The following is a lightly edited transcript of the December 18 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, Democrat of Connecticut, sounded an extraordinary warning this week. After a House GOP report recommended that the FBI investigate Liz Cheney for activities related to the January 6 Committee, Murphy pointed out in a powerful social media thread that Donald Trump is clearly putting in place a plan to cripple our democracy, one we might never recover from. What made Senator Murphy’s warning particularly interesting was how he connected a series of dots to show the plan coming together and accelerating right before our eyes, even before Trump has taken office again. Today, we’re talking to Senator Murphy about his warning. Thank you so much for coming on, Senator.
Chris Murphy: Thanks for having me.
Sargent: Senator, Donald Trump has now tweeted about the House GOP report, basically endorsing its findings and saying that Liz Cheney could now be in a lot of trouble. Do you take that as a direct sign that the FBI under Kash Patel—if he gets confirmed as director—will try to investigate Cheney?
Murphy: Well, you have to assume that that’s exactly what’s going to happen. Kash Patel’s number one qualification is that he will do anything and everything Donald Trump tells him to do. He has, in fact, made his career off of an advertisement that he believes anybody who’s opposing Donald Trump politically should be prosecuted. He said, The people who tried to stop Donald Trump from becoming president in 2020 [those are the people that accurately reported the results of the election] should go to jail.
So Kash Patel’s at the FBI to make the FBI an enforcer of Trump’s political power. Pam Bondi is not going to stand in the way as the attorney general. And if they pick the right court with a Trump-appointed political judge, the courts won’t stand in the way either. There is a very real possibility, increasing by the day, that one or many more of Trump’s political opponents, perhaps starting with Liz Cheney, end up in jail in 2025.
I do not think that we can overhype the potentially fatal damage that that will do to American democracy. It is important that we not normalize this. It is important that we talk about the gravity of the challenge right now, before it is too late and everybody just goes back to business as normal.
Sargent: The House GOP report does look like a deliberate pretext for Kash Patel to use to potentially initiate a criminal investigation of Cheney. The allegations in the GOP report are a joke, but putting that aside, you lay out a scenario in which Trump’s DOJ collaborates with client judges to make a prosecution of Cheney or any other enemies of MAGA a lot easier. Can you talk a little bit about that side of it? How does that unfold—the client judges? Does that mean indictments become easier? Do you expect them to really seek indictments with grand juries of people who Trump just decides have angered him?
Murphy: Can we just spend one second on the substance of the allegation piece? I think it’s important because if you actually read mainstream news reporting on the referral that the House made, you would believe that there was substance to it. I read most of the headlines. The headlines were standard boilerplate headlines: House refers Liz Cheney for criminal prosecution. You had to dig really deep to find out that it’s literally made up.
First of all, you cannot, under the Constitution, criminalize conduct done in your official duties—that’s the speech and debate clause. But even if you wipe the speech and debate clause out of the Constitution, they’re literally just making up things that they say that she did. They claim that she pressured one of the witnesses to lie, that she intimidated the witnesses to not tell the truth. That’s just not true. There’s no facts that allege that; it is just made up out of thin air.
It is a bogus claim on the merits, and it is also unenforceable under the Constitution, but that will not stop Kash Patel from acting on it. That will not stop the DOJ from acting on it. And if they find the right judge, potentially in a jurisdiction where the right grand jury is seated, then there’s nothing to stop her from going to jail. That, in and of itself, would have a chilling effect.
What we see all across the globe is that when you start to put a couple of the regime’s political opponents in jail, there are literally just thousands of people who say, You know what, forget it. It’s just not worth it. I think this is important, to oppose Donald Trump, but I got a family at home. I just don’t want to put my name in the mix. And all of a sudden, the bodies that are available for the political opposition are cut in half. It’s not that they disappear, but that you just don’t have the same crowds to organize because people become risk-averse for a good reason. So even if it’s just Liz Cheney—and it may not be just Liz Cheney—the chilling effect that it has on speech could be fatal.
Sargent: I love the way you connected all this to the media angle as well. Trump just secured a $15 million settlement with ABC News in a libel lawsuit that ABC might have won. Trump followed up on that by suing Iowa pollster Ann Selzer for getting her preelection poll wrong. Clearly, he’s going to try to cow media organizations into submission. And as you write, there are signs that they’re starting to fold.
