Signalgate, the story about how Washington’s top security officials mistakenly added a journalist to their text chain about an imminent attack on a rebel group in Yemen, is actually not about the messaging app Signal. According to Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut, it’s about gaslighting—the fact that the White House “maintains they did nothing wrong.”
I spoke with Murphy on the latest episode of FP Live, in which we discussed the bombshell news of the week, and also the topic we had originally agreed to chat about: FP’s new print issue, “Billionaire Rule.” On that topic, Murphy said “the Trump administration’s intent is to turn us into a hybrid oligarchy-kleptocracy.” Subscribers can watch the full discussion on the video box atop this page, or download the FP Live podcast. What follows here is a lightly edited transcript.
Ravi Agrawal: Sen. Murphy, I have to begin with Signalgate, when the Atlantic’s editor in chief was mistakenly added to a message chain that included the country’s top national security officials as they discussed a strike on the Houthis in Yemen. How damaging is this to the United States?
Chris Murphy: In and of itself, it’s something we could probably get over. But it speaks to the administration’s growing incompetence. This is a secretary of defense with no real, meaningful experience before taking the job, who badly bungled our initial interactions with Ukraine and Russia by telegraphing our bottom lines for negotiation to the world. That’s just diplomatic malpractice.
And now it’s clear that the administration is regularly violating, and will for the foreseeable future regularly violate, some of the most important security laws built to assure that classified data remains classified.
What is most stunning about the last two days is that the administration maintains they did nothing wrong. It suggests that they will continue to use private commercial texting services like Signal to communicate classified information. What is maybe the most damaging is the gaslighting. [Defense] Secretary [Pete] Hegseth and others claim that no classified information was shared. That is absolutely false. They claim that no war plans were shared. That is absolutely false. The American public has read the contents of the texts. It’s classified information. Those are absolutely war plans.
American credibility is destroyed when our highest-level national security officials transparently and brazenly lie to the American people and to the world. That hurts American security just as much, if not more, as the cavalierness that they have about the security of our most sacred information.
RA: There was a telling moment on Wednesday, when White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said “let the people decide” what the truth of the matter is. And this emerged when she was asked again and again if the information on that chain was classified. She said it wasn’t—because Hegseth said it wasn’t. But, of course, experts in the intelligence community all say the information would be classified.
How do you expect this all to play out in a climate where we’re so polarized?
CM: Democracy can’t function in a world without truth. You simply can’t solve any problem in your neighborhood, your community, your state, or your nation if we don’t agree on a common set of facts. We can disagree about how we solve a problem, but we can’t disagree about the underlying reality. And what is so chilling about this moment is that the administration thinks it can get away with it. They have literally put up a bright white piece of paper for the entire world to see and are telling you it’s a black piece of paper. Call those war plans or attack plans.
But it is absolutely true that it’s classified information. One reason information is classified is because it could put our security and our troops’ security in jeopardy if it were known to the public. Those texts were sent out at least 30 minutes before the attacks were launched. Thank goodness it was Jeff Goldberg who was accidentally included on that chain because if it was someone else, that information could have been potentially sent to our enemies or made public ahead of that mission. That would have compromised the safety and the security of the airmen flying those planes, and the troops and the sailors launching the attacks. So, yes, this incident speaks to the Trump administration’s inability to believe in the very idea of truth, and that is maybe the most dangerous threat posed to our democratic norms.
RA: So given the threat to democracy here, what can Congress do? Watching these hearings over the last two days, Sen. Murphy, it honestly feels like there are two sides that are talking at each other without agreeing on basic facts.
CM: Well, Congress is controlled by [President] Donald Trump. Republicans, who have essentially become a cult of personality, are in charge of the House and the Senate. I’m glad that at least one Republican, the Republican chairman of the Armed Services Committee in the Senate, has suggested there should be some outside investigation. But this is a criminal matter. They violated several laws: the Espionage Acts, the Presidential Records Act. We can do a congressional investigation. There can be an independent audit.
But ultimately there needs to be criminal liability, or our criminal laws don’t matter. If criminal laws are only applied to the poor and not applied to the powerful, then we are not a nation of laws any longer. That’s why this is a moment of crisis, because there’s no suggestion that the Department of Justice, again controlled by the president, is going to bring any criminal charges.
RA: Let’s move on to what we had originally planned to discuss before Signalgate: corruption. So as we describe in our new print issue, there’s corruption, there’s grand corruption, there are oligarchies, and then there are kleptocracies. Where does the United States fall on that scale?
