Senator Chris Murphy: “This Is How Democracy Dies—Everybody Just Gets Scared”

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour.
I'm David Remnick. As Donald Trump carries out a radical plan to slash the federal government to a nub, no matter what the cost or who's going to pay it, his most obvious accomplices are congressional Republicans, politicians who, with almost no exceptions, will not dare risk his wrath or risk a primary challenge.
But also notable is the Democratic opposition or the lack thereof. In the House, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries says he won't swing at every pitch from the administration as though this were a baseball game.
Chuck Schumer's vote to back the Republican budget in order to avoid a government shutdown enraged many in the congressional rank and file. So the Democratic Party now seems paralyzed.
Senator Chris Murphy has emerged as one of the most vehement critics of what you might call the business-as-usual approach by the Democrats. Murphy says, We have months, not years, before American democracy is damaged beyond repair.
In other words, if there's an emergency,

act like it's an emergency.

I spoke with Senator Chris Murphy last week.

Senator, I wonder if we could try to define the crisis that we're in.

I'm of the opinion that the Trump administration

is intent on creating a kind of

American-style authoritarian situation. Do you agree with me? I do.
Long ago, the Republican Party decided that they cared more about power than they did democracy. That's what January 6th was all about.
Regardless of who won the election, they wanted to make sure that their person was in charge. They believe, and have long believed, that the Democratic Party progressives are an existential threat to the country, and thus any means justifies the end, which is making sure that a Democrat never again wins a national election.
So this seems pretty purposeful and transparent, this decision to rig the rules of democracy so that you still hold elections, but the minority party, the opposition party is rendered just weak enough and the rules are tilted towards the majority party just enough so that Donald Trump and Republicans and the Trump family rule forever. And, of course, this is not an unfamiliar system.
This is Hungary. This is Turkey.
This is Serbia. There are plenty of countries all around the world that hold elections.
It's just one party continues to win. And that's, I think, the very concrete, the very transparent plan that Trump and his White House are implementing right now.
Why do your Republican colleagues put up with this? Do they fess up to it when you talk to them in private? Yeah, they do not fess up to the plan behind closed doors. They are living in a self-created delusion.
Most of them will tell you that it's not as bad as you think. Yes, Donald Trump is acting in a way that previous presidents have not, but we will still have a free and fair election that what he's doing is not enough to topple essential democratic norms.

They are, of course, also deeply scared of him. They have worked very hard to become United States senators.
You know, I think this has only been going on for a couple of months. It's quite different from the first term.
How bad is this? And where is it going in your estimation? Well, we have months, not a year, before our democracy is rendered so damaged such that it can't be repaired. I do think that over the last four years, those surrounding Donald Trump put together a pretty thoughtful plan to destroy democracy and the rule of law, and you are seeing it being implemented.
Just in the last week, and you and others have covered this well, the assault has been trained on academia, institutions of higher education, and the legal community, the biggest law firms in this country.

In democracy after democracy, those two institutions, higher education and the legal profession, are in many ways the foundation that undergirds the rule of law.

Those are the places that think about the rule of law, that protect it, that warn when it is being undermined.

The legal profession is the place that contests efforts to try to destroy the rule of law.

And so it is not coincidental that that's where Trump is going first, that he is trying to force both higher education and the legal profession to capitulate to him and to commit, often through very explicit bilateral agreements, for the most important institutions to essentially quell protest. And, of course, what the administration is doing by taking on these very high-profile institutions is sending a warning to other law firms and to other colleges that if you take us on, if you file lawsuits against the administration, if you support Democrats,

if you allow for campus-wide protests against our priorities, you'll be next. And so what will happen here, what inevitably happens in every democracy in which this tactic is tried, is that they won't have to come after every institution or every firm because most of them will just decide in

advance to stay out of the way. And so when students are filing a petition for a massive

protest against the Trump administration policy, they may just find it much harder to be able to

exercise free speech on those campuses. This is how democracy dies, that everybody just gets

scared. You make a few examples and everyone else just decides to comply.
That brings us to the real crux of our conversation today, and that is the Democratic Party. What is the Democratic Party going to do about it? Because every indicator that I see in terms of public opinion polls are a widespread dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party.
What are the Democrats going to do in a concerted way in the Senate and the House? I mean, I think we're a pretty broken brand right now. And I think some of the folks don't, some of the people on the left don't want to go through that hard rewrite of what the Democratic Party stands for.
What's at the core of the brokenness, if we can be specific? Well, I think we have become the status quo party. And so we have reverted to defending democracy instead of explaining how we are going to break it down and reform it.
We have not been a pugilistically populist party where we name the people who have power and we build very easyunderstand solutions about how to transfer power to people that don't have it.

And then we're a pretty judgmental party filled with a dozen litmus tests.

We don't let you in unless you agree with us on kind of everything from gender rights to reproductive rights to gun control to climate.