I want to ask you about one more iteration here. Imagine these things interlocking. Imagine media organizations getting too skittish about reporting aggressively on the baselessness of Trump’s prosecutions of his enemies. You just pointed out that the headlines are not doing justice to the absurdity of the House GOP referral. These things interlock. Do you see something like that happening and snowballing on itself?
Murphy: I don’t think there are signs that the media is folding. They are folding. They are. We’re watching them fold. I don’t exactly know why Elon Musk decided to fold his entire operation into the White House, but maybe it has something to do with the fact that he got rich off of government policy, whether it be tax credits on electric vehicles or subsidies for his space business. He’s just much better off being integrated into power. I don’t know why Comcast decided to sell MSNBC, but maybe it has to do with the fact that they decided they don’t want to get crosswise with Donald Trump because they have lots of business interests that intersect with the government. I don’t know why Jeff Bezos, for the first time ever, told The Washington Post not to endorse, but maybe it’s because his bread is often buttered by government policy. I don’t know why ABC decided to settle a bogus lawsuit, but maybe ...
Listen, they’re folding. They are. When the media decides to start hedging, or not telling the full story, combined with people being reluctant to engage in political opposition because they fear they will land in jail, that’s just not a democracy any longer. And it’s not like we’re six months away from that. It feels like we might be a month away from a world in which people start to retreat from politics for fear of criminal prosecution, and the media just uses kid gloves in dealing with the regime.
I don’t think this is hypothetical two years from now; we may be living in a very restricted democratic space in January. We have to understand that if we don’t raise that in the context of these nominations, if we don’t put up a fight as political leaders, then we are signaling to the American public that it’s not a big deal.
Sargent: You brought me to my next question, which is about your party. In the face of all this, it seems like Democrats—many anyway—are adopting this posture of strategic caution. They fear saying straight out that Trump is threatening illegitimate, corrupt, dangerous abuses of power because it might make them appear unwilling to work with Trump. To put it very bluntly, are enough Democrats saying what you said on Twitter, or X, and are they saying it loudly enough?
Murphy: No. No. And I’ll give you another example. Having watched Trump during his first term, when nothing was real, when everything was a faint or a fake—it was never infrastructure week; he was never serious, after Parkland, about doing gun control—why do we, all of a sudden, decide to take this government efficiency task force seriously? Why are we acting as if this is legitimate?
A, it’s not a department. B, it’s being run by two billionaires, people who have no idea how important basic government services like Medicaid, Social Security, veterans benefits are to regular people. But there are a lot of Democrats openly saying, I want to work with them, I want to sit down with this group. That gives the appearance that this is something other than either just a TV show or an effort by the billionaire class to privatize government to benefit themselves, which would be par for the course because all Donald Trump has shown us is that he wants to monetize his power for the benefit of himself and his friends.
So yes, on nominations, I don’t think enough Democrats are sounding the red alert on this government efficiency racket. And when regular people see Democrats treating all of this as normal, they start to believe it’s normal. It’s not normal, and we have to start telegraphing that to people.
Sargent: A hundred percent. It seems to me like the Democratic Party’s understanding of things right now is deeply problematic. Democrats seem to think that because Trump won in spite of their warnings of the threat Trump poses to the system that voters can’t really be reached with an argument about those things. The only thing that reaches them, Democrats think, are promises on the economy. But Senator, Democrats can’t use that as an excuse not to communicate with voters about what Trump is actually doing to threaten the system, right? If the party musters a loud unified stand against the profound unfitness of these nominees, couldn’t that noise, the warnings, get voters to focus on Trump’s lawlessness, get them alarmed about what’s happening?
Murphy: Yes, but let me add an important element to that: Only if voters believe that Democrats are actually serious about reforming government. This was one of the problems in 2024 and the election that we just went through. We were so obsessed with the threat to democracy. That was arguably the tent pole of the Harris campaign. That’s why Liz Cheney was campaigning with her despite their disagreements on foreign policy and economics.
