Sam Stein (2:03)

You first ran for office when you were 25 years old, is that correct?

Senator Chris Murphy (2:07)

Correct. Yeah. I was 24 when I was elected to the Southington, Connecticut Planning and Zoning Commission. And then I realized if I wanted any future in politics, I had to get the hell off the Planning and Zoning Commission. And then, yes, I was elected to the state legislature a year later.

Sam Stein (2:27)

You were elected into the U.S. house of Representatives during 2006. Blue wave. And then you went into the Senate in 2012. I first met you sometime in between. Then I Believe. And I don't think you've changed, but you've evolved in a way. And I'm just sort of curious as you are in this current moment and you look back, how do you think you've evolved and how do you think your perceptions of politics have evolved?

Senator Chris Murphy (3:00)

Well, first of all, great to be here with you, Sam, and everybody at the Tribune. Thanks for continuing to invite us back. Looking forward to the conversation. Yeah, listen, I've changed in a lot of ways. I hope I'm still essentially the same person that I was when we first met, when I started out in politics. But, you know, my first evolution obviously happened In December of 2012, right after I was elected to the Senate. The awful shooting in Sandy Hook occurred. You know, I'm super embarrassed by the fact that I really had not worked on that issue before it happened in my backyard. And for the last now, you know, almost 15 years, I've devoted, you know, much of my life to helping to build the anti gun violence movement and to try to make sure that we save lives in this country and make it a national priority. But I would say that more recently, you know, my political views have also evolved in the sense that I do believe that there is a political realignment available in this country. I think increasingly, people on both the traditional right and the left just wake up every day and are absolutely suffocated by an economy that is crushing them, by a consolidation of economic and corporate power that demands more robust government intervention. And, you know, I've watched my party over the years view people like Bernie Sanders and his message, and most recently Mom Dominique's message as, you know, kind of an, an outlier risk to our party's electoral chances. But it's not a coincidence that the only person that can draw 50,000 people to a rally is Bernie Sanders. And it's something that we should pay attention to as a party. I think our path forward runs through being a bigger tent party with fewer litmus tests, but being a party that is robustly populist in our economics, presenting very big ideas that match the big problems that people are facing. And I would say that's an evolution for me. You know, I was somebody that was pretty proud for a while that we applied a litmus test on assault weapons and background checks to every candidate that was running. And I now feel like we got to be winning elections. And winning elections probably means letting more people with more diverse views on social and cultural and hot button issues into the tent. And that that has been a more, a more recent Conversion, more recent metamorphosis of my political beliefs?

Sam Stein (5:42)

Yeah, it sounds like, to a degree, what you've, what you're talking about and what you've sort of discovered is that a lot of this comes down to sort of an attitudinal adjustment in how you view politics being less, you know, rigid about who you support. And also in terms of reaching voters, just trying new things going on, different mediums, being more aggressive. How much is that simply a mode of we are living in uncertain times. This is Donald Trump 2.0, and things are now different and more existential. How much of it is just sort of you discovering new things about politics in general?

Senator Chris Murphy (6:19)

Well, I do think it's true, and I know we'll talk about this as our time goes on, that all of the old rules do not apply in 2013, 25. And that's really hard for, you know, folks who've been around politics for 20, 25 years, especially United States senators, to understand. And, you know, one of those rules is how you communicate. You know, I, you know, was pretty prolific and still am pretty prolific in putting out, you know, multiple pieces of content every single day, being outraged every single day. And there were a lot of folks who thought when I started doing that at the beginning of this year that that was a mistake, that you are, you know, supposed to reserve your political capital, that you can only show outrage every couple weeks or months or you will sort of spoil your outrage.

Sam Stein (7:12)

It's like a strategic reserve of outrage that you have to tap.

Senator Chris Murphy (7:16)

Yeah. And what Trump is showing you is a fundamentally different way of exercising power, that it's a muscle. And if you exercise it every single day, if you exert power every single day, if you flood the zone with information every single day, you don't give any breathing room, any oxygen for the opposition to be able to maneuver and respond. And we need to learn from that. We need to show outrage about what he is doing and how corrupt he is every single day. We need to be producing content at the same pace that he is. Well, we don't have to copy his morality or his corruption. There are tactics that this president has shown us work in American politics today. And we have been, frankly, very slow on the left and in the Democratic Party to pick up that challenge.

Sam Stein (8:02)

I was just going to ask, are you going to start a crypto coin? But you've eliminated them.

Senator Chris Murphy (8:05)

You know. Okay, I'm not going to. I'm not going to start a crypto coin, Sam, because we passed legislation earlier this year. Sorry, I'm getting, I suppose, this year. Well, we passed legislation earlier this year with Democratic votes, by the way, that legalizes what that prohibits me and every other federal government official from issuing a crypto coin. And the legislation, again, supported by Democrats and Republicans, has a carve out for one person in the federal government, the president of the United States. And so an example of Democrats not necessarily understanding what is necessary to meet this moment.

Sam Stein (8:48)

Good for Trump. I want to talk. Well, this is sort of an inelegant transition, but you did talk about sort of the gusher of outrages that Trump brings with him this morning on Truth Social. There have been many, many posts about Jeffrey Epstein and what he is now deeming the Epstein hoax. He's saying he wants the Department of Justice to investigate Jeffrey Epstein's relationships with Democrats. Larry Summers, JPMorgan Chase, Bill Clinton. He's lashed out at Republicans for continuing to focus on this. What is your. I hesitate to ask you to get inside the man's head, but get inside his head. What is going on, do you think?

Senator Chris Murphy (9:40)

I really don't want to.

