U.S. Senator Chris Murphy Talks with Anand Giridharadas on The.Ink Podcast

The day after Donald Trump's Nuremberg rally – oops, I mean his address to a joint session of Congress – I intended to write a Zenger's Newsmagazine blog post (my first in nearly four months) about the Führer's speech. Instead I stumbled on this post from The.Ink podcast with host Anand Giridharadas and U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut). Murphy's appearance here drew attention from the rest of the medla largely because of his prediction that the next few months will determine whether the U.S. remains a democratic republic or becomes an authoritarian oligarchy ruled in perpetuity by Donald Trump, his "hand" Elon Musk, and their ultra-rich cronies. But he had a lot more to say than that, including what it will take to get the Democratic Party to stand up for democracy and resist Trump's autocratic takeover with all the tools at their disposal. After I spent this afternoon transcribing this blog post, which you can watch at https://the.ink/p/watch-dem-senator-warns-us-may-be, I found myself wishing that last night, when Congressmember Al Green (D-Texas) was expelled from the speech for challenging the President's lies, the entire Democratic delegations of both houses of Congress had walked out in solidarity and staged their own event on the Capitol steps. Instead they once again succumbed to what Giridharadas calls their "politeness problem." – Mark Gabrish Conlan, March 5, 2025

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Anand Giridharadas: O.K., we are live. Hey, everyone pouring in. It takes a second for everyone to get in, but welcome to another live show of The.Ink. I’m very delighted to be here today with Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, who is no doubt familiar to many of you, and has been especially familiar in recent weeks as one of the most fiery and visible sources of opposition to the madness of the second Trump administration. So, Senator, thank you so much for making time to chat with us.

Chris Murphy: Yeah, awesome. Great to be with you.

Giridharadas: You know, you’re someone who’s in the arena, as the saying goes, but you’re also sort of unusually – you write books, you’re a student of American history, and also you’ve studied the various stages in the history of this country, through wars, crises, insurrections, fractures, serious things. I wonder at this hour how you would define this moment in that sweep. How would you define what this is that we are living through and how you would situate it in the sweep of the very serious things this country has been through in its history?

Murphy: Yeah. Listen, I’m very reluctant to engage in too much hyperbole here, but I think this is increasingly becoming the most serious moment since the Civil War. And I just think it’s a miracle that we have lasted as long as we have: 240 years of multicultural democracy. This is an absolutely revolutionary idea that gets pulled apart at its seams every generation or so, because it’s unnatural.

The idea that we would make decisions for ourselves instead of investing decision-making power in an hierarchical structure, which is what we do for mostly everything else that we care about in our lives, and that we would choose to live among people who are very, very different from us, even while our biology, millions of years baked in, tells us that we’re better off and safer retreating to our tribes.

So what we’ve done is unnatural: self-governance in a society that’s multi-religious, multi-ethnic, multi-racial. And so of course there are these times when folks get told it would just be a lot more efficient if one guy made all the decisions. We’d get stuff done a lot faster. And wouldn’t it be easier if we just kicked out everybody that doesn’t look and feel and sound like us? That’d be a lot simpler.

So I think that this is increasingly serious, because I think what you’re seeing is that a lot of people are actually very transparently up for that transition. There are a lot of people in this country, and a lot of the folks who now occupy positions of power in the United States Congress, who don’t even need to defend democratic norms and democracy. This idea that took root within the “conservative” movement maybe a decade ago that democracy is outdated and antiquated, and needs to be replaced by a CEO model, is now pretty mainstreamed.

And I think we have to realize that we need to confront it head-on, instead of sort of thinking that Republicans are really for democracy in their hearts, but are being cowed into silence by a really strong leader. We need to understand that actually now a lot of them, more than you’d think, are on board for this whole transition. And that’s why we have to take it head-on.

Giridharadas: That comparison you make, which I think is valid, to the most serious crisis since the Civil War. Obviously we know how that one was resolved. I don’t think anyone thinks that that kind of way of resolving this one would be what anyone wants, or certainly what you or I would want. But I’m curious for you, maybe to speak personally first. How have you – I think we’ve all witnessed you, it’s not to say you were a wallflower before, but I think we’ve witnessed you go through something publicly in the last few weeks.

