Marc Elias: Senator Chris Murphy, welcome back to Defending Democracy.
Chris Murphy: What's up, man? Thanks for having me back.
Marc Elias: All right, so we are at a strategic inflection point in our nation's history. We have Donald Trump in office. You have been one of the strongest, loudest, most morally clear voices about what we face in America today at the hands of Donald Trump and his authoritarian regime. As we're recording this right now, we are still in a government shutdown. You have been very clear-eyed about that as well. Tell us what you see as the stakes right now, what you see as the path forward for people who want to be fighting against Donald Trump, and how you are approaching this moment.
Chris Murphy: I think it's a moral moment. And Trump's behavior inside the shutdown is showing you exactly how serious the stakes are. Hours after the government shut down, the president announced that he was basically canceling spending in states represented by Democrats as a mechanism to try to bully his political opposition into submission by hurting the people in our states. That is, of course, exactly why the founding fathers put the spending power in the hands of Congress, not in the hands of the president, because they had watched a king use the power of the purse to try to reward loyalists and to try to punish opponents.
If we normalize that behavior by voting for a budget for the coming year that funds the death of our democracy, that funds the pursuit of the president's political enemies, that allows him to corrupt the spending that's allocated by Congress for his own political purposes, then I don't know that we'll have a functioning democracy by next November. I think it's that serious. I don't know that we have sort of crossed the Rubicon yet, but we're pretty damn close right now.
This is a moment to say, loud and clear, no, we don't want to fund a budget that destroys healthcare for people. So yes, part of the price of admission for Democrats is that we don't increase healthcare premiums on people, but it is also very important to us that we don't provide a bipartisan endorsement of his corruption, of his criminality. So we need reforms in this budget that protect against this country slipping from a democracy to an autocracy. It's a big moment. It's a really big moment. But I believe that the country is with us. I think the early polling around the shutdown shows that people know what the stakes are and don't want Democrats to give in. And I hope the Democrats will stay united.
Marc Elias: There's been a lot of discussion about healthcare and it is clear that the White House and the Republicans, I think, understand they are on the wrong side of this issue. You know, the idea that they want to raise the cost of healthcare is just incredible. And I think that is where the polling shows. You mentioned though something that I want to make sure that everybody who watches this video understands, which is that Donald Trump has taken the position, as far as I can tell, that he can spend or not spend the money that he is told by Congress to spend, which for those of us who took basic civics in grade school know that Congress appropriates, Congress passes laws and tells them to spend money, and that his job is to take care that the laws are faithfully executed. Literally, that's it. His job is to take care that they are faithfully executed. So can you just unpack for people what the threat to democracy is on that issue?
Chris Murphy: He is the leader of what is called the executive branch, right? Because they are in charge of executing the laws, not making the laws. This is the genius of our founding fathers. Our founding fathers knew that if you gave a single individual the power to decide where spending happens and where it doesn't happen, then that is a road to despotism because that individual could use that money to, as I said earlier, reward people who are loyal to him and punish people who are disloyal to him. That is how a democracy crumbles. And so they said, no, the Congress, which represents everybody, which is representing every faction in the country, that's where the spending is going to be decided. And the president just has to execute on the budget that Congress writes.
What Trump is saying is that he's going to decide where spending happens. And we have seen over and over again that that is actually how democracies die. That when a leader gets the power to basically say to a state like Connecticut, "Hey, you're not going to get any money for your schools, for your police departments, for your highways, unless you elect somebody that agrees with me, that stops criticizing me." That's a level of corruption that unwinds democracies. So as Trump signals that during the shutdown, he's going to be even more corrupt — i.e., he's going to blatantly withhold money only from states represented by people who are opposing him during the shutdown — this is a moment where our spine should stiffen. It's not a moment where we should bend the knee or get weak. The more corrupt he is, the more confidence we should have that this is the next essential moment we have, in which we have to win the moment.
Marc Elias: You are standing tall and you are standing with a stiff spine. That makes you one of the heroes of this moment. Your state is being threatened with funding. I am sure that you are aware that as you pointed out, he has gone after his political opponents. You have done nothing other than be clear that you are his political opponent. And the stakes are really high right now. How do you approach dealing with those kinds of really big threats? These are not theoretical threats. We have seen him go after James Comey. We've seen him make threats about other people in the criminal process. And he's, like you said, targeting your state with really big consequences. How do you approach days like this?
Chris Murphy: We've already seen it play out in Connecticut. We had a massive wind power project that was 80% built. Like all the turbines were already up in the water in Long Island Sound. It was going to help us lower our electric bills next year. We have hundreds of jobs, thousands of jobs probably relying on it. And he shut the project down. Again, 80 to 90% finished. He shut it down just to punish Connecticut and Rhode Island, two states represented by four Democratic senators. He announced yesterday that he's cutting some really important clean energy projects to Connecticut. So there's no doubt that his illegality is hurting Connecticut. But if we give in to the illegality, there will just be more of it.We all know how schoolyard bullies work. If you reward their bad behavior, you just get more of the bad behavior.