Sam Stein (9:41)

Okay. Well, as you observe this, this, you're an interested party here. What is, what is your take on how this is playing out and why he's acting in incredibly guilty fashion?

Senator Chris Murphy (9:54)

Well, he is in daily panic mode as we get closer to the moment where these files and the fullest truth that we have available to us is going to be made public. And it is clearly the biggest scandal in presidential history. And he wouldn't be acting this way if he wasn't so deeply worried about what sits in those files. What we've already seen is immensely incriminating. Clearly, Donald Trump was at the center of a child sex ring. That is heartbreaking that the president of the United States was involved in that kind of gross, craven immorality. And it stands to reason that he wouldn't be fighting so hard to spin against this story or bullying Republicans in the House to prevent the release of these files if there wasn't something especially and specifically incriminating in that information. Now, I think the scandal in and of itself could bring him down. But we also do have to contextualize it, because what Donald Trump is all about is protecting the rich and powerful and stealing from normal people, regular middle class and poor folks, in order to enrich the rich and powerful. And this is very much part of that story. Yes, I am sure that there are both Republicans and Democrats named in those files. There are powerful people on both sides of the aisle. But what Trump is all about is, you know, not really playing a game based on politics, but playing a game based on wealth and influence. If you have wealth and influence, Donald Trump is going to protect you. And that is consistent through everything he has done during the first nine months of this administration.

Sam Stein (11:45)

So, as I understand it, the House will vote next week on the release of the files because discharge petition. I'm not trying to get too in the weeds here, but they are going to have a vote next week on the release of files, and it's widely expected that it will pass. And at that point does go to the Senate, what are your expectations for a vote in your chamber on that specific issue?

Senator Chris Murphy (12:10)

Well, the Senate has, you know, essentially been, you know, out of the loop. There's been very little, almost no pressure on Senate leadership Republicans because of what's been happening in the House of Representatives. But six months ago, you would have thought there was no shot that the House of Representatives would vote in what is likely to be a pretty big bipartisan vote. They only got three or four Republicans to sign the discharge petition, but they may get dozens and dozens of Republicans to actually vote for the bill when it comes before the House for a full vote. You wouldn't have thought that that was possible, but the daily pressure campaign on Republicans over the course of the last several months caused them to finally force this vote and will cause many of them to vote for it. So, yes, today you'd say, you know, is John Thune really going to bring this bill voluntarily before the Senate for a vote as an additional means of embarrassing the president? That doesn't sound likely today, but after weeks and months of public pressure, after more drip, drip, drip release of information about how deeply Trump was intertwined in this scandal, I think the reality will look very different. And it may be that John Thune decides. I think it's very likely that John Thune decides that his members cannot survive if they don't go on record and release and vote to release these files.

Sam Stein (13:33)

You can clap, it's fine. Don't worry.

Senator Chris Murphy (13:36)

But that's incumbent upon us to build that. That's incumbent upon us to build that pressure. As folks built that pressure in the House of Representatives, it probably will require one or two Republicans in the Senate early on to say what the right thing to do is here. But I don't think it's inevitable that we won't get that vote in the Senate.

Sam Stein (13:59)

You called it the greatest scandal in presidential history, and it may very well be. We'll see. But there's been a lot of other scandals in this presidency I'm not asking you to rank them. We can if you want. One of the ones that has been top of my mind and I don't think gets a lot of attention, is the issuance of pardons. Over the past couple weeks, we've seen just a slew of them for incredibly random officials in various walks of life. But the one defining feature is that they're either Republican or they've hired a lobbyist or donated some sort of money to a Trump venture. The big one was a pardon that actually wasn't for a criminal case, which was the 30 or whatever. So people involved in the 2020 election scheme. I talked to a pardon attorney who had been pushed out of the Justice Department, a woman named Liz Oyer. She was pushed out because she refused to give Mel Gibson back his guns. And so they pushed her out of the administration. And she made the case that this was a pardon with a purpose. That he's trying to signal to people that you can disrupt an election and you'll get an A. OK from him legally. Is that your fear? And then I guess the secondary question to that is, what can be done about the use of pardons? It's a constitutional right to the presidency, but it's being flagrantly abused.

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Senator Chris Murphy (15:51)

Mmm. Okay.

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Senator Chris Murphy (16:06)

Well, so what? What can be done ultimately is a contraction of that power through constitutional AM I think we have seen, frankly, the nuclear grade abuse of that power by Donald Trump, but we have also seen the abuse of that power by prior presidents as well. And so it is time to have a national conversation about whether that power can, can, can any longer be justified in the, in the, in its present form. Yes, Obviously he is trying to signal to his supporters that they are going to be able to get away with not just political disruption. And that's the 30 people you were talking about, but violent disruption. It is pretty amazing to me how quickly our national conversation turned moved on from the wholesale pardoning of every single one of the January six protesters. There's likely nothing he has done that is a greater threat to our democracy to the peaceful transition of power than the decision to pardon every single one of the January six protesters. And so what he is very clearly signaling is that if you are on the inside of the election system and trying to maneuver the election illegally towards Donald Trump, he will protect you. He is signaling to his rank and file MAGA acolytes and sycophants that if you engage in violence in my name, you will be protected and let off the hook. And we are being set up for an election, whether it be in 2026 or, or 2028 that may be a immediate simmering crisis. He's not going to cancel the election. Right. We're going to have an election next fall and we're going to have an election in 2028. He is simply, methodically and planfully rigging the rules of that election so that Democrats don't have the political space to operate and cannot win. And that, I think, is, is a question that is presently before the American electorate. We don't have another year to save American democracy. We likely only have months.

