Bulwark Takes - The Senator Who Isn't Afraid To Punch Trump In The Face

Episode Date: June 6, 2025

Senator Chris Murphy joins Lauren Egan to talk his new political action committee, the American Mobilization Project’s $400,000 effort not to fund campaigns, but to fuel grassroots protest and organize resistance to what he calls a looming threat to American democracy.

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This free virtual event brings together leaders like Senator Heidi Heitkamp, Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Governor Andy Beshear, and others for real talk and real solutions. Together we'll tackle the most urgent issues facing rural America. Register today or learn more at ruralprogress.com. I've got Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut

here with me today. He just launched a new political action committee. It's called American Mobilization Project. So he's with us here today to talk about it. Senator, how's it going? It's going great. Thanks for having me. Yeah, thanks for joining us.

So give us like the big picture overview of what this pack is and why you wanted to start it. So it's definitely not news when a member of the Senate or a member of the House starts a political action committee. Most of us have them. We generally use them to support our fellow candidates. We use them to support our political priorities around our states and around the country. This one is different. This PAC is going to be used to fund protest and mobilization all around the country. And we're hopefully going to raise some very big dollars in the process. We're launching with a $400,000 investment in three

groups. One group that organizes doctors and nurses to explain how devastating the Medicaid cuts would be to youth groups that are focused on organizing students and young people around fighting Trump's corruption and registering voters. And the idea here is pretty simple. You know, we right now can't afford to worry about the 2026 elections because there might not be an election in 2026 if we don't stop the destruction of our democracy, if we don't put a real effort into fighting Trump's corruption. There's definitely a dispute in the Democratic Party right now about sort of how urgent this moment is. I just want to model a kind of leadership that says for the time being, all of our efforts have to be dedicated to building enough protests in this country

So that we save our democracy Political science tells you that you need about three percent of the American public to be regularly mobilized in order to stop the destruction of a democracy Or to overcome an autocracy and we're not there yet But if more people do something like this turn over all their political activities and fundraising to pro-democracy organizing, I think we may be able to survive the moment. So the two sort of issue areas that you highlighted are Medicaid and then youth groups. Of all the things to pick from, why those two? Well, I mean, right now, the urgency has to be around both explaining to the American people the scope of damage that would be done by this budget bill. I mean, you're talking about kicking 16 million people off of their health care just so that you can pass along a $270,000 tax cut to the wealthiest families. That is fundamental corruption in and of itself. And in explaining to people how unpopular that is,

then we are frankly just sort of damaging Trump writ large and making it harder for him to get away with some of his other work to try to destroy the democracy. So the central story right now is this effort to throw 50 million people off their Medicaid. And I just think doctors and nurses can tell a really credible story about that. The second project is around organizing youth. And we're starting out in two states, Georgia and Pennsylvania.

And it is just true that when I look at who's showing up to these protests or who's showing up to my big town halls, there's lots of people. But so far, young people have not been dominating those crowds. And I think it is in part because they kind of believe that we're all corrupt and that Trump's corruption is no different than what Democrats might do. And so our work here is to really explain to them why Trump's corruption is fundamentally different, why they're being targeted right now. These Medicaid cuts target young people, the destruction of the Department of Education targets young people, and try to get them out in bigger numbers and also listen to them about what they need to hear from Democrats in order to convince them to be part of this

movement. So this is just the start, but it's a big investment. It's $400,000 in these three groups. And hopefully the tip of the iceberg. I think the next thing we'll look at is maybe some smaller, really localized protest groups where they don't need $400,000, but they might need five or 10 or $20,000. I think you'll continue to see announcements from us all throughout the year about how we can partner with and invest in these local citizen-led protest groups. What's your theory of the case for why these kinds of protests actually lead to results? Because we've seen the Women's March, we've seen a lot of activism, and Trump's still here. So how do you think about that? Well, I do think back to 2017,

what happened after the women's march was pretty exceptional. They wanted to repeal Obamacare, and everybody thought they would do it. The pundits kind of told Democrats why even fight back, because this is their number one agenda item. They didn't do it, and they didn't do it

because we organized all around the country. We lit up the phone lines here. There wasn't a day where there wasn't a pro healthcare rally somewhere in the Capitol. And in the end, there were just enough Republicans who decided to stand up and do the right thing. Those protests also did help stop Donald Trump from engaging in some of the things he was

