As the United States deals with the economic effects of its ongoing conflict with Iran, Senator Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) made a clear warning on Saturday.She stated that the main danger to the country is not from foreign enemies.In a post on X on June 27, 2026, Slotkin, a Michigan Democrat and former CIA officer, said that the decline of the American middle class, which has been speeding up under the Trump administration, is a bigger threat to the country’s stability than any outside enemy.
Slotkin wrote, “The biggest national security threat facing the United States is not coming from China, Russia, or Iran.
It’s coming from inside the country.”
She explained how financial struggles directly lead to social problems and weaken democratic values.
She said when hardworking Americans can’t get ahead, it causes feelings of shame and anger, which can lead people to blame others who are different from them.
She said, “When people can’t get ahead, when you work hard and still can’t save money, can’t buy a house, can’t pay your bills, you feel shame and frustration.
And you look for someone to blame.Someone who doesn’t look like you, or talk like you, or pray like you.”
She added, “What we usually think of as the key to the American Dream, that by working hard you’ll eventually succeed, isn’t working anymore.
Gas prices, groceries, healthcare—everything is more expensive.It feels like an impossible climb.”
Slotkin finished by warning about the country’s social structure, saying, “We are a diverse country and I think that is one of our greatest strengths.
But diversity only holds when the dream underneath it is still alive.”
The economic situation she described is supported by recent data.
According to the Democratic National Committee, inflation has risen 4.1 percent over the last year, the highest in three years.Core inflation is up 3.4 percent, the biggest increase since 2023.The DNC says much of this rise is due to Trump’s economic policies and the war with Iran, which has increased fuel and fertilizer prices.
The effect on families has been big.
The cost of basic needs like gas, groceries, and healthcare has gone up by more than $3,100 for the average American family.Gas prices alone have gone up by $372, groceries by $310 in 2025.The job market has also worsened, with 97,000 jobs lost in May, the highest in any May since the pandemic.About 70 percent of Americans now don’t approve of Trump’s handling of the economy, and nearly 65 percent think the country is going the wrong way.
Kendall Witmer, DNC Rapid Response Director, said, “Donald Trump is destroying working families,” and added that the administration isn’t making things easier for regular people, but is pushing a “billionaire-first agenda.”
This is consistent with a message Slotkin has been making throughout her time in the Senate.
In September 2025, she said the nation’s economic security should be treated as national security, stating that the “existential threat to the United States is not coming from abroad” but from “the shrinking middle class here at home.” She made a similar point in a speech at the Center for American Progress in June 2025, when she warned that “if we lose the middle class, and by association the American Dream, we will lose our democracy and our American country.”
During a visit to Iowa in April 2026, she told a Democratic gathering that she believes “to my bones that the most important and dangerous national security threat to the United States is not coming from abroad,” calling the threat to the middle class and the American Dream “the most dangerous thing we face.”
Slotkin’s worries about the economy come as she continues to oppose the Trump administration’s military actions in Iran.
When U.S.and Israeli forces struck Iran on February 28, 2026, she warned against a long-term war.She said, “Unlike the U.S.strike on Iran back in June, this operation doesn’t appear to be a one-and-done,” and urged protecting U.S.soldiers and Michigan residents with family in the region.
By mid-March, with the conflict still going on, Slotkin supported a bipartisan War Powers Resolution that would require Congress to approve any military action against Iran.
She cited the loss of 13 U.S.soldiers, hundreds injured, and rising costs for gas and fertilizer as reasons to stop the cycle of military actions that have no end.
In April 2026, she criticized Trump’s plan for more military action in Iran, arguing that targeting civilians en masse would break the Geneva Conventions and the Pentagon’s War Manual.
Confronting Hegseth Directly
Slotkin has also taken her fight directly to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. At a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on April 30, 2026, she pressed Hegseth on whether he would deploy uniformed military personnel to seize ballots or voting machines during elections. When Hegseth dismissed the line of questioning as “yet another gotcha hypothetical,” Slotkin pushed back sharply, noting that Trump had expressed regret for not involving the military in contesting the 2020 election result. “You’re the guy here in the seat. It’s not hypothetical,” she told Hegseth. “Tell the American people, will you deploy the uniform military to our polls to collect voter rolls or machines?”
The hearing came as the administration’s war in Iran still had no defined goal and no end in sight, and as the Pentagon had purged nearly two dozen senior military officers. The conflict has cost an estimated $25 billion, according to Pentagon testimony — a figure that does not include damage estimates to U.S. bases in the region.
The Domestic Cost of Foreign War
Slotkin’s Saturday post threads together the threads of her broader argument: that the Iran war is not an isolated foreign policy debate, but a driver of the domestic economic pain she has long identified as America’s most corrosive threat. The $372 average increase in gas costs per household traced directly to the conflict illustrates precisely the link she has drawn between military adventurism abroad and suffering at home.
Slotkin has consistently positioned herself as a vocal opponent of Donald Trump while emphasizing that Democrats must present a positive vision rather than simply opposing him. In that context, Saturday’s post reads less like a political attack and more like a strategic argument — one that reframes the national security debate around kitchen tables rather than military maps, and places the cost of eggs and electricity alongside the threat of foreign missiles.
Whether that argument resonates with the working-class voters Slotkin has spent the past year courting across Trump-won states will likely be central to the Democratic Party’s posture heading into the 2026 midterm elections — and beyond.
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