Sam Stein (18:17)

I guess this, I suppose I have to ask you this now. It's kind of like a parlor game. But if he is rigging it in the way that you are outlining here, is it your anticipation that he's going to try to remain in the White House after 2028?

Senator Chris Murphy (18:34)

Sure. I think he is right now trying to scheme a way to be able to stay. I think you have a potential super, two potential Supreme Court vacancies coming up. And it may be very important for him to install folks on the Supreme Court who may be willing to entertain radical ideas about the restrictions in the Constitution. About a third, about a third term. He also may just be interested in installing. Right. Donald Trump Jr. Or another family member in, in the White House, whatever he's planning on doing, he can't get away with it unless he destroys the ability of the people to speak their mind in an election because he's, he and his party are going to lose in 2026 and 2028 unless he's successful in rigging the election. And we're going to do everything in our power and we need to order all of our advocacy in the United States Senate and the House to stop him from doing it.

Sam Stein (19:31)

Just going to note that was very disrespectful to Eric Trump, who you didn't. I'll give you an opportunity to apologize if you want.

Senator Chris Murphy (19:40)

I, I refuse the, I refuse your, your offer.

Sam Stein (19:47)

I'm pro Baron, but he's just too Young, I want to switch to your party, who you've been critical of. I think is fair to say you were not a fan of the shutdown deal. You made that abundantly clear. I want to play devil's advocate here. The shutdown was meant to put a spotlight on expiring extended Obamacare subsidies. And the argument was that you as a party had a moral obligation to make sure that people did not feel that financial pain, the health outcomes that could come from losing insurance or having insurance be too costly. As the shutdown progressed, benefits for food assistance became very imperiled and people began to feel a different type of pain, hunger. Did you not have a moral obligation as a party to make sure that that was also resolved? And if that is the case, why was agreeing to reopen the government and turn on those SNAP benefits again, a bad idea?

Senator Chris Murphy (20:55)

Okay, so I think you're getting into the most essential question and it will remain the hardest question for the political opposition as our democracy remains in peril. And it is this. What do you do when the President United States is willing to weaponize our compassion against us? What do you do when the President United States is willing to impose pain on the American people as leverage to try to get the political opposition to grant him more power? I wish that there were a path to save our democracy that did not involve pain, that did not involve sacrifice, that did not involve hard times. But. But what I know is that democracies die when the opposition just tries to bring everything back to normal as quickly as possible, allows the leader to be able to weaponize our compassion in a way that drags us into consenting to grant more power to the President over and over again. There are not perfect lessons, but lessons from the civil rights movement. The leaders of that movement were willing to live through immense pain, economic pain, during that bus boycott, they filled up the jails, they crossed that bridge, even though that they knew they were going to be subject to enormous abuse and potential death. But their goal was to show their oppressors that their willingness to sustain and live through pain was greater than their oppressor's willingness to impose it on them. Now. But that's a hard thing for a United States Senator to say because I'm not on food stamps. And so the pain is ultimately being borne by the most vulnerable in our society, which means local governments, state governments, the private sector, I think, have an elevated responsibility to try to help alleviate as much of that hurt as possible. But if the path forward is to continue to pass short term budgets or a Long term budget that has no check on his corruption, that has no protections for our democracy simply because we want to preserve the social safety net, which is a very logical thing to want to do. The end result is the destruction of our democracy. And if that's the end result, that is much worse for the poor and the vulnerable than that. Short term pain is man. This is a very hard conversation. I totally understand why eight of my colleagues wanted to end the shutdown. I wanted to end the shutdown. But I think this is an exceptional moment and an exceptional moment that requires you to choose between two very distasteful propositions. So I'm admitting to you that we're all struggling with. I just land on the side of making the sacrifice, asking people to live through the sacrifice, trying to alleviate the sacrifice, because he will be emboldened if we continue to fold to him, if we continue to yield to him, submit to him month after month after month.

Sam Stein (24:27)

Can you give us a little insight into what it was like when you were having your Senate Democratic Caucus meetings in the days leading up to the decision to cut the deal? Because I presume these types of remarks were ones you were making to your colleagues. And I just would be very curious to know how the dynamics were playing out privately to the extent that you're able to talk about them.

Senator Chris Murphy (24:52)

Sure. I mean, there is, there is a sort of difference of opinion broadly inside the Democratic Party as to how exceptional this moment is and whether you can sort of manage the growing totalitarian state in a way that preserves our democracy, or whether you have to draw lines in the sand, moral lines in the sand. Part of my worry, and this is back to the conversation we were just having, is that if we don't show in the Democratic caucus a willing to engage in risk tolerant behavior, how do we ask a university or a law firm to do the same thing? Because in the short run, the best decision for Paul Weiss was to cut the deal. And they would say, we have people that rely on us, we have paralegals and bike messengers who will be hurt in a real way if Paul Weiss disintegrates. But we told that law firm and we told Columbia University, no, the principle right of free speech is more important than the immediate pain that will be visited upon your institution or your company. And yet we aren't necessarily living our own advice. We aren't willing to take stands that involve pain and hurt, but for a principle. I think there was also another difference inside the caucus, which is whether this strategy was going to work or not. If we continued the shutdown, I just think that after that election, the country had, I think, you know, made a referendum supporting the tough stand that we were making. And I think Trump was showing signs of cracking. What did he do the next morning, Wednesday morning, he called all the Republicans to the White House and said, end the filibuster as a means of ending the shutdown. They basically told him no. His next only play would have been to come to Democrats and say, okay, let's cut a deal to reopen the government. But we were so impatient to end the shutdown that we didn't even get to that next step. So I think one of the other disagreements in that room was whether we were going to get what we asked for, the suspension of those subsidy cuts. If we had held out longer and those eight folks didn't believe that, people like me thought that the public pressure would continue to build and that we could actually achieve our objective if we stayed in that shutdown a little bit longer.

