Transcript: Chris Murphy’s Dark and Unnerving New Warning about Trump

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 3 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is the Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut has been one of the most forceful Democratic voices sounding the alarm about Donald Trump. Importantly, he’s also urged his congressional colleagues to use their power creatively to constrain Trump’s ongoing abuses of power and his destruction of our democracy. But in recent days, Trump’s consolidation of authoritarian power has if anything escalated. And we’re in the middle of a government shutdown fight in which Democrats are drawing a hard line—but not for an end to Trump’s lawbreaking. Trump has responded by issuing shockingly lawless threats toward blue America.

So why aren’t more Democrats stepping up? And is there anything Democrats can do right now, and in coming weeks, to use their power to place constraints on Trump? Today we’re talking to Senator Murphy about all of this. Senator Murphy, thank you so much for joining us.

Senator Chris Murphy: What’s up, man? Thanks for having me.

Sargent: Senator, let’s start here. The Office of Management and Budget Chief Russ Vought is now corruptly canceling billions of dollars in funding for projects in a number of blue states. Trump just explicitly said on Truth Social that he’s meeting with Vought to determine which “Democrat agencies” they can cancel. I just wanted to get your immediate reaction to all that.

Senator Murphy: Yeah, I mean, it’s pretty wild that the corruption is so brazen, is so transparent. Vought sent out this tweet yesterday saying, I’m canceling energy projects in the following states, and listed the states. And every single one of them is a state represented by two Democratic senators. And the one Democratic senator who voted for the Republican continuing resolution—that senator’s state wasn’t on the list. So, you know, it’s just there for everybody to see that he is lawlessly, corruptly using the power of the White House to do what he’s been doing all year: punish his political opponents, reward his political loyalists. It is the fundamental antithesis of a functioning democracy.

And here’s what he thinks. He thinks that’s going to bully Democrats into submission to signing onto a budget that would be bad for our people, a budget that would throw millions of people off their health care. My approach is the exact opposite. The more corrupt and lawless he gets, the stiffer my spine gets. Because at this point, if I give in and consent to these kinds of tactics, which are blatantly corrupt, then it just normalizes it all, makes it become standard fare.

So I’m not going to be bullied by what he’s doing. I hope my colleagues won’t be bullied. And I think if we stand up for our democracy, for the rule of law, for people’s health care, we’ll show people what Democrats stand for, which is kind of necessary at this moment.

Sargent: Well, you were pushing early on for an even more aggressive strategy in this shutdown battle. On NBC in mid-September, you basically set a threshold that I liked. You said Democrats should meet this, it was two things: one, meet the crisis of the moment, and two, restrain Trump’s lawlessness. So now Democrats are demanding an extension of the ACA subsidies. They’re insisting on an end to rescissions. But are they right now, with this current strategy, clearing the bar in terms of mounting the type of opposition that you said this moment requires?

Senator Murphy: Listen, I don’t think we’re asking for too much in that we are telling the president that if you want us to sign onto a budget, it can’t be a budget that funds the destruction of our democracy. I would be a sucker to agree to a budget that literally funds an operation to hunt me and my allies down—to imprison us, harass us, intimidate us.

So yes, I want there to be a number of things on the table that constrain his lawlessness. Now, am I naive, am I pollyannish enough to think we’re going to write a budget that eliminates his lawlessness and his corruption? No. But I don’t think we should be shirking from a pretty simple demand, which is that if you want our votes, it can’t be for rampant lawlessness.

This isn’t a normal time. In a different era, maybe just asking for a minor adjustment in health care tax credit policy would be enough. But it’s not a normal time. If you don’t mount a stand right now on behalf of democracy, there won’t be another opportunity. This is a high-leverage moment, with the world watching to see what we stand for. And we have a chance to actually constrain his attempt to destroy our democracy and our commitment to free speech.

So yeah, I want us to be—not piggish in what we’re asking for—but realistic, asking enough to save democracy.

Sargent: Senator, what would that look like exactly? So let’s just say you are laying out a set of terms that the Democratic caucus would probably be able to get behind that actually is something you could plausibly explain to the American people pretty clearly in bullet points. What would it look like?

Senator Murphy: Well, I do think it is centered on the requirement that the president spend the money that is authorized in the budget. So—well, these words like rescissions and pocket rescissions mean nothing to people. We do need clear provisions in this bill that say the president cannot pick and choose where he spends money and where he doesn’t based upon who’s loyal to him. I think that’s an easy thing to ask for. I think there are Republicans who may end up supporting that, and I think we could explain it to the American public, as long as we don’t use that technical jargon.

But yes, then there is a different set of restrictions on, for instance, what the FCC can do with its power; where and how the president deploys troops around the country; limitations on ICE officers in terms of the way in which they operate in the interior. I’m not saying any of those things are easy to get, but why shouldn’t we ask for them? Why shouldn’t we demand that DHS and DOJ and the FCC start behaving lawfully? Again, when we don’t even ask for these things, it makes it look like we don’t care about these things. At the very least, we have to create a very clear narrative in the public that Democrats have a plan to attack this level of lawlessness.