considering to destroy our democracy. And the protests also are a signal to the courts. Whether we like it or not, the Supreme Court is a political body. They are sort of putting their finger up on a regular basis to take the temperature of the American public. And if they think the American public doesn't care about protecting democracy or doesn't care about fighting back against Trump's corruption, then that may have an impact on their rulings. So I think experience from 2017 tells us that we can stop the worst of their legislative attacks

on people. But I think we also have a pretty good case to be made that significant amounts of mobilization are probably what will help us survive. It won't stop all of Trump's attacks on democratic accountability, but I think it could make him hard. It can make it harder for him to sort of deal the death knell to democracy in the next year and a half.

You mentioned this sort of division that is in the Democratic Party right now about whether or not this is an existential moment, like whether Trump is an existential threat to American democracy. And not all Democrats agree on this. And I'm curious sort of what your conversations have been like with other people on Capitol Hill that are in your party who maybe don't see eye to eye with you on what this moment actually means. And why do you think they feel differently? And where do you think they're coming from about this? Yeah, it's a really good question. I will admit that a lot of the conversations are frustrating. I'll give you an example where, you know, having a debate right now in the Senate

over regulating something called stable coin, it's a type of cryptocurrency, but it's one of the cryptocurrencies that Donald Trump is engaged in. He's the fifth biggest issuer of stable coin in the world, and he's using it for corruption. The UAE, this country in the Middle East, just invested $2 billion in Trump's stable coin in exchange for the United States giving them state secrets. Just a fundamental corruption, fundamentally immoral and unethical. The current version of the bill actually provides an exemption to the ethics laws for Donald Trump, which is outrageous. And a lot of Democrats say, well, the other provisions of the bill actually provides an exemption to the ethics laws for Donald Trump, which is outrageous. And a lot of Democrats say, well, the other provisions of the bill are

good and it's a good thing for us to generally regulate stable coin. But our democracy might not be here in two years. That law might be dead letter. Donald Trump might be ruling by decree. And so if you don't prioritize stopping the corruption, if you don't, for instance, say there's going to be no democratic votes for this bill unless that loophole is closed and Donald Trump is banned in this bill from issuing cryptocurrency, then I don't know that the bill matters at all because the democracy could be gone a year from now. I don't know why, you know, folks don't see what I see, which is the chance for our democracy to disappear by 2026. But I think if you put all of the, if you connect all of the dots between what he's doing to destroy protest on colleges, the normalization

of political violence, the attacks on lawyers, the attacks on democratic fundraising sites like ActBlue. It's not hard to see that the democracy could disappear. So I think we're converting more Democrats as each week goes by to this case, but it's slow. And my hope is that the conversion rate is not too slow to save us. What exactly do you mean by we might not have our democracy in 2026? Is it like, he's gonna do something weird and like cancel elections? Or is it gonna be less obvious? And it's gonna be one of the we talk about Hungary a lot, for example, like you don't necessarily know that you're in it until it's too late. So can you just be more specific about how exactly you think like 2026 could play out? Yeah, like super important question. Because I do think there's this misperception that you're going to know when democracy dies, that it's going to be,

you know, like the burning down of the Reichstag, or there's going to be a coup, or that he's going to cancel elections. No, I don't think any of that is going to happen. We talk about, you know, Hungary or a place like Turkey, because, you know, those are countries that still have elections. They actually still have opposition parties. But the regime rigs all of the rules so that the opposition can never win a national election. And it exists and it wins at the local level, but it never wins a national election. And what they do in Hungary and Turkey is exactly what Donald Trump is doing right now. You smash to bits the places where protest happens. That's college campuses, for instance.

You capture as much of the media as you can. You bully journalists into not telling the truth. You clamp down on the fundraising sources for the opposition party. You destroy the legal class so that you can't sort of push back against the regime when they're trying to destroy the opposition. What happened in Hungary and Turkey is exactly what's happening here. So yes, the worry is that we'll have an election this fall and Democrats will lose even though Trump's approval ratings might be in the Um, and folks will not understand that that's because the democracy is gone

because the rules have just been rigged against us. So it kind of happens in an invisible, hard to track way, which is, um, you know, which is part of the story we have to tell. Yeah. And just to push on that a bit more, like, what do you say to people who hear that and just think that you're catastrophizing a bit and that, you and that Donald Trump's been on the ballot for quite some time and we're all still here. So how do you try to convince people that this isn't normal?