Sam Stein (27:12)

The deal that was cut will fund SNAP for the next year. So it is not, as I understand it, an issue. The next time there's going to be a shutdown fight, which is the end of January. Deal cut also says that rifts, reduction in forces can happen while the CR is in play. And RIFs are not allowed to happen legally. We know that the president deeply respects law, but they're not allowed to happen. We're doing a shutdown anyway. So those also should be off the table. So with those two issues off the table and the likelihood that Obamacare subsidies will stop and that premiums will rise, how likely, at this point, do you imagine there's going to be another shutdown in January 31st into February?

Senator Chris Murphy (28:00)

So Trump's pollsters have told him and told Senate Republicans and House Republicans that they are going to get wiped out next November if they don't stop these subsidies from going into effect. And remember, the subsidy cuts, you know, hit folks worst if they're on the aca, but that pain does get spread out to everybody. So everybody who's got either an ACA plan or private insurance is seeing an enormous increase. And so this is, you know, a real political problem for them, as it is a life and death problem for Americans. So I think there is, yes, still a chance that Republicans are going to come to the table and do some kind of deal with Democrats to postpone some of this pain in the economy. But remember, we have been understandably, myopically focused on the health care subsidies. But that's not the only Thing that we're fighting for in this budget debate, this president is acting in brazenly corrupt and illegal ways that if not checked in this budget will destroy our democracy. And so if you cut a deal on this budget that just restores the health care premiums but doesn't require the president to spend the money that the budget allocates, it allows him to just spend money in Republican states and not spend money in Democratic states. If it's. It doesn't constrain his ability to deploy our troops into our cities to try to suppress dissent, if it continues to allow him to use the FCC to shut down free speech and build a growing censorship state, then you haven't succeeded. So we need to put checks on his corruption and on his destruction of democracy into this budget. And so that will be part of the fight in January is are Democrats going to provide votes for a budget that funds a Department of justice that is hunting us down in an effort to jail us and destroy our ability to dissent? What suckers we would be, frankly, if we voted for a budget that literally funds the witch hunt operation against us. So we're not just fighting over health care that's been the center of our fight for the last few months, but as we seek to pass a long term budget, I am not voting for a budget that doesn't both extend the protection for people in our health care system, but also significantly check the President's destruction of our democracy.

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Senator Chris Murphy (30:44)

Come on.

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Senator Chris Murphy (30:54)

Mmm. Okay.

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Sam Stein (31:08)

I want to read you a quote from a colleague of yours. You can guess who the colleague was. I'll give you a clue. It is a Democratic colleague in your chamber. Okay, you can guess who said this. The Democratic Party needs change. It is time for a new generation of leaders to stand up to Trump and to all those compliant in sabotaging the American dream. If the Democratic Party is to deliver new leaders. If the Democratic Party is to deliver new leaders. Must rise, stand and fight. Who do you think said it?

Senator Chris Murphy (31:37)

I think that's Corey, right?

Sam Stein (31:39)

Damn, you're good, dude.

Senator Chris Murphy (31:40)

Okay, I pay attention to what my colleagues say.

Sam Stein (31:43)

Was he talking about Chuck Schumer?

Senator Chris Murphy (31:47)

I have no idea. I saw that that quote got a lot of attention, despite the fact that it's not that controversial a thing to.

Sam Stein (31:55)

Say got my attention.

Senator Chris Murphy (31:56)

And so, you know, I guess people thought that he was talking about one person specifically. Listen, Chuck has a very hard job. None of us met this moment. None of us met this moment. And frankly, what bothers me is that it is a repeating pattern in our caucus. This isn't the first time that a small handful of Democrats split off to vote with Republicans. Twice on continuing resolutions that did not check the president's abuse of power, and then twice on pieces of legislation. I mentioned one earlier that actually give this corrupt President of the United States additional powers of corruption. One, that cryptocurrency bill which carves out an exception for the President of the United States and legalizes his corrupt stablecoin. And a second piece of legislation that passed very early on an immigration bill that gave the president new unprecedented powers of detention that he is using right now against peaceful immigrants. And so this pattern has to stop. Our caucus has to be unified, more important today than ever before. Yes, the Senate has a tradition of a handful of members sort of acting in an ad hoc fashion to solve problems. But if we aren't united today as a caucus moving forward, I don't think there's a path to save the democracy. So the caucus has to figure this out, but Chuck Schumer has to figure this out as well. So, yes, we have to be better in this moment. We have to learn from the mistakes that we have made. That is an obligation of the rank and file, but that is also an obligation of the leadership in the Senate.

Sam Stein (33:35)

Okay, I guess I should be more direct. Is he the right man to be the leader of the Democrats in the Senate? Yes or no?

Senator Chris Murphy (33:48)

So he can lead us. He can lead the Senate moving forward, but only if he and rank and file members make a commitment to work together in protection of our democracy. Again, this is an issue where you've got a handful of Democrats in the Senate who sort of want to return to normal as quickly as possible, who still see their job as reaching out and creating compromise with Republicans, even if that compromise provides more power to the president. Whatever person is in charge of the Senate Democratic caucus is going to have to manage that phenomenon. That problem exists even if there was a different leader. So it's more for. I'm not trying to punt on the question. I'm just telling you the problem right now is a Lack of unity and a lack of common purpose in the Senate. That's a problem that we all have to solve together.