People came to believe the Democrats were endorsing not just democracy, but the current version of democracy, which is not working for anybody. So the only way that we are credible in attacking Trump’s attempts to deconstruct democracy is to make it clear that we want to reform democracy. Not in marginal ways. Like get private money completely out of politics through a constitutional amendment if it’s necessary; close the revolving door in and out of government, make sure nobody can trade on their influence to make money; actually make government more efficient and faster, like build a permanent road in six months instead of six years.
We’ve got to attack the existing version of democracy. Get back to where we used to be 20 years ago when we were an aggressive democracy reform party because our critiques of Donald Trump will land flat if people think that we’re just defending the existing system.
Sargent: OK, 100 percent agreed with that. It seems to me, though, that Democrats are taking that critique that you just made and internalizing it, and essentially using it as an excuse to not take on the actual fight that’s necessary here. Your thread stands out from what most other Democrats are saying. It just feels to me like Democrats think that they can’t talk too much about Musk and the horribly unfit and dangerous RFK and the lawless Kash Patel, which you’re warning of; that Democrats fear that somehow Trump’s choices are tapping into something authentic felt by the American people so they can’t call those things out. It seems like an excuse to shrink from the fight. Senator, is it unreasonable for people to fear that the Democratic Party is flirting with surrender to this authoritarianism here?
Murphy: Listen, we’re making that decision right now. And there’s nothing wrong with a little bit of time to lick your wounds. He’s not president yet. You really need to have the fight and be ready for the fight when he’s president. It’s also true that there’s some big, important things that had to get done at the end of the year, including the funding of the government and the defense bill. So there are Democratic leaders that are working on finishing up business; there’s a lot of folks that just needed a little break. And that’s okay.
So I don’t know that I’ve come to the conclusion that we’re preparing for surrender yet. But these are critical moments. And I do think that if you go from now until January 20 and not raise the specter of how dystopian this world could be, then start doing it on January 20, it loses a little bit of credibility.
Sargent: And the party has to really find its way to a loud and unified position on the threats Trump is posing, right?
Murphy: Yes, but that’s combined with a true authenticity about what we stand for. You’re right that we’ve been a little reluctant to push against some of these nominees because we think Trump has a monopoly on authenticity. That’s not true; his populism is fake populism. We could choose to be an actually populist party, a party that attacks power, matched with actual solutions that deconstruct power and hands it to regular people, that rebuilds healthy communities. We could be breaking up the banks and the big tech companies. We could be aggressively raising the minimum wage. We could be empowering unions, tilting the playing field toward unions. We could be a real economically progressive, for-the-people party in an authentic way, and that would give us additional credibility to spend time attacking Trump on his insincere populism and his attacks on democracy.
Sargent: You’ve been very vocal in saying that the cataclysm–as you called it in the election, the Democratic loss—is attributable to the Democrats losing touch with working-class voters, not articulating an authentically populist message and so forth. But some people think that that goal—figuring out how to talk to the working class—is in contradiction with warning about democracy and the threats Trump poses. That is, some Democrats worry, or think, or are using this as an excuse, saying, Well, if we respond to every outrage by Trump, then we won’t be communicating with the working class. It sounds like that’s not a dichotomy you really accept. You’re saying both have to be done.
Murphy: I’m saying both have to be done; but for the criticism of Trump’s attacks on democracy to be legitimate, you have to campaign as a reformer of democracy. As we’re speaking, I’m tossing around a Dan Osborn football here. And who ran further ahead of Kamala Harris than any other Senate candidate in the country? Dan Osborn in Nebraska. Independent; not Democrat, independent. What did he marry together? Critique of government, critique of the existing version of democracy. He’s not in favor of autocracy, just a reformer. He is a reformer of democracy, along with an economic populist, somebody who talked about workers all the time.
That’s what Democrats should be: government reformers. The system is not working. We need to fix it, not do away with it. And everything we do has to be for workers, has to be breaking up concentrated power, handing power back to local communities and on-the-line workers. I don’t know—I’m not the smartest guy in this town—but that, to me, seems like a pretty simple winning message.
Sargent: Well, no question about it. I just want to try to pin this down though because—
Murphy: No question about it that I’m not the smartest guy in town?
Sargent: [laughs] Well, I didn’t say that, senator. You’re definitely up there. There’s no question. I don’t think anyone doubts that.