We've got to be a party that invites people in as long as they agree with us on the basic economic message and build our party with a little bit more acceptance of people who have diverging views on social and cultural issues. Well, let's break that down.
How would that conversation and how would that process go about among the Democrats? Well, I think first is making the decision that economics is the tentpole and populist economics. That means that you are gonna have a party, frankly, that sounds a little bit more like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren.
You are talking about billionaires and corporate power. You are proposing really easy to understand ideas on how to shift that power, whether it be a cap on rent increases or a massive increase in the minimum wage or the regulation of every single drug price, not just the 10 highest priced drugs.
And then it is just making that decision to go out and ask people to come into the coalition who might not be with us on issues that I care about, like guns, and nominating candidates as a signal that the party is a big tent that are populist economically but may not line up with us on all the social and cultural stuff. So the Senate candidate that ran the furthest ahead of Kamala Harris in the entire country was Dan Osborne,

who was a union organizer, an economic populist, but, you know, somebody who, you know, prioritized those issues amongst all the others. I get that, but here's the dilemma.
If you read Martin Luther King's letter from Birmingham jail, he is addressing centrist or center left clergy and activists who are always counseling him. You have to wait a little longer.
You have to wait longer. It's not time yet.
And I think a lot of people, a lot of groups, and the most obvious one that Trump took advantage of in his ads were trans people. These are real, actual human beings who want their rights and who want their respect and they want to be able to exist in the world as easily as you and me.
Are we asking them to wait? No, we're not.

Listen, we're trying to win power so that we can protect those people. I mean, we just aren't going to be able to protect them if we don't.
If we mention them. No, if we don't build coalitions that allow us to win elections.
Listen, one of my colleagues, John Ossoff, gave a great speech

over the weekend in which, you know, he talked in the meat of his speech about the trans community. Senators get threatened with $5, $25, $50 million of opposition over individual votes on a whole range of issues.
And see, this is why things don't work for ordinary people.

It's not because of trans kids or woke college students.

It's not...

It's not because of our new arch enemy, Canada. That is a message that can win.
Can you explain the split we're seeing between Democratic senior leadership and more junior members of the party? Oh, I don't know that it really breaks down along generational lines, but I can explain to you what the basic argument is right now. And there are members of leadership who are on both sides of this question, but here it is.
Is this a normal moment where you can just keep on punching Donald Trump and pushing down his approval ratings and eventually win the 2026 election and set up a potential win in 2028? Or is there a pretty good chance that we're not going to have a free election in 2026? You believe that's a possibility? 100%. Oh, every single day, I think the chances are growing that we will not have a free and fair election in 2026.
What does that look like? It may not even be that, you know, the mechanics of the election are rigged. I'm not suggesting that there's going to be election officials out there stuffing ballots.
What I'm talking about is that the opposition, the infrastructure necessary for an opposition to win will have been destroyed, right? No lawyers will represent us. They will take down Act Blue, which is our primary means of raising small-dollar contributions.
They will have threatened activists with violence so no one will show up to our rallies and to our doorknock events. This is what happens in, you know, lots of democracies around the world.
The opposition is just kept so weak that they can't win. That's what I worry about being the landscape as we approach 2026.
And if you believe that, then everything you do right now has to be in service of stopping that kind of weakening or destruction of democracy. And so to me, the essential difference right now in the party is that some people think that that's a very low likelihood.
And so we should just engage in normal politics where we try to become more popular than Republicans. People like me believe that it won't matter if we're more popular than them because the rules won't allow us to run a fair election.
And so everything we should be doing right now, both inside the Capitol and outside the Capitol, should be geared towards trying to make Republicans stop this assault on the rule of law and democratic norms.

Senator Chris Murphy.

Just after we spoke as if on cue,

the president issued an executive order on voting that could disenfranchise millions of people. My conversation with Murphy continues in a moment.
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This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick, and I've been speaking today with Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut.
Earlier in our conversation, Murphy called the Democratic Party a broken brand.

And in thinking about what ails his party, its approval ratings, its losses at the polls,

its seeming lack of resolve, Murphy has joined the more radical wing of the party in castigating the influence of big money that corrupts our politics.