Sam Stein (34:41)

Prior to coming to Austin.

Senator Chris Murphy (34:44)

You did.

Sam Stein (34:45)

What many people do this time of year. You flew to Manchester, New Hampshire and hung out in a somewhat random state. Right. Who goes to New Hampshire? Why were you in New Hampshire?

Senator Chris Murphy (35:02)

Yeah, I mean, I will say I have been traveling the entire country all years.

Sam Stein (35:07)

Yeah, okay, sure.

Senator Chris Murphy (35:11)

Yeah. Listen, I don't think anybody with ambition right now should be planning on running for president in 2028, because we may not have a free and fair election in 2028. We all have to be in the business of saving our democracy right now. So, no, I don't have any plans to run for anything other than the Senate. But I do think we have to, all of us be traveling the entire country, whether it be an early primary state or not, to build this political resistance movement. Sam, as you know, I did something abnormal a few months ago. I decided to stop raising money for myself. And instead right now, when I raise money into my political campaign, I just turn that back around to fund mobilization and protest groups all across the country. So I have spent about a million dollars funding different organization. And you know that if you were, I don't know, if you were only focused on a future office, you'd probably be raising money and sort of hoarding it in an account to spend later. But I don't know whether any of us are going to have election or run in, in 2028 that a Democrat can win. So right now I'm focused on helping these citizen led education, mobilization and protest groups all across the country be able to speak truth to, to power. So that's my sole focus right now. And I wish, and I frankly, I wish more of my colleagues would do that. Like, I, I don't know why everybody's sort of hoarding money if you may not, you know, actually have an election to run. And if every high profile Democrat in the Senate and the House were spending, you know, even a couple hundred thousand dollars supporting all of these various local citizen groups or national groups like Indivisible or MoveOn, we'd have, you know, a much better chance at the kind of mass mobilization that we need. So Bernie does that, AOC does that. I'm doing that now. My hope is that more of my colleagues will decide to spend a little money now on standing up the mobilization effort that we need. That can make a big difference.

Sam Stein (37:26)

I'll just say I went to school in New Hampshire and next time you need Cover do the trip in October, you can say you're looking at the fall leaf peeping. Yeah, leaf picking. That's exactly the thing that a senator does. To your point about the sort of strategic allocation of funds and where to spend it, I will say after the off year election last week, there was real renewed optimism in Democratic circles about the possibility of retaking the Senate. Obviously, it's going to require states like Texas and some unconventional states, maybe even like in Alaska. As you talk to your colleagues and you go around the country, how realistic is the possibility that Democrats can flip that chamber, which I will say nine months ago seemed totally implausible to me.

Senator Chris Murphy (38:17)

Yeah, I think there is a real chance for Democrats to draw even or better in the United States Senate. Agreed. I don't think that this was on most people's bingo card six months ago. But, you know, there are these twin phenomenon that are playing out in the American public right now. This, the president's inability to manage the economy, the rising costs, much of it, you know, derivative of Trump's policy, are maddening to people in and of themselves. But then they also see the way in which he is spending his time and his resources, whether it be on a bailout of Argentina or a new ballroom for the White House. And it is just deeply morally offensive to people. It is not just a practical problem that there are costs arising. They just can't understand why the President of the United States doesn't spend more time on them rather than on himself. That is a political problem for the president and an advantage for us. But people are also seized with the question of the future of American democracy. And I worry that our party has, like, a bit overlearned our lesson from 2024.

Sam Stein (39:26)

How so?

Senator Chris Murphy (39:27)

Well, so I think it's true that, you know, we ran a campaign in 2024 on saving democracy, and it didn't work because people weren't really up for saving this version of democracy. Right. This version of democracy sucks. It's captured by corporate elites and billionaires. It works to consolidate power rather than distribute power. And people also weren't super convinced that Trump was the threat we were saying he was, because they watched the first term and it was a lot of bluster, but it wasn't actually a lot of real turnings of the screws towards totalitarianism. This is different. Right. People are waking up every day worried that they are going to stop you for once lose the ability to speak freely.

Sam Stein (40:12)

Let me stop you on that.

Senator Chris Murphy (40:13)

What don't you believe about the case that I just Made, you said it.

Sam Stein (40:17)

Didn'T feature the turns of the screws. And yes, to a degree. But then on January 6th, the screws were turned and Democrats ran in 2024 on the idea that this man literally threatened to overturn the results of an election. People died as a result, and we went through a national trauma, and voters didn't seem to actually care. In fact, they kind of whitewashed January 6th from their memory. If you recall, as Trump was campaigning, the entire year of 2020 seemed to, like, go into the ether. It wasn't his. So why would, respectfully, why would running on let's save democracy work now if it didn't work after January 6th?

Senator Chris Murphy (41:02)

Well, I do think that the coordinated series of actions that he has taken, which are frankly, different than that one seminal moment on January 6, have caused people to rethink his mission. They have seen this methodical usage, as I mentioned, of the Department of Justice, of the fcc, of the White House itself, of his spending power in order to try to destroy political dissent, reward loyalty. I do think people have picked up on the pattern. They do believe that the president and his team did spend four years putting in place this very coordinated plan, and they're really worried about, in a new way, whether the democracy can survive. But I will say, Sam, is that what we need to learn from 2024 is that nobody is going to really be up for saving democracy unless they believe that if Democrats get power, we are going to do radical things to transform our democracy, to make it work better for people. And I don't really get it. Like, this party, when I first got involved, talked all the time about getting dark money and billionaire money out of politics. Campaign finance reform, whether that's the right phrase or not, was like a top three issue for Democrats. And somewhere along the way in the last 20 years, it stopped being a priority for us. And if we don't get back to being a party that talks about how we will unrig our democracy as a top 1, 2, 3 issue for us, people will be less enthusiastic about stepping up for our democracy. It's a long way of saying that the threat to their pocketbook and the threat to democracy, I think puts us in a position next fall to win a lot of seats in places like Alaska or Texas or Iowa. That maybe would have been unthinkable as political possibilities. Just six months ago, I forgot that.