You’ve been very clear about a lot of things for a few years, but I think we’ve all seen you go through something, and you’ve become very visible to maybe people who didn’t know you two months ago, outside your state. Can you talk about what kind of experience you’ve gone through to get to that place of realizing the gravity, in spite of how seriously you took it before? What has been your kind of radicalization around this in the last few weeks, and how have you changed?

Murphy: Well, as you know, I’ve spent a lot of the last two or three years just stepping back and doing a lot of thinking about the spiritual state of the country. And I think I came into this moment maybe understanding, better than some other people, how angry and anxious this country is, and how many people are in a truly revolutionary mood. And so for me, it made sense that there were a lot of folks in this country who were really willing to entertain the idea of throwing out 240 years of democracy.

Now that’s not the majority of the country, but it’s a strong, powerful minority. And listen, I’ve been pretty angry at my party for not sort of realizing the spiritual unspooling that was happening in America and finding ways to plug into it in a more powerful, more constructive manner. But I also watched very carefully over the last four years, as the anti-democratic “conservative” movement very methodically put together a plan and an infrastructure to make sure that they were able to seize this moment.

I think a lot of folks thought that Trump 2 was going to be like Trump 1. Just a lot of bluster. We’d survive. But I watched them get ready for this moment. And so I’m just convinced that they are operationalizing, as we speak, a plan to convert our democracy into something fundamentally different: an oligarchy, a kleptocracy, in which only a handful of people have power, and the rest of us are just pawns for profit and gain to that small set of elites.

And so all of the moves that have been made – the targeting of independent journalists, the conversion of our justice system into an exercise in forcing loyalty to Donald Trump, the normalization and endorsement of political violence – they are not all just sort of random points on a map. They all exist on a continuum, part of an effort ultimately to try to install Donald Trump and his family in power permanently.

And I think this has been coming. The groundwork has been laid for this moment for four years, and I am just absolutely confident that it is as grave and as significant as the crises that we faced 150 years ago.

Giridharadas: You know, I don’t know if you can see the chat, but what’s emerging in the chat is a lot of people listening to that, I think, appreciate you personally and, from what they’ve seen, you reflect the gravity. I think it is no surprise to you that most people watching this, and I think most Democrats out there, feel completely abandoned by the vast majority of your colleagues.

I think, to characterize it loosely, there is a sense of being texted a lot for $5 by Democrats, often sometimes by people who have hundreds of millions of dollars in their own bank accounts, asking you for $5. And then, when we’re living through what you say is the most serious crisis since the Civil War, they’re just not there, right? And I’m sure you could point to things someone said in the committee and things that are being done that we just don’t know about.

But I think you probably sympathize with the broad feeling, that I’m sure you’ve heard from your constituents and others, that basically people feel completely undefended by the Democratic Party in the worst crisis since the Civil War. So let’s say you’re an exception to that, which I think most people would agree with. Just put it as bluntly as you can: what is going wrong with your party that they are leaving so many of their most loyal supporters feeling this way?

Murphy: Well, I think there’s a lot of things going on. One is that it’s a lot easier to get up in the morning if you convince yourself that everything is going to be O.K., right? It’s a lot easier to sort of go do your job if you think that all of these things are just random points on a grid, and that this is going to look a lot like the first four years [of the Trump Presidency] looked. If you actually think that we are months away from the destruction of our democracy, such that it is irreversible, man, that requires a different level of energy when you wake up every morning: a different level of urgency that frankly not everybody inside the Democratic political infrastructure has.

I think it’s also true that when you get to this level of power, you start to care deeply about the institutions and you want to protect your institution. And so here in the Senate there’s still a lot of talk about working with Republicans and not fighting Donald Trump on everything, because we want to make sure that the Senate is preserved as a place where bipartisanship can happen.

But that’s illogical when you’re fighting against a would-be tyrant who doesn’t give a shit about institutions or norms, and is willing to shatter every single one. If the rest of the field is burned to the ground and the Senate still stands on the top of a pedestal, what does it matter? So for me, it was easy to say I’m not voting for any of Trump’s nominees, I’m not expediting any of these nominees, until this constitutional crisis is solved. I’m not going to be complicit in populating an administration by people who are going to violate the rule of law.