And then second, my state cares about democracy, and they are willing to take a couple of body blows from a corrupt president if that's what is necessary to save the democracy. If we give in to these tactics and say, "OK, we're just going to vote to fund your corruption because we're worried that if we don't, there might be repercussions," that's the end of democracy. So in Connecticut, a place that has contributed a lot to American democracy, that was a big part of our founding story, folks are willing to support people like me and Blumenthal and others that are not willing to give in until we get some guarantees in this budget that the president's lawlessness and corruption is going to be constrained.
Marc Elias: How much do you worry about for yourself, for your colleagues, for others in the pro-democracy camp about the corruption and the politicization of the executive branch — the Department of Justice, the IRS, the DHS? How much do you worry about it yourself and for others?
Chris Murphy: I worry about it because obviously what he is trying to do with the corruption of the Department of Justice and the corruption of his regulatory agencies is to tell anybody who wants to speak truth to power that there's going to be a price. Sometimes that price is that you're going to lose your business or lose your place in the media landscape, or sometimes it's that you're actually going to go to jail. And he's counting on everyone just deciding to be silent.
It's a little bit of like a Spartacus moment in that if everybody's silent, then he wins. But if everybody decides not to be silent, he can't put us all in jail. He can't lock us all up. So if I'm going to ask a college president to stand up to him, if I'm going to ask a law firm to not cut a deal with him and still bring suits that defend the rule of law, if I'm going to ask businesses to not get in bed with him and pay him off as he is asking many businesses to do, then I've got to be willing to be loud, even if there's a risk that I'm going to be targeted or my family is going to be targeted as well. I just think we have to model a lack of fear so that others that are not in elected politics but are in key places that matter to the preservation of democracy show a lack of fear as well.
Marc Elias: Senator Schumer and Leader Jeffries went to a meeting in the Oval Office to discuss really weighty things: the shutdown of the federal government, healthcare, and the like. And Donald Trump seems to have basically a merchandise store run out of the Oval Office, which has become normalized. The fact is he handed them hats that were produced, I assume, by his campaign that are claiming that he's going to run in 2028 when he is ineligible to run under the U.S. Constitution. And it just feels to me like much of the legacy media has just sort of treated this like, "Yes, the President of the United States is handing out campaign merchandise for an election that he's not eligible for to the opposition party." Do you ever look at this and just think, "Have I lost my mind? What is going on here?"
Chris Murphy: Yeah, I have two thoughts about that. Like on that specific silly tactic, I think that was probably more about trying to bait Democrats and the media into talking about that, the hats on the desk, rather than talking about the substance of the meeting, which is 22 million Americans who are gonna have their healthcare jacked up by 75 to 100% in some cases. So, I do think that sometimes the corruption can distract from the central story.
What I think is wilder is the fact that the mainstream media has done a pretty miserable job of covering the massive, nuclear-grade corruption. The merchandise is terrible. It's icky, it's ugly, it's illegal. But this guy's engaged in a mass-scale corruption campaign, which is his cryptocurrency operation. So Trump is doing a couple of things. He's got a meme coin, right, just Trump's face on a coin that he sells secretly. Anybody can buy that coin, nobody knows who buys it. The money goes through a kind of indirect route, but into Trump's pocket. It's a way for CEOs, oligarchs, and foreign princes to buy Trump off. A trucking company, an international trucking company, bought a bunch of this coin. They basically sent a press release out and they were like, "Yeah, we need some regulations changed, and we know that the best way to get the regulations changed is to just pay Donald Trump money." Now, they sent a press release out about it, but nobody actually needs to disclose that they bought the Trump coin. But they can whisper in his ear, "Hey, I bought $2 million of your coin, and I'd like to be named ambassador to [name your country]."
But then there's the other Trump crypto coin, which is a stablecoin. This is a different kind of crypto coin. Trump needed somebody to help launch a stablecoin, so he went to a foreign government. He went to the government of the United Arab Emirates, and he basically did a trade. He said, "I'll give you some state secrets. I'll give you some classified material," which was essentially the highest-value microchips that we previously were unwilling to sell because of how sensitive they are, to the UAE. "And I'll do that if you make a $2 billion investment — billion dollars — in my crypto business," essentially launching it as, overnight, one of the biggest crypto businesses, stablecoin businesses, in the world. Listen, there's no document, right, that says, "$2 billion for the state secrets," but they happened within just a couple of weeks. And it's pretty clear to everybody that those two things were on the table together. So yeah, we're talking about billions of dollars of corruption. You're talking about Trump's overall wealth having doubled or tripled during the time that he's been in the presidency. He's basically just trading U.S. policy, U.S. taxpayer dollars, money, and national security secrets in exchange for help for his businesses.
Marc Elias: We’ve talked a lot about Donald Trump, but he would not be in the position to do the things he's doing without a Republican Senate and a Republican House, right? So Mike Johnson and John Thune are part of the equation here, and we can't let them off the hook, and you don't let them off the hook, which is one of the reasons why I love talking to you. Talk a little bit about what the Republicans in the House and Senate are doing right now about any of this, which from the outside seems to be nothing.