Sam Stein (42:59)

The question was about the Senate. Sorry, not about my way to get there. We have five minutes of just you and me, and then we're going to get to audience questions. So I guess I should do some oddball ones. What are your thoughts on Trump's taste of interior design? No, I'm just joking. A little bit of a wind up to the this backstage. We do this thing at the Bulwark where we kind of gamify these things and by the way, subscribe to the Bulwark. And one of the things that we have done is we've ranked who we think are the most problematic cabinet members. And I told the senator backstage about this, and I gave him the names, and he didn't tell me his rankings, so I'm going to have him do it in front of you. The options were Pete Hegseth, Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem, and RFK Jr. Technically, JD Vance is a cabinet member, but we're gonna put him aside for the time being and just stick with those four. And in all seriousness, each of them has a portfolio that's done an incredible amount of damage. From the perspective of you and many others, it's hard to rank it, but if you had to look at the landscape, what would you say is the one that stands out for you?

Senator Chris Murphy (44:17)

It's a terrible question, dude.

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Senator Chris Murphy (44:26)

Come on.

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Senator Chris Murphy (44:36)

Okay.

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Senator Chris Murphy (44:50)

So, yeah, I was you previewed five minutes ago. You're gonna ask me this question. So as I was trying not to trip down the stairs, I was thinking about it. So I guess the question is, who can kill the most people, right? No, I'm serious. Which of them, through their incompetence and evildoing, can end up with the most people being harmed? The answer to that question may be RFK Jr. That's my choice.

Sam Stein (45:20)

Is it in alignment?

Senator Chris Murphy (45:21)

Yeah, in part. In part because Trump has the least sort of interest in that portfolio. Hegseth is just nuclear grade incompetent, but he has people like Rubio and others that might act as constraints on him. There are a few constraints on RFK Jr. And there's no guarantee that there will not be another epidemic, another pandemic that could be just grossly mismanaged so that we don't have millions of people dying. We have tens of millions of people dying. So I think he would be number one. Who are my other. Who are my other choices?

Sam Stein (46:01)

You have Bondi and Nome.

Senator Chris Murphy (46:02)

Yeah, I think Bondi and Patel are probably next for me. I mean, they are more sort of avatars for the decision made in this White House to essentially end the independence of the Department of the Judiciary. But there's where the democracy dies. When they move on from Just Comey to Schiff and to Pritzker and de Raskin, right when they get in the wholesale business of pursuing, harassing and locking up their political opponents. That's the most perilous moment for our democracy. And I think as it becomes clear to Trump that he is going to likely lose in 2026 and perhaps lose in 2028, he starts to panic. And the place where that panic may happen is the island is doj.

Sam Stein (46:57)

That was a really uplifting note to end on. No, no, I'm not going to let us end on that. We're going to go very quickly and then audience questions, because I was talking to a couple people actually, prior to coming here, and they had the same question they wanted to ask, which relates to this, which is, if you look at all the damage and the problems and the threats that are out there, how do you go about repairing this? And is it even possible?

Senator Chris Murphy (47:24)

Oh, it's absolutely possible. I mean, yeah, all of our talk tends to be depressing, but I remain, in general, an optimist. But I also remain deeply optimistic about our ability not only to survive this moment, but to come out of it stronger. People are having a emotional, spiritual reaction in this country to this level of cruelty. The way in which the president is treating immigrants is causing a lot of folks who, you know, frankly, had real sympathy for the president's position on immigration, to rethink their belief system and to recommit themselves to the idea of a multicultural America. Seven million people turned out for no kings at a moment when the president was doing everything possible to try to suppress people into silence. That's a big deal. That's a big deal. Democracy. Democracy is still alive. We just saw it on Tuesday. People decided that they weren't staying home, that they weren't giving up. So there are all of these signs that, you know, his attempts to try to overwhelm us with information, to try to harass us into silence are not working. And so I absolutely believe that we survive this moment. And, you know, I just, as much as I'm angry and anxious, I also feel super lucky to be alive at this moment. This is still the greatest experiment in governance in the history of the world, right? 250 years in to governing ourselves in a multicultural, multi ethnic, multi religious society. We should remember how absolutely radical this experiment is. It's kind of wild that it's lasted this long. And so the reason that I feel, you know, both anxious and angry and joyous is that, and I think you probably feel this too. It's probably part of the reason why you're here in this room today is that, you know, I could have been parachuted into the world at any time, in any place, and I happened to be dropped into the United States of America, right? Multicultural democracy 250 years in. @ a moment that it's at peril, at a moment that we're deciding whether we're going to save it for our kids and our grandkids. And I just feel like we are going to do our job. We are going to save this country, we are going to repair from it and we're going to be able to tell our kids and our grandkids that when the test was upon us in the greatest country in the history of the world, we met the moment. So to me, yes, I'm angry, yes, I'm anxious, but I'm absolutely joyous that I get to be part of this moment, a historic moment with all of you and millions of others all around the country.

Sam Stein (50:17)

We're going to turn it over to audience questions now.