CM: The Trump administration’s intent is to turn us into a hybrid oligarchy-kleptocracy, which is a small group of elites with enormous financial resources making decisions for the people and then operationalizing government to engage in large-scale, industrial-sized theft. There’s still time to stop that transition, but you can see the signs in how Elon Musk, the richest person in the country, has been given extraordinary powers that no unelected American has ever had before. You can look at how he’s using those powers, sometimes to just award himself contracts. At the FAA [Federal Aviation Administration], he canceled a competitor’s contract and awarded the contract to himself. He gives himself new contracts without the vetting that occurs in a normal contract-award process. He shuttered the parts of the federal government that would stand in the way of his expansion, whether at the NTSB [National Transportation Safety Board], which oversees automized vehicles, or the NLRB [National Labor Relations Board], which was investigating unfair labor practices of Musk’s businesses. He is pulling the strings of government in a way that benefits him. That is oligarchy, but that is also ultimately kleptocracy because it results in him, because he has access to the government, becoming richer and more powerful than others who don’t have access to the government.
RA: But corruption is not new. Money in politics is also not a new phenomenon. There’s lots of data showing that the United States has gotten more corrupt and less equal as a trend line for the last two decades. That period includes both Republican and Democratic administrations. Billionaires or at least multi-multimillionaires have served in senior positions in Democratic administrations. So why does this moment feel so different to you?
CM: No unelected individual in this country has ever been given a portfolio with the scope of Musk’s. Musk has carte blanche to fire anyone in the federal government, to close any office in the federal government. His mandate is limitless. What Trump announced a few weeks ago at his cabinet meeting was a legal maneuver. Musk has more power than the president himself. That has no corollary in any prior administration, Republican or Democrat.
You are right that our government has been corrupt for a very long time because of how we have allowed people with money to corrupt our electoral politics, how secret money impacts races, and how secret donors come to elected officials and ask for favors after the election is over. But this is a new level of corruption. The Trump meme coin alone is probably the biggest corruption scandal in the history of the United States of America. The idea that the president of the United States has a secret but seemingly legal way for any big company CEO, any Saudi prince, any Russian oligarch to essentially wire Trump millions or billions of dollars, outside of the view of the American public, is outrageous. That the corruption is happening in full view doesn’t make it any less corrupt. And I would argue that the way in which Musk is empowered and the way in which the corruption has been mainstreamed in this government really has no comparison over the course of American political history.
RA: I take your point, but there’s been a long trajectory leading to this moment. And both parties have contributed to that, for instance due to the revolving door between people in high office and lobbying or venture capital or private equity firms. There’s a sense that the system is broken. Your point is that right now feels exceptional. But how do Democrats make the case that they can fix this, and with what moral standing?
CM: Well, let me contest your premise. You can believe that American politics has always had an element of corruption and also believe that there is no throughline from the prior form of corruption to what Trump is doing now. This is supersized, like going from a 12-ounce soda to a 50-ounce bucket of soda. The meme point alone, which has no comparison in this country’s history. Our allies in the Middle East are doing private-sector business with the Trump family while also negotiating diplomatic deals. That is new. And so, while I won’t excuse the level of corruption that has always existed in the United States, I don’t believe that this is just the natural evolution of a history of corruption that involves both in both parties.
But to your question, which is a good one: What are the Democrats doing right now? The only way that we are credible opponents of this existing scale of corruption is to campaign on how we’ll fix it. When I came into politics 20 years ago, campaign finance reform, getting private money out of politics, and ethics reform were top three issues for Democrats. Every Democrat talked about those. And we credibly were viewed as the party of government reform. For whatever reason, over the past 20 years, the issue of cleaning up government has diminished on the Democrats’ priority list. It’s still on our list, but no longer in even the top 10. In order for us to win over the American public, they need to believe that if we get the reins of power, we’re going to actually change the rules. That, for instance, we are going to push for a constitutional amendment to get dark, anonymous money out of politics, close that revolving door, and never going to allow a member of Congress to use the information they get to trade stocks. There’s a suite of reforms that we could elevate as top-tier issues as a party, promises that we say we will keep if you elect us. If we did that, then we would be in a much better place to be credible anti-corruption messengers.
RA: A lot of subscribers have written in with frustration over the Democratic Party. One subscriber went as far to call the party toothless. What are Democrats doing to stop this?
CM: There is a bit of fantasy that exists because Republicans are in charge of every lever of the federal government: the House, the Senate, and the presidency. We don’t have the power to pass laws; we don’t have the power to start investigations; we don’t have the power to subpoena. And it is difficult for Democratic minorities in the House and the Senate to stand alone against corruption or the planned massive transfer of wealth of the budget reconciliation bill, with $880 billion of cuts to Medicaid to finance $1 trillion of tax cuts for the wealthiest 1 percent.