And then the last thing is it’s hard when you’re fighting liars. It really is. I mean, we do hold ourselves to some concept of truth, and provable truth. And so I think it has caused us not to be clear about what is likely happening, because we’re not absolutely sure. Right, like what is Musk doing inside the Treasury right now? Do we have irrefutable proof that he is stealing people’s data in order to enrich himself, or ultimately to withhold your Social Security benefits because you posted something ugly about him on Twitter?

Like no, I don’t have the smoking gun, but why should I give them the benefit of the doubt? Why do they deserve the benefit of the doubt about anything? I am going to lay out the worst-case possible scenario because I think the worst-case possible scenario is the most likely one. But a lot of Democrats, until they have that smoking gun, don’t want to leap to conclusions. So I think those are a set of factors that play into people’s frustrations that not everybody in the party is talking the same way.

Giridharadas: Does what you just said justify leadership changes in the House and the Senate immediately?

Murphy: I think the Senate and the House are stepping up here. I think you have seen my colleagues come to the decision, almost to a person, that they are not going to support these nominees. I think you will see a very vigorous effort to oppose the upcoming reconciliation bill, which is their attempt to steal money from the rest of us [and] cut Medicare and Medicaid benefits to fund their tax cuts. So I think you are going to see Democrats starting to rise to this moment, and I’m going to continue to try to rally them to rise to this moment.

Giridharadas: But I think people are asking in the chat specifically about Senator [Chuck] Schumer and [House Democratic] leader [Hakeem] Jeffries. If you’re right about [us being] months away [from losing our democracy], if you’re right about [this being] the worst crisis in 150 plus 60 years, is it time at least to think about new leadership in terms of either of them?

Murphy: I think they both have very difficult jobs. I wish that all 47 Senate Democrats were really easy to sort of marshal and push into one direction, but they aren’t. We have a diverse cast of characters, and so our leadership is pretty easy to critique from the outside. It’s harder to operationalize on the inside. And remember, leadership doesn’t only come from the folks that have the official titles. Leadership comes from AOC. Leadership comes from Jasmine Crockett. Leadership comes from me, right, from other Senators. So I think the job is harder than people think. And I think that leadership comes from a variety of different places.

Giridharadas: I wanted to ask you about the kind of broader point that people were making last year, when there was debate about whether President Biden should stay on the ticket. And I think it’s come up again in what you’re talking about now, which is the question about whether Democrats have a “culture of politeness” problem that prevents the stating of hard truths. [Murphy nods.]

You and I have spoken in the past about the “subtlety problem,” which is a slightly different thing about picking fights. But I’m talking about a culture of politeness, where things everybody was saying in group chats about President Biden’s capacity were not being said out loud. Things maybe everybody is saying privately about this moment don’t necessarily reflect what they say in front of the cameras. Is there a politeness problem that needs to be shaken off, given the stakes that you’re talking about?

Murphy: That’s a good question. I’ve never really thought about it as a “politeness problem.” But, listen, there certainly has been a shaming exercise that has happened inside the party on folks that get too far out of the conventional wisdom. In retrospect, though I didn’t support his candidacy, [Biden’s primary opponent] Dean Phillips understood something about where the American public was that it took the rest of us far too long to understand.

Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren still get shamed by the mainstream of the Democratic Party because they are “dangerously populist,” even though they are plugged into the actual conversations that people are having in this country about … [Sound cuts out at this moment, 15:01, and doesn’t resume until 15:48.]

Giridharadas: Thank you all for joining in while we’re waiting. And I’m glad we’re getting to have this conversation. I think this is a very blunt and plain-spoken conversation. All right, let’s see if we can get him back. … [At 17:54:] I think this has been a really fascinating conversation thus far, and I think even news-making, I would say. I need to kind of process everything we’ve been hearing, but it’s been a really powerful and clear message, and I think it’s kind of been a benchmark for what we should expect to hear from Democrats in general. I mean, this should be the basic floor of what we think. …

Giridharadas [Returns with Murphy at 19:32]: O.K. I was telling the good people, while we were waiting for you, that this is the problem when the tech oligarchs are the people doing the constitutional crisis. It’s not so helpful. It would be better if they were in the furniture business, or something.