Colleen (Reporter) (50:20)

Hello everyone. Thank you for being here and thank you for submitting your questions. My name is Colleen, I'm a reporter at the Tribune and I will be relaying your questions to the senator. So Sean from Austin asks, you often speak about how de industrialization and our failure to provide high paying, meaningful work to displaced workers laid the ground for the MAGA movement today. We are at risk of another mass economic displacement from AI. How should the government intervene to make sure that the AI transition does not lead to the same aftershocks of de industrialization?

Senator Chris Murphy (51:03)

So Trump feels like and likely is the biggest story today, but maybe not. Maybe the most important thing today is the rapid pace of development of AI because if we reach in the next 10 years what they call AGI, which is a level of AI that is way smarter than humans are, the massive immediate job dislocation could be cataclysmic for our democracy. You layer on top of that the damage to our politics done by fake video and audio, the corruption of our children that is happening as we speak. When 66% of kids are regularly using these chat bots, these friendship bots that are coaxing and cheerleading many of them into self harm and suicide. This looks like a pending disaster. And so it is absolutely essential for Congress to step in right now and regulate AI both from a perspective of human interaction and our children's interaction with it, but also to figure out what we can do to slow the pace of job disintegration. I don't know that anything else is more important. I believe that there are an increasing number of Republicans and conservatives that sort of see this disaster coming. I think you may be able to build some cross aisle cooperation on the regulation of AI, but this is a technology that if unregulated, may destroy us. And we've been kind of convinced, and I'll just stop here because we could talk forever about this. We've become convinced that we shouldn't regulate AI because if we do, China will sort of leapfrog us and ultimately control the global AI economy. We don't talk about this a lot, but China is frankly being much more careful than we are about how they use their citizens as guinea pigs for this new technology. They actually have guardrails around how fast they are developing certain technologies and protecting the Chinese people from some of the roughest edges. The Chinese would delight, delight if the United States did not regulate AI and it destroyed America before it destroys China. And so it is really important for us to not listen to the AI technology elites who just want to become billionaires trillionaires off of this technology and are using the red herring of China competition as a means to, to convince us not to step in and regulate. We should start with easy stuff. Just ban children from being able to log on to these conversation chatbots say that you've got to put a big giant watermark on any fake video that you produce so everybody knows real from fake. There are some strength in copyright law so that creative content can't be so easily stolen on these large language models. There's mitigating its impact on job displacement is a harder question. But there are some really easy things that we could do now. And my hope is you'll see more opportunity for Republicans and Democrats to work together. I'm somebody that, you know, has been telling my Democratic colleagues to fight rather than cooperate. The one thing we should be open to cooperation on is on the regulation of AI.

Colleen (Reporter) (54:43)

The next question is from Dan in Austin. If Democrats in the Senate continue to take a hard line on future funding for the government, do you think the Republicans will eliminate the filibuster I think.

Senator Chris Murphy (54:58)

It'S possible that they will. Obviously the President went to Republicans and said, you know, I want to end the shutdown. And the quickest way to do that is to just get rid of the filibuster. And on Wednesday morning when he asked that of them, the answer was broadly no. Probably about half of the Republicans in the Senate are not interested in eliminating the filibuster. I think the President will probably keep up that ask. He will keep pressuring them and they have shown no broad willingness to reject his entreaties on anything. So he may win out. They are going to be increasingly politically skeptical of changing the filibuster because they now see that the likelihood is to going growing, that we're going to win back the Senate in 2026. And if we show up on day one and the filibuster is gone, well, then we're going to use it in those first few days to restore Roe vs. Wade, to pass universal background checks, to pass the Voting Rights Act. I hope we do that.

Sam Stein (56:00)

Anyway, I was going to say, are you okay with them eliminating the filibuster?

Senator Chris Murphy (56:03)

I mean, listen, I have been arguing for us to do it in order to get broadly popular things passed through the Senate. They are trying to use the filibuster reform to pass things that are deeply unpopular. So I think it's probably okay to have a little bit different standard about what you think of filibuster reform if you're trying to use it to pass something like universal background checks that has 90% approval versus what Republicans are trying to use it for, which is, for instance, to pass a budget that doesn't restore these ACA subsidies, which is something that's approved by 20, 30% of the American public.

Colleen (Reporter) (56:44)

So this question is from David from Michigan. Alyssa Slotkin recently hosted a group of low propensity voters and she concluded that people vote according to their hopes. And when they don't feel hope, they are a lot less likely to make the efforts to go out and vote. How can we turn this around?

Senator Chris Murphy (57:06)

Yeah, I think that is broadly correct. And I think that our party over the years has failed to give people real hope because our policies are incremental in the way that they change people's lives. The problems people are facing are enormous today. And so when the Democratic Party is talking about a few dollar increase in the minimum wage or our prescription drug plan is we're going to use the bulk purchasing power of Medicare to negotiate down the price of the top 10 most expensive drugs, it Just doesn't meet the moment for people. Again, part of the reason that Bernie Sanders gets these huge crowds is because. Because he has solutions that are as big as the problems that people face. And so we should be talking about a $20 minimum wage. We should be talking about regulating and capping the price of every single prescription drug in this country. We should be talking about a constitutional amendment to ban billionaire and anonymous and private money from politics. You are not going to get people to feel hope unless you are proposing ideas that meet the moment that are as big as the problems that people face. So yeah, I think she is right. And I think we have to sort of look ourselves in the mirror as a party and ask if our agenda, if our policy ideas have been the kind of ideas that actually generate hope that if you elect us, we'll solve your problems.

Colleen (Reporter) (58:40)

This question is from Carrie King from Austin. How do we combat continued gun violence in our schools in a Red Sea state like Texas? There were two gun related incidences at my son's high school right here in South Austin just this week.

