjoyer Podcast. Join him in conversation on X @downi75.