Murphy: No, at worst they are watching us and interfering with content they don’t like. At best, they’re just not paying attention to their technology because they are spending all of their time trying to destroy the FAA [Federal Aviation Administration].

Giridharadas: Exactly, and a quite perfect time to do that, also. I wanted to ask you a little bit about the new chair of the Democratic Party [former Minnesota Democratic chair Ken Martin]. There was a question of how fundamental should the change be. That was litigated during the actual election. You had quite a range of voices from the Bernie Sanders wing of the party, to the moderates.

And there was some debate about whether Ken Martin, the new chair, said that the message was kind of great and mostly fine versus more of an overhaul. What is the process at this point, do you think, of really rethinking the party in the way that you were trying to do in the last few years, and now with greater urgency? It’s obviously really difficult to do when you’re running 80 miles an hour. How can this happen right now?

Murphy: So, I mean, a) I don’t think we should overhype the power of the Democratic National Committee. It has never been a thought leader inside the Democratic Party. I’m not saying it isn’t relevant. I weighed in on behalf of another candidate, because I do think it’s important to have the right person there. But I think Ken Martin will do just fine and will be a very good party chair.

But yes, it does feel overwhelming. There was this – and it still exists – this meme, this idea that the resistance didn’t work in 2017, and so we shouldn’t do it again. And in part, because people want to focus on a bigger project, which is rebuilding the Democratic Party brand and winning back all those working-class voters – and, I mean, I’ve talked a lot about that as well. I think the problem is we actually have to do the resistance and rebuild the party, and we have to do both at the same time. And I actually don’t think there’s a choice.

The resistance, to my mind, worked. I mean, we didn’t stop the big tax cut in 2017, but we stopped the repeal of the Affordable Care Act. We literally saved tens of thousands of lives. We won in the midterms in 2018. We beat him in 2020. Did it solve the underlying problems in the party? No, but there were political wins, and really big ones. There were policy wins, and some really big ones. So I think you’ve got to do that again so that you shave the edges off of their policy agenda, and ultimately you put yourselves in the best position to win in 2018 [sic].

But we have to rebuild the party, because the party brand is just fundamentally broken. We are the party of elites. We are the party of the status quo right now. We are the party of market-based reforms. And people want really big revolutionary economic change. They want the system unrigged. They want their democracy unrigged. And right now we are not the party selling that convincing message.

So I admit that these are two big projects that have to happen simultaneously. Rebuild some form of the traditional political day-to-day resistance, and convince folks that we cannot run back the Democratic Party that got our clocks cleaned in 2024. We’ve got to build a new party.

Giridharadas: One idea – so there’s obviously, in what you said, that there’s the idea of actual, substantive policy, proposing much bigger, bolder things than in the past. And then there’s also the question that you and I have spoken about in the past, of just how you communicate ideas and connect with people in the kind of revolutionary mood you’re talking about? And that communication has, again, seemed incredibly fractured in recent weeks, as we’re going through this very serious thing? Again, people will turn to you, people will turn to AOC, but just very fractured.

One idea that’s been proposed is creating some kind of unorthodox thing of a single point of communication. Some people have suggested Pete Buttigieg, who’s kind of out of government right now, do a daily response, or various shadow Cabinets. I’m sure you’ve heard a lot of these proposals. Do you think any of those things are interesting, as a way to solve this problem of so much bile being thrown at people, and people not really having a clear response?

Murphy: Not really. I’m all for people searching for new ideas, but that just sounds like something else for people to compete over. If you were to create a shadow Cabinet and you had to pick Democrats to be in each one of those positions, you’d have to come up with a process. There’d be campaigns, and there’d be back-room efforts to try to be the shadow Secretary of Defense. I mean, it would be a lot of wasted energy, and I’m not sure ultimately it would result in the best people being in those positions.