Chris Murphy: There's no different story from the inside. From the outside, it looks as if Republicans are doing nothing, and from the inside, they are doing nothing. You occasionally get one or two Republicans who say true things. When Trump came after Jimmy Kimmel and instructed the FCC to tell TV stations that if they didn't take him down off the air, they would lose their licenses or they wouldn't be able to move forward with mergers, one Republican senator, Ted Cruz, came out and said, "Hey, listen, if this becomes normal, then it'll ultimately happen to Republicans' and conservatives' speech." That is a true thing. I'm not making a threat, I'm just stating reality that if this becomes normal, that the president can engage in this kind of corruption, that he can bully people into censoring their own speech, then that becomes a normal power that a Democratic president could use to try to destroy the political right or to censor the political right. So by and large, Republicans are doing nothing right now other than just being good loyal members of the cult. Occasionally one or two of them will speak up, but one or two members of the Senate speaking up doesn't change anything because 99% of them are backing Trump's corruption up and down the line.
Marc Elias: One of the things that I think everyone should know is that before you took on Donald Trump and the corruption and the attacks on democracy, you were in many circles best known for having taken on the gun industry. And if you want to talk about a tough fight, I won't ask you which is harder, taking on Donald Trump or taking on the NRA, but you were and still are a ferocious defender of people from the scourge of gun violence, particularly as it impacts children and schools around this country. I wonder if there's anything from those fights that you have learned that helps you in this fight? they're disconnected in many respects, but I have to assume there is. I mean, first of all, it requires a backbone of steel, because I'm sure that wasn't very popular either. But is there anything from that lesson that you learned for this?
Chris Murphy: Yeah, certainly. It took us 10 years from the shooting in Sandy Hook to our ability to pass the first anti-gun violence measure through Congress of any significance in 30 years. So one lesson that we can't relearn is the time that it took. We don't have 10 years to beat Donald Trump and his weaponization of the government to destroy democracy. We've got about 10 months to do that.
But here are the lessons I did learn. One, you have to talk about the things you care about in moral terms. Obviously, the issue of saving our kids' lives, making sure that they don't run from a hail of bullets in their first-grade classroom, is easily talked about in moral terms. That's eventually why we won that issue, because we appealed to people's moral sensibilities. This is a moral moment as well. The very essence of being an American citizen is that we live in a country that made this just heroic bet on self-governance, and we are putting that all at risk right now. The very nature of what it means to be an American, is a question that's being put to the country to decide. This is a moral moment. Do we want to normalize corruption? Do we want to stand up for the right of everyone in our country to speak their mind, even if you don't agree with that speech? So talk about it in moral terms.
And then have faith that the people can rise up and do something that, you know, in a particular moment may seem impossible. When we started out after the shooting in Sandy Hook, it did seem like we would never beat the gun lobby. For 8 out of those 10 years, I wondered whether we ever would. But we became powerful enough, the people became powerful enough, that we changed minds. We got 15 Republicans to vote against the NRA. That was something that political pundits said was impossible, but because the people stood up and said to those Republican senators, "I'm not going to reelect you if you vote one more time with the NRA," we were able to beat them. So the people have power in this moment as well. They can be very loud in telling Republican senators and Republican members of the House of Representatives that if you vote to back up Trump's corruption, if you vote to raise my premiums again, if you vote to allow the president to censor speech, you're not coming back to Washington. So if we are loud enough, the American people are loud enough, just like I saw it change a political reality on the issue of guns, it can change a political reality when it comes to the effort to save our democracy.
Marc Elias: One of the questions I'm getting most in the last few days, it relates to US cities and the deployment of the military in those cities. I got to get your insight into this and your advice to people. They are worried. They saw the speech that the president gave before the uniformed flag officers, the generals and the admirals, and the discussion of "enemy within" and the deployments we've seen in LA and Portland and Washington DC and elsewhere. How worried are you? How worried should people be? And what should people do with that worry?
Chris Murphy: Well, I am deeply worried. These deployments of the US military to American cities, primarily cities that are represented by Democrats, are just part of his effort to try to suppress speech. Whether we want to believe it or not, it's true. When you see a bunch of armed members of the military on the streets of your city, yeah, you probably are less willing to engage in political protest. You probably make the decision more easily to just stay at home and stay out of politics. And so I do worry that his deployment of the military is going to have an impact on suppressing political speech and protest in this country.
There are a couple of things that we can do about that. First of all, I think the issue of keeping the military out of our cities should be on the table in these negotiations over the budget. What's possible, but why should Democrats not ask for provisions in this budget that require the military to be used only to protect this nation against foreign enemies, not be utilized to go after the president's domestic critics? The second thing is, we should start talking about the fact that the military leadership itself has an obligation to refuse immoral, illegal orders. Should they ever be asked to do something that is like taking physical action against peaceful protesters, they need to say no, and they need to say no loudly. So we've got to start setting up that standard for our military leaders that when and if they are given an illegal order, they have to say no.
Watch the full interview here.
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