Well, because he's doing things this term that are fundamentally different than what he did in his first term. And it's true. In his first term, he was a lot of loose talk, but not much action. And what happened in those intervening four years In his first term, he was a lot of loose talk, but not much action. And what happened in those intervening four years is that the people who surround Donald

Trump put together a plan. I mean, they literally sat around conference tables and they said, okay, we want to destroy democracy. And they do. I mean, you read the kind of pseudo intellectual underpinnings of MAGA, they say very plainly that democracy is outdated and that progressives are an existential threat to the country. And so by whatever means possible, we have to eliminate them from the body politic.

And if that means eliminating elections, fair elections, then so be it. So a lot happened in those intervening four years. A plan was constructed and you're literally watching the plan be implemented. I mean, whether it's what he's doing to journalists, lawyers, democratic fundraising sites or college campuses, it pales in comparison to anything he even talked about doing in his first term. So I just think it's true that people say, well, we survived Donald Trump the first time, we're going to survive him the second time. No, no, no.

He's carrying out a fundamentally different plan, a well-organized, well-thought out plan to install himself and his allies in power forever that he never even contemplated carrying out and implementing in his first term. You mentioned some of the corruption and the grift of this Trump White House. You know, when the Qatari plane situation happened, I really thought

that that was like breaking through. It was like all over my TikTok. People that don't tend to pay attention to politics are messaging me about it. But Data for Progress had this interesting pullout that was basically like, yeah, this is the Qatari jet was like bottom of the list of news stories that actually did break through. So how are you thinking about trying to get out that message of corruption and grift of this White House when it just kind of seems like a lot of these attacks against Trump, just sort of like, you know, never really seemed to stick. Well, I mean, I worry that Democrats and the left broadly, you know, often think they're powerless in terms of

driving a news cycle. I mean, remember the crisis in America with Haitians eating people's pets, right? That was driven purely by a political decision made by the right and by Republicans to make that a news story. And despite how ridiculous and untrue it was, they were relentless in repeating that lie over and over and over and over again, until it forced mainstream news sources

to talk about it as well. We have to do the same thing with his corruption. The truth of the matter is that we kind of decide, well, people don't care about the corruption so we won't talk about it. They do care about corruption, but they get signals from Democrats that we don't think it's that bad. When we're considering passing a bill regulating crypto that greenlights Donald Trump's corruption, instead of drawing a

line on the sand that we will not vote for it unless his corruption is banned, it sends a signal that it's not that important. When we talk about the cuttary jet for a couple of days and then stop talking about it, it's a signal that it's not important. So I've filed actually resolutions in the Senate to force a full Senate debate and vote on the pending arms sale to the cutteries. My belief is that we should all vote against it because we should not normalize

the kind of corruption that's happening. So there are opportunities that we will have to keep this issue front and center, but I think Democrats can be a little defeatist about our ability to drive the narrative around Trump's corruption. So normally when people start a pack, it's because they have, you know, a higher office in mind. Just curious if you had any news you might want to make on the bulwark at this moment. I have no news in part because I'm trying to, well, I'm trying to sort of model the exact opposite. And listen, you're not the only person to like look at the American Mobilization Pack and, you

know, wonder whether it has to do with something else other than this moment. But, you know, what I've made, I've made this commitment that the money that we're raising right now into this PAC is not going for any political campaign, mine or anybody else's, is literally going to protest on the ground right now. And I guess to the extent that like, you know, some of my voice is broken through a little bit, some of the things I've been saying, you know, my voice is broken through a little bit. Some of the things I've been saying people have paid attention to in the last few months. I think it's because I mean, I am genuinely seized by this moment. I really think that we might lose our democracy if we don't stand up a massive

protest campaign all across this country. And I think it would be wildly irresponsible for any of us to be thinking about 2026, nevermind 2028, when our democracy might not be around. So I want all my colleagues to stop thinking for the time being so much about the next few elections that are coming up, whether they're running in them or not, and put all of their energy, all of their political efforts, all of their fundraising efforts into supporting the people on the ground who are protesting right now to save our democracy. Well, Senator Murphy, thank you for being here today. And when you do have some news that you might want to make one day on that front, you are always welcome back at the Bulwark.

Thanks for having me.