I mean, what’s happening now is a little meritocratic. I mean, the folks who are having the more amplified voices are the folks that are just more plugged in with the actual emotional Zeitgeist of the country. And I don’t necessarily have a problem with a moment in which the folks that are portraying the kind of urgency that the American public wants are the folks that actually are being kind of self-selected by the movement in the country as leaders inside the party.

Now, do I think that we have an information distribution problem? Yes. But I think that that is something that needs to be solved in a really thoughtful, well-planned way. We don’t have the echo chamber that Republicans have because they spent money on it, and we didn’t. We spent a billion dollars – two billion dollars – in the last election, and most of that was on 30-second TV ads. That was a horrible mistake.

We should be building the kinds of permanent, owned media, the permanent set of influencers and amplifiers, that the Right has. That should be our project, not coming up with a sort of bullshit “shadow Cabinet.” Sorry. If that’s your idea, I feel bad about it now.

Giridharadas: Not at all. So you’ve talked about blanket holds as something that you’ve discussed. Senator Schatz of Hawai’i has talked about that also. Are there other things beyond that, that are kind of tactics in your arsenal? Maybe ones we haven’t been talking about, maybe more serious ones than that? Are there tools besides that, that you have in mind to, if you say we’re possibly a few months away from irreversibly losing democracy, what else have you got besides blanket holds?

Murphy: Listen, there are a limited number of tools in our toolbox as the minority party in the Senate and the House. The House has very few. The Senate has a handful. One of them is just kind of gumming up the works and making things take a little bit longer, but that tactically only prevents nominations or legislation from occurring by hours.

The other is just to signal that we are not being complicit in any of this, and we’re not going to support them doing anything legislatively, or we’re not going to support any nominations, until they take seriously the destruction of our democracy and the handover of our government to billionaires. And so I at the same time don’t want to overhype what we can do internally, while also telling my colleagues, “You better do everything you can do.” And that’s still an internal debate. I mean, there are still a lot of my colleagues who are voting for these nominees because they’ve got a lot of reasons they do that. But one of them is that they don’t think that our internal day-to-day tactics don’t translate to the outside; that nobody pays attention to what happens inside the Beltway.

I don’t think that’s true. I’m not saying everybody pays attention to whether there’s 47 of us or 21 of us voting against the nominee to go to the Department of Agriculture. But I do think that the most committed activists don’t love it when the Democratic Party isn’t putting up the loudest fight that they can. And if we aren’t putting up a loud fight, then they aren’t willing to give four hours or six hours or eight hours or 12 hours a day to the fight.

And when that inner ring of the most committed activists aren’t doing that, the next ring of potential committed activists aren’t stepping in. So I think that there are ripples that start here in the United States Senate, and so that’s why I argue to use every tool that we have, because I actually do believe that over time, that’s one of the tactics that helps build a meaningful, loud national opposition with scope.

Giridharadas: Two more things before I let you go. I know your time is limited, and you’ve been generous with it. When you look at the “Musk coup” element of this surprising Presidency already, I’ve talked to scholars of fascism who’ve said, “I’ve seen every trick in the book, but this thing feels actually quite unprecedented and hard to imagine: planting a very rich man as your sort of boss.” Do you believe that Elon Musk has broken federal laws, as far as you’ve seen the reporting, what you know to have happened in recent weeks? And should he be prosecuted for that, if so?

Murphy: I don’t know that he’s broken federal criminal laws. Certainly, they have smashed statutory protections for agencies. They have violated the Constitution. I don’t know whether he has broken individual criminal laws. And part of it is that they have cloaked this entire thing in secrecy, between the firings of the inspectors general, the gag orders, the intimidation of the press.

And we haven’t even talked about that: the fact that it’s just not clear that the press is asking the kinds of questions that they might otherwise, because the owners of these outlets are deeply scared of President Trump and Elon Musk. So there may be criminal statutes that have been violated, but I don’t know that to be a fact.

Giridharadas: I want to end by talking about what people can do. I mean, obviously I was pressing you and your party on what you can do for people, But obviously this is a democracy, and at the end of the day people need to make their own voices heard and pressure people to do things. People know the usual: call your representative, call folks that you know. There were protests yesterday [February 17, Presidents’ Day], as you know.