That's not necessarily a popular position in Murphy's home of Connecticut,

one of the wealthiest states in the union. We'll continue our conversation.
The Democrats ran in no small measure on the preservation of democracy, and that failed. Why do you have any confidence that the public would mobilize for democracy in the future, if not now? So, yeah, the public did not – we're not convinced by our argument in 2024 because we were shilling for the existing version of democracy, which is deeply corrupt, which does not work.
Trump is giving us this opportunity because this is the most corrupt White House in the history of the country. He's giving us an opportunity to run on an anti-corruption message, but we will only win if we actually run on an anti-corruption platform.
And so for me, the two things that matter most are populist economics and government reform. If Democrats run on cleaning up Washington with real actual plans to, for instance, get private money completely out of politics, to pass the Stock Act to make sure that not a single person inside government can use insider information to trade to benefit them financially, and we run on populist economics, I think that's a winner, and it's a way for people to stand up and support democracy, but only a reformed version of democracy.
You mentioned corruption. And we now have a situation where members of the Trump family earn tremendous fees from foreign governments.
Seems to me that that's a form of colossal corruption. And it's not something we don't know about.
It's published all the time. And then it falls into a black hole.
Why? Well, I think in part, I mean, Trump has been very effective in being so public about his corruption that it ends up with it being normalized. I mean, I'm just shocked that the Trump meme coin isn't like the only thing that we're talking about.
It's probably the most massive corruption scandal in the history of the country. You literally have a, I guess, legal open channel for private donations to the president and his family in exchange for favors.
And we just kind of think that it's part of Trump's right to do business in the White House. It's gross.
It's disgusting. It's deeply immoral.
And, you know, the fact that we didn't talk about that every hour of every day once he released that coin was, you know, kind of a signal to the country that we weren't going to take the corruption seriously. Senator Murphy, is Chuck Schumer the right leader for the Democratic Party in the Senate for this moment? He can be.
I mean, listen, it's not easy to be leader of this party. There are a lot of diverse views inside the caucus.
And I think the whole caucus has to make up their mind that we are going to start fighting, that we are going to not just do business as normal. As you know, Chuck Schumer's argument about voting the way he did on the continuing resolution was that if you shut down the government, it gives the Trump administration carte blanche for a potentially boundless period of time to do whatever they like in terms of shutting down agencies.
Not that they're not doing it to some degree now and to a great degree, but that it would be open season. The opposing point of view was let them do it, let them own it, which seemed to tumor a gamble that one couldn't take.
Listen, he has a compelling argument. I mean, it does feel odd for Democrats to protest Republicans shutting down the government by shutting down the government.
And it is also true that the president would have extraordinary powers during a shutdown. I came to a different conclusion.
I thought that the public would actually blame Republicans for the shutdown of government because they saw them shutting down the government. But it is true that voting no on the continuing resolution would have involved

a big risk for Democrats. But we need to be engaged in risk-tolerant behavior right now, because ultimately, the only way to save the democracy is for there to be a national public mobilization of not thousands, not tens of thousands, but hundreds of thousands of people when the five-alarm fire happens.

And if the public doesn't see us taking risks, tactical risks, daily risks, then they are not going to take what will be a risk on their part, standing up to a repressive regime where it's clear that the government is willing to make you pay a personal price if you exercise your voice. What kind of risks should you and your colleagues be taking right now going forward? So in the Senate, the minority has power.
You cannot proceed to any legislation without the consent of the minority. Now, we have regularly been providing the votes to the Republican majority to move forward legislation that they care about, including the continuing resolution.
We could choose not to do that. We could say to Republicans, unless you work with us on some targeted measures to prevent the destruction of our democracy, we are not going to continue to pretend like it's business as usual.
We can make that decision as a party. Now, that would mean that occasionally Democrats would need to vote no on legislation that on the merits they may support.
But if you think that democracy is the number one, number two, and number three story, then you have to act like it. And you need to show that you're willing to take a political risk, like voting against an otherwise popular bill, in order to increase and create leverage to try to save the democracy.
You mentioned the possibility of public involvement, public demonstrations, people out on the street. What would bring them there? Well, you know, there aren't daily political rallies happening in the country, but anytime you set one up, you're now seeing not thousands of people, but tens of thousands of people attend.
You saw what happened with Bernie and AOC over the weekend. I think they reached 30,000 at one of the rallies.
Well, and Senator Blumenthal, my colleague in Connecticut, was telling me he went to this, you know, tiny last minute Tesla protest at a dealership in Milford, Connecticut. And there were 600 people that essentially shut down Route 1 in Connecticut.
I mean, like people are ready to mobilize. We just haven't been organized enough to give them those opportunities.
And so this speaks to like the actual need of the Democratic Party right now.

Okay, we have to be better in our tactics

inside Washington,

but we actually have to build a political infrastructure

that can plug people in.

And that's what we've been really terrible

at doing over the years.

The Republicans have a permanent political infrastructure,

mobilizing, legal, messaging, intellectual.

The Democrats have a very thin permanent infrastructure.

So Democrats, because we raise money primarily from smaller and medium-sized donors, we don't have money until about six months before the election. But there's a consultant class in the Democratic Party, and until we break their grip on our party, we're going to continue to spend money badly.
Senator, you've been on TV a lot lately, to be frank. You've been out there quite a lot.
Are you in the process of asserting yourself for national office? No. And I actually think that to the extent my messaging has broken through a little bit more than others.
I ascribe that to the fact that there is not actually a personal motive attached to it. I think sometimes, even if you're not saying it out loud, people can kind of tell when you're putting yourself out there for personal political gain.
So just to be clear, you don't want to run for president ever. That job looks awful difficult to me.

I just would, if I could go down in history as somebody that sort of helped save American democracy at its most significant instance of peril, that would be good enough for me.

Senator, thank you so much.

Thanks a lot.

Chris Murphy has been the junior senator from Connecticut since 2013. I'm David Remnick.
Thanks so much for joining us this week. See you next time.
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