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

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.