Sargent: Yes, I think that really makes a lot of sense. And the lawlessness has escalated since you set that bar in mid-September. He’s illegally blowing up and murdering people in the Caribbean Sea. His FCC chair nakedly threatened state retribution to coerce a network into censoring a Trump critic. He’s expanded the militarization of cities. His agency cronies are manufacturing pretexts to launch DOJ investigations of his enemies. Now his OMB chief is explicitly using the budget process to punish Democratic areas and constituencies. A fair amount of that has happened since you laid out that set of pretty clear demands for what Democrats could oppose. Where are we in a big-picture sense in fighting this lawlessness? What’s your overall assessment? It seems a little bleak to me.

Senator Murphy: Yeah, no — my assessment is increasingly bleak, which is why I think it commands us to step up to the plate and draw firmer lines. We have this habit, especially in the political ecosystem, to forget what happened in the last news cycle and only focus on what’s happening in the current news cycle. We’re very bad at understanding the cumulative impact of a set of assaults on a particular norm or set of programs or priorities.

But, I mean, I think it’s hard to mistake what is occurring here. We know what’s happening in the media right now: you’re seeing a massive consolidation of key media properties into the hands of Trump allies. You’re seeing a willingness at scale for media companies to punish voices that dissent from Trump. You’re seeing the weaponization of the DOJ so that there’s a risk to anybody who stands up and protests Trump loudly, donates [against] Donald Trump, or gives to any progressive cause. The full scope of that is likely having an impact on the number of people who donate to Democrats, the number of people willing to show up at protests, the number of people willing to become candidates.

My belief has never been that he’s going to cancel the election in 2026 or 2028—he’s not going to do that. Turkey still has elections, Hungary still has elections, Russia still has elections. The leaders in those countries just constrain the that space the opposition can operate in, such that they never have enough room to win a national election. If we are not already there, we are really, really close. Which is why the only way out of that is to make them pay a political price every time they ratchet up pressure on the opposition. We did that with Kimmel: we did organize people around that, we used economic pressure, and got a win. But we need to use those kinds of tactics over and over and over again.

Sargent: Do you bring this up with your Democratic colleagues privately, and why aren’t more of them talking like this?

Senator Murphy: Yeah, I do. There’s a couple answers. And I’m not the only one who’s talking like this. But I hear a couple things from my Democratic colleagues. One, it’s “dangerous” to be so alarmist—that if you say we’re not a democracy anymore or that we might not have a free and fair election, you’re actually disincentivizing people from getting involved because that makes it feel hopeless. I’m not saying it’s hopeless, but I actually don’t think that people will join this fight unless they think the stakes are actually existential. And I don’t think we should lie to people—the stakes are existential.

The second thing I hear about is, “Well, we ran on democracy in 2024 and we lost. And so let’s not do democracy, let’s do economics and health care.” I’m totally for a focus on economics—I’m a big believer that Bernie’s message, or some version of it, is really the secret sauce. We’ve got to be a populist economic party. But we’ll never be able to raise the minimum wage by $10 if our democracy disappears. So whether or not the polls tell us that everybody in this country believes that democracy is at risk—it is at risk. And if we don’t lead and explain to people what’s happening, then it doesn’t matter what our message is next fall. There won’t be a free and fair election to run in. Those are the two things that I hear from people that are not necessarily willing to talk like I talk.

Sargent: Yeah. And I wonder whether that’s really a dodge in many cases. Some Democrats just don’t want the fight that you’re taking on. They don’t want to get into an argument like this one for various reasons. And then they just sort of say that this is the reason for it, the ones that you offered. It’s not an easy argument to get into, because, one, it’s hard to explain to people, people don’t want to hear it—although I think more and more people do want to hear it in a sense. The Democratic base certainly wants to hear it. And a segment of independents want to hear people saying it. But it strikes me that Democrats are being evasive and creating excuses after the fact for it. Does that seem too harsh to you?

Senator Murphy: No, that doesn’t seem too harsh. I think when you’ve been in politics, climbed the ladder, gotten to a position of authority, sometimes, for whatever reason, some of the risk-taking instincts that you might have had earlier in your career maybe disappear a little bit. So yes, I think that there are some people that just aren’t up for this fight. I get it. There are some people who say a shutdown is really bad for people. And it is. People will get hurt in a shutdown. But they’ll get hurt more if our democracy never recovers from this. They’ll get hurt more if the oligarchs take total control of our government and are able to steal without any check, with total impunity, from the people. So yeah, I think people need to understand that this is a fight worth having, and it’s still a fight we can still win.

Sargent: Let’s just say Democrats win this short-term shutdown. Others have made this point before—Substacker Brian Beutler has been good on it—but if Dems do get the subsidies extended and agree to open the government again—and that’s it—then haven’t Democrats protected Republicans from the political consequences of their hatred of the ACA? And also, doesn’t the Dem message to the country inadvertently become something like, “well, you know, we’ll kind of tolerate all the lawbreaking, as long as you let us claim a narrow win on kitchen-table issues”? That’s what it looks to me like could happen at the end of the day here. What do you think?