I think a lot of people are at a loss. I think a lot of people really don’t understand, because it’s not just a hijacking by 100 people. It’s a hijacking by 100 people with, as you said, the support of a significant number, tens of millions of people creating protection around the hijacking. What can people do, besides the obvious stuff that they know to do?

Murphy: Yeah, I think the obvious stuff that people know to do still works. And I think there are a lot of folks out there who doubt that, right? There were protests yesterday with hundreds of people, some with thousands, but not necessarily the size and scope that you would think this moment would demand. And I think that is due to the fact that a lot of folks don’t think that it has impact and influence – and it does.

The only route through this crisis is the mobilization of the public. Political gravity still exists in this country. It works a little bit differently than it did 10 or 20 years ago. But if the public is mobilized, it can and will have an impact. Because ultimately it may not persuade Elon Musk to stand down, but it will start to eat away at enough Republicans so that everything they want to do becomes a little bit harder; so that there is finally a little bit of legislative friction against the tasks that they are undertaking.

Donald Trump’s net popularity has come down by about six or seven points already. If that drops by another six or seven points because of our mobilization, well, then that frays a bit the hold that he has on the party. The only route through this crisis is the mobilization of the public. Now, right now, joining groups like Indivisible and Move On, calling, showing up, all of that matters. Volume matters.

I remember back in 2017 when their number one agenda item was to repeal the Affordable Care Act. And they didn’t do it only because we mobilized; only because, in the end, we made just enough Republicans realize that this was not going to be worthwhile for them politically. That works now. Now, ultimately, if they completely break this thing – and I think that comes by the transparent, brazen violation of a court order, and most significantly an order from the Supreme Court – then we have to talk about a wholly different set of tactics. And I don’t think that we need to cross that bridge right now.

But if we are at a moment in which they have just completely and brazenly taken control of the government without any regard to the judicial branch, then we have a different conversation about the kinds of things that citizens should be doing. But right now, traditional political mobilization can, and I think will, work. But we need more people than hundreds out at these protests. And part of that is our job: to have more people talking like me to convey the sense of urgency that will convince people to mobilize.

Giridharadas: There’s some talk among people [who] have suggested a general strike. Is that something you think people should look at?

Murphy: I think when we talk about those elevated tactics, right – general strikes, civil disobedience – I think people will know the moment when it comes. I will not tell you we are there yet, and you frankly don’t want to promise that you can do something that you can’t. So I think you’ve got to be very thoughtful and well-planned in those kinds of actions. I don’t think we’re there yet. If the moment comes, people will know it.

Giridharadas: Before I let you go, a lot of people appreciate your leadership right now. Are you thinking about running for President, and are you including – or beyond that – what would be your kind of commitment to people if this continues to get the very bad trajectory that you’ve talked about? What is your kind of vow to people about how you’re going to defend people who are feeling very defenseless?

Murphy: Yeah, I don’t know. You asked me the question at the beginning about why are people paying attention to me now. I think it’s in part because I legitimately don’t have a personal agenda here. Like, I do not wake up every day thinking about my political future. I’ve got two kids whom I want to see grow up in a democracy, and I see it, right? I just have a vision of how dangerous this moment is. I have clarity.

I have existed in politics for a long time, plagued by a lot of grey. There are a lot of moments in my political career in which I saw my side, and I also saw their side. And, you know, no. I see what they are doing, and what they are doing is evil. And so I wake up every day speaking authentically and urgently, in part because I’m not thinking about sort of my next move here. I’m just – I will be satisfied if, at the end of the day, democracy is still here four years from now and we actually have a free and fair election for President.

And my commitment is just to not be afraid. That’s my only commitment. I mean, you can imagine the kinds of calls that we get into this office, given that political violence has been normalized, and given the fact that I’m out there talking in a way that not everybody else is talking. And so my only commitment is just to not be afraid in a way that a lot of other institutional players are clearly acting scared. I’m just not going to do it.

Giridharadas: I think many people here would join me in saying we hope that your attitude is contagious among your colleagues, and that you’re able to be an influence on them. Thank you so much for taking time to chat with us today, and for your voice in this time.