Murphy: Low bar. Low bar.
Sargent: Maybe. I just want to try to pin this down because your thread is so jarring compared to what other Democrats are saying. Yes, licking wounds, understood. Yes, there’s time. Yes, there’s things to do, but the Democratic Party has got to get out there more on this stuff now, or in the next couple of weeks. It’s got to get in the game of sounding the alarm about both the profound unfitness of these nominees, the moral degeneracy of people like RFK, and Kash Patel, openly, as you say, being nominated for the express purpose of weaponizing law enforcement against Trump’s enemies with no basis. The party has to say this stuff, right?
Murphy: Yeah. And just because it is unlikely that we are going to defeat these nominees doesn’t mean that there [isn’t] great efficacy in having the fight. These are moments. These nomination fights are moments where you draw a contrast on values. Even if you don’t win the vote, they can be very impactful. And if you don’t signal outrage at how Trump is fundamentally shifting our conversation around the health of democracy now, then I don’t think people will believe that later.
Why? After a mass shooting—these awful mass shootings—I will often immediately go down to the Senate floor. I do that because it’s the way I express my visceral emotional reaction to another mass shooting. It is also because I want people to know, in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, that this is not something we should accept; that I don’t accept it. I go right down to the floor and pour my heart out about how devastating it is, and that is what’s helped to keep the conversation going: that we don’t normalize mass shootings.
That’s the same tactic we need to use right now. If we just accept that RFK Jr. is a mainstream nominee to head the health agency when he just finished telling us that he thinks maybe Covid was a genetically engineered virus to protect Chinese and Ashkenazi Jews, we’re cooked. We’re cooked if that, all of a sudden, is a normal thing—to nominate somebody like that, who thinks things like that, to head up the biggest health agency in the world.
The signaling to the public is important. We’re not super popular politicians, but it doesn’t mean that people don’t listen to us.
Sargent: That is absolutely true. To close this out, in your thread, you said that Trump is putting into action a plan to cripple our democracy in a way we may never recover from. What’s the end point that you’re envisioning here? Not even the worst case scenario, but a plausible scenario in which we don’t recover—what does that look like?
Murphy: It’s what I articulated at the beginning, Greg. If a couple of Democrats or critics of Trump go to jail, it could have an immediate chilling effect on the number of people who will ever get involved in politics on the side of the opposition, which is the Democratic Party. And if over the next six months, the number of donors, the number of volunteers available to Democrats running in elections gets cut by 20 or 30 percent, that may be the end, in and of itself.
Then, what if, on top of that, the media decides to stop criticizing Trump—the media doesn’t publish a poll that shows that a race is tight because they don’t want a lawsuit from Donald Trump, they don’t write a headline that is critical of him because they don’t want their FEC license pulled? What if, all of a sudden, the media starts to slant toward Trump at the same time that normal people retreat from democratic politics because they fear intimidation or persecution?
We’ll still have elections at the end of this year. There will still be a free media, but it will be a space where the opposition doesn’t have enough oxygen to breathe. And that’s the reality in many countries in this world today. If you go to a place like Turkey or Hungary or Serbia, the opposition doesn’t win elections very often—sometimes never. That is because though they have elections, the space for journalists and the space for the political opposition is too crunched for the opposition to ever win. That is what I am worried about.
Sargent: Senator Chris Murphy, I really, really hope that the rest of your party starts to say this stuff as loudly as you just said it. Thanks so much for coming on with us.
Murphy: Thanks, Greg.
Sargent: Folks, if you enjoyed that discussion of where the Democratic Party should go next, check out some new content up at tnr.com: Kate Aronoff arguing that in sabotaging AOC’s bid for leadership on the Oversight Committee, Nancy Pelosi may have won but the Democratic Party lost. And over on the DSR network, Deep State Radio’s annual year-in-review is out now. Join David Rothkopf, David Sanger, Kori Schake, and Rosa Brooks as they look back at 2024 and forward to 2025 in this special two-part episode. Also, tune into the latest episode of Words Matter featuring Norm Ornstein and Kavita Patel as they take stock of the Trump transition as we inch closer to Inauguration Day. We’ll see you all tomorrow.
You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.