Senator Murphy: Well, let’s not underhype the importance of preserving those subsidies. That’s 22 million Americans. In Connecticut, there are some families that are going to see a $25,000 increase in premiums. You’re talking about millions of people losing their health care. That’s not a small niche issue. So yes, I do think that would be an important victory that would help people. And the bottom line is that’s what we’re in the business of doing, is helping people.

But I do broadly share that critique. Which is that, if we’re going to sign on to a full-year budget—maybe the price is smaller for a temporary budget—but if we’re going to sign on to a full year budget, that budget has to have constraints on the corruption and the illegality. We cannot sign onto a full-year budget that basically puts a bipartisan imprimatur—a bipartisan endorsement of the illegality. We’re literally signing our own political death warrants if we do that. Again, I’m not saying we’re going to include in that budget a provision that stops Trump from being able to ever issue a crypto meme coin. There’s limits to what we’ll be able to do. He’ll still be corrupt. He’ll still act illegally. But we could put some sand in the gears. I think that does has to be a condition of our signoff on at least a full-year budget.

Sargent: You’ve got Trump accomplices at agencies really corrupting the process in all kinds of ways. There may be serious illegalities here: The FCC chair censoring networks. Agency heads manufacturing pretexts for prosecutions of Trump enemies. Military officials blowing people up in the Caribbean. I want to ask you this: Couldn’t Democrats also, in addition to all the things you’ve advised, couldn’t they say more explicitly, right now—and almost in unison, in like every forum—that anyone who carries out corrupt or illegal orders for Trump should prepare to face real accountability? Say: Here’s we will do as Democrats if we gain the majority. Here’s what will happen when we have a real attorney general again. Save your papers. Is that something Democrats could be saying more?

Senator Murphy: Of course. And I think you have to be very precise in how you say it. We’re talking about applying the actual law as written to individuals. We’re not talking about using the Department of Justice to politically persecute people. There are a lot of unethical decisions that are being made in the Trump administration that are probably not criminal in nature. But there likely are decisions that do have criminal consequences attached to them. So if we’re going to say that more loudly—and I agree with you, we should—I think we have to probably be precise in what we’re naming as the actual criminal behavior, not just saying: Everybody who’s doing anything we disagree with should get a lawyer. I think we should be careful in naming: Listen, your action that you’ve taken is likely criminal, and you should be concerned about what will happen to you. I think being precise in the language, and in what we describe as the illegal activity, is probably important.

Sargent: And then maybe what you could do to make that message broader is to say something like: If you’ve committed corrupt actions, but not illegal ones, prepare to be sitting in front of us in this chamber answering questions.

Senator Murphy: Yeah, of course. And we likely did not do nearly enough of that when we took control of Congress in 2021. We were in the middle of the pandemic, we were obviously so focused on trying to get a legislative agenda done that we did not do a lot of accounting for the criminality and the corruption of the first Trump administration. I don’t know that that would have changed anything had we done it, but maybe if we had spent some time exposing who he was—I think in early 2021, we thought: Oh, because of January 6, he must be in our rearview mirror. He’s never coming back. That was a mistake to think that way.

Sargent: Let’s say at the conclusion of this shutdown standoff, Democrats end up caving—or if they getting just ACA subsidies and nothing more—or, alternatively, they somehow agree to a full budget, as you said, that doesn’t draw the lines you’re talking about, that just does little piecemeal kitchen-table wins—sorry, I don’t mean to minimize the ACA subsidies, huge—but just kitchen table wins: Will you still be able to support the current Democratic leadership of the Senate in a scenario like that?

Senator Murphy: Yeah, I guess that’s like not a useful exercise for me to engage in, planning for losing. You know, the Red Sox are in Game Three tonight against the Yankees. We’ve got a rookie on the mound. I’m planning on us winning. I am planning on winning. And I’m trying to make the case to my colleagues that the stronger we are in this moment—and the stronger we get in reaction to Trump’s illegality getting more serious—the stronger we will be later this year and into next year. I disagreed with Senator Schumer’s decision in March, but I thought it was a tough call. At the time, we were in the early stages of the meltdown of our democracy. Trump’s approval ratings were much higher. We weren’t so close to the precipice of real personal harm to people. This is a different moment. Trump’s approval ratings are the toilet. We now know the full scope of his campaign to destroy democracy. And we’re days away from premiums going up. Right now we should just acknowledge the fact that Democrats are holding the line for things that really matter. My work is to try to make sure we continue to do that until we get a budget that is good for our people.

Sargent: I just wonder if more Democrats in a position like yours could be drawing a line with the leadership and saying, in the full budget, we really have to draw these lines, otherwise you can’t have our support anymore.

Senator Murphy: Well, I’m just saying what kind of budget I will support. And I believe that our leadership—which has been definitely talking mostly about the ACA subsidies—is also deeply concerned about building protections into the ultimate budget for our democracy, too. I’ll continue to make that case both publicly and privately. And my sense right now is that my leadership in the Senate takes that seriously.

Sargent: Senator Murphy, thanks so much for joining us. We really appreciate it.

Senator Murphy: Thanks, man.

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