Senator Chris Murphy (58:59)

Yeah, I mean, I'm, you know, I'm the parent of a high school student and a middle school student and they go to school in a, you know, urban public high school. In middle school they have not lockdown drills, they have lockdowns. You know, they have moments where there are active shootings happening in their neighborhood. And I, you know, don't completely understand the trauma that's being done to my own children. I do understand the trauma that's being done to kids who live in neighborhoods where gun violence is a reality. Every day I have this little group of like kitchen cabinet middle schoolers in my neighborhood in Hartford. And I meet with them every couple months to, you know, just have them tell me what life is like in this low income neighborhood in Hartford. And they remind me all the time that school for them is the safe place. They don't worry about school shootings. They worry about getting shot when they're walking to and from school. And so I just try to think about the epidemic of violence in this country. Not through the lens of 90 people dying a day, but all of the kids brain chemistry that's being changed by this daily exposure to violence. Here's part of the reason why I am so desperate to protect and preserve our democracy. Because I've seen it work. I've seen it work. You know, after Sandy Hook, we lost. We didn't pass a bill to try to change the trajectory of gun violence in this nation. And so what did we decide to do. We decided to build. For 10 years, we built methodically a movement. Moms Demand Action, Giffords March for Our Lives. We lost. Over and over again. We continued to try to bring measures before Congress. We lost. We lost. We lost. But we had confidence that our cause was so righteous that eventually we would prevail. And then after that shooting in Uvalde, eerily and tragically reminiscent of Sandy Hook, we had an opportunity to pass a bill. For 30 days, we negotiated what eventually became the bipartisan Safer Communities act, the most significant anti gun violence bill in 30 years. It passed even with the NRA opposing it. Why? Because for the first time in 30 years, Republicans were more scared of the anti gun violence movement than they were of the gun lobby. And you know what happened? Gun violence rates started to plummet as soon as we passed that bill all across the United States of America. And so we have proved the theory of our case that if you organize, if you take advantage of moments in Congress to pass legislation that tightens our gun laws, we will save lives. And we haven't solved this epidemic, but we have had three straight years of double digit declines in gun violence that happened in large part because of a political movement that we built. So these next three years will be really hard. Donald Trump is not going to help us get any new legislation passed. But if we continue to build the movement, if people sign up for these groups, if we continue to build power, there will be a moment not far off in the future like There was in 2022, and we can double down on the progress that we made. And if we are successful in that endeavor, we will continue to chip away and chip away and chip away at this epidemic. So I, as I told you, am in general a very optimistic person, but I am very specifically optimistic on our ability in this country to organize around and eventually end the epidemic of gun violence in our schools and our communities.

Sam Stein (62:25)

Is.

Colleen (Reporter) (62:32)

Let's do one more question for one minute. AJ From Fort Worth asks, do you think that you and your colleagues are sufficiently aware and concerned with the demographic changes of this country, namely that red states are rapidly gaining population while blue states are more slowly growing or outright declining in population? What steps should Democrats take to change these trends?

Senator Chris Murphy (63:01)

Yeah, listen, I mean, we have a national economy, and to me, there is often a race to the bottom occurring as states start to chip away at workers rights. They start to chip away at workforce protections, at health care protections, which does often cause companies to move from one state to another. But the sort of net results of that phenomenon is an economy that broadly isn't working for workers, as you have this kind of regulatory race to the bottom. Which is why I do think there is a growing appetite amongst folks in red states and blue states for the federal government to step in and play a more robust role in creating a national floor of worker safety, a national floor of wage protection, a national floor of benefit protection for all workers in this country. I said at the outset, I do think that there is a realignment happening in America today. The Democratic Party has to do a better job of being able to communicate to voters not just in blue states, but to red states states as well. Which is why, you know, I'm engaged in this project to try to convince my party to build a bigger tent, to be more robustly, economically populist. There's a group of voters who are sort of open to more national intervention in the economy, but are probably more socially and culturally conservative voters. We have an opportunity to expose Trump as a fake populist, as somebody who only cares about himself and not you, but only if our party is a little bit less judgmental about people who don't agree with us on everything from abortion to climate to gun rights. We have the opportunity right now. Trump has presented us with this opportunity to build an unprecedentedly large voting coalition heading into the 2026 elections. And I am hopeful that we will capture that opportunity. It's a really hard conversation for the the party. And I regret sometimes that because we have been so hyper focused on defending our democracy and confronting Trump's corruption, we maybe haven't had the kind of autopsy we should about what went wrong and why we've become so uncompetitive in places like Texas and Missouri and Iowa, places where we used to be competitive only a handful of years or a decade ago. But what an opportunity Trump is presenting us. He has exposed himself as a fraud. He is the most corrupt president in the history of the country. People are looking to salvation. They are looking to the Democratic Party to show that we care about them, that we have ideas that are big enough to match the bigness of their problems, that we're willing to reform government so that it works for them and not the billionaire class. There is, as I said at the outset, an opportunity in this moment to beat Trump in the midterms, to turn the corner for this country in 2028 to come out more united as a nation and to protect and preserve American democracy. That has to happen by Democrats speaking in blue states and purple states, but also red states as well. That's the work ahead of us. I think we can get the job done.

Colleen (Reporter) (66:22)

Thank you for being here.

Senator Chris Murphy (66:23)

Thanks, Sam. Thanks, everybody.

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Senator Chris Murphy (66:35)

Come on.

AM PM Advertiser (66:35)

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Senator Chris Murphy (66:45)

Okay.

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