What ultimately will stop the corruption is a combination of legal action and courts that step in to uphold the law and mass public mobilization. We don’t have a lot to do with what’s happening in the courts, but we have something to do with mobilization. Oligarchies, kleptocracies, and autocracies have been toppled over the course of history through mass public mobilization. Not tens of thousands of people showing up on the streets, but hundreds of thousands of people showing up in the streets.
And here, I agree with some critiques of the party. The party needs to show more risk tolerance. The party has to engage in more tactics that have real potential downsides but that show a willingness to meet the urgency of the moment. That is why many of us voted against the continuing resolution: to show the country that we are willing to take risks on behalf of saving our democracy. If we do that, I think it makes it much more likely that the American public will step up and take the risks that they need, that the institutions of the legal profession or higher education will take the risks they might not be otherwise willing to take in order to uphold the rule of law.
RA: You’ve mentioned the courts now a few times. Can you talk about the constitutional crisis that confronts this country? The courts are a tool to maintain rule of law, but if the courts themselves are challenged or ignored, you have another set of problems.
CM: We popularly think of the five-alarm constitutional crisis coming when the Supreme Court issues a clear ruling and the president disobeys that ruling. But the president, on a daily basis, is disobeying lower-court rulings. He has been told several times to rehire federal workers. Not only has he not rehired them, but he continues to fire other workers. So we may not be in that ultimate constitutional crisis where the president ignores a Supreme Court ruling, but he is, without question, ignoring lower and appellate courts.
I’ll just make a quick point here. A lot of folks say everything is uncomfortable, but still manageable, until the president ignores a Supreme Court ruling. That’s not true. You can lose a democracy without ever witnessing that ultimate conflict between the executive branch and the judicial branch. You’re watching that destruction happen as we speak. Why is the executive branch going after the legal profession, journalists, and higher education? Because those are the three essential pillars of any democracy. The lawyers who protect the rule of law, the academics and the college campuses where protest normally begins, and journalists to tell the truth about what’s happened. The president is trying to dramatically weaken the power of all three of those pillars, not to destroy them, but to make them think twice about engaging in robust oppositional activity. That’s what happened in Hungary. That’s what’s happening in Turkey. That’s what happened in Serbia. It’s not that they stopped having elections. It’s just that the rules were rigged in a way that these institutions became so weak that the opposition could never win.
The White House doesn’t need to ignore a ruling of the Supreme Court for our democracy to disappear. It won’t be a fire at the Reichstag. It won’t be the Capitol building burning down. There will just be a day when you wake up and elections are no longer competitive in this country. That’s the danger we’re living in today. And I worry that many of my colleagues and the infrastructure of the left feels like we’re OK until that traditional executive-judicial conflict comes.
RA: As we talk about how the Democrats can be a more effective opposition, it’s important to also just spend a beat on why the party lost in November. What’s your sense about why the party didn’t win?
CM: In general, this is a tough time for incumbents. So in retrospect, [then-Vice President] Kamala Harris probably had no path to victory given how late she entered the race. There was no time for her to introduce herself in a way that would blunt the momentum toward change naturally occurring in a year like 2024.
But to the extent that I’d identify broader problems, the first is that we have allowed the Republican Party to present itself as the economically populist party, the party that is willing to disrupt the economic status quo. And today, in a world where everybody’s working, but most Americans feel economically powerless, the party that is the economic populist party, the party that is going to disrupt the economic status quo, is the party that will win elections. And Democrats are now the party of the status quo, so we have to rebrand ourselves to be seen, accurately, as the party that will break up concentrated economic power, dismantle concentrated corporate power, enable unions to play a bigger role in our economy, raise the minimum wage. We’ve viewed people like [Sen.] Bernie Sanders as an outlier threat to our brand. I don’t think that’s true. His brand of politics, whether you endorse every single one of his ideas, is actually the kind of politics that crosses over into Trump’s space.
The other thing is that we’ve become really judgmental. We used to be a big-tent party. If you agreed with us on the economics, you were in the tent; we permitted a level of disagreement on social and cultural issues. I admit that I’m partially responsible for this. I felt good about myself when the issues surrounding guns became a litmus-test issue for our party. Now, I think we need to get back to the point where we say, you need to line up with us on the breakup of corporate power, on a higher minimum wage, and on strong unions. But if you’re not with us on absolutely every other issue, we’re not going to judge you as unworthy to be a member of our party or a candidate for office. Big-tent, pugilistic populace. I think that that is the closest way to describe the way back for Democrats.
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