Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues From Trumpism
Thu, 8 May 2025
Democrats are stumbling — badly. While the Trump administration redefines the limits of executive overreach, the Democratic party remains at odds over how to — even whether to — respond. But Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut has a plan for beating Republicans in 2026, and it involves taking a cue from President Trump. He shares it with Ross Douthat on this episode of Interesting Times. 02:07 - The First 100 Days for Trump and the Democrats04:06 - The Threat to Democracy Wasn’t Enough Then or Now.06:49 - How Dems Fight Trump13:41 - Where Chris Murphy Can Agree With the Populist Right16:38 - Is Connecticut a Model of What is Wrong with Democrats?25:54 - The Spiritual Crisis in American Life27:56 - The Problem with Big Tech33:45 - How Do Democrats (And Murphy) Talk About Religion? Should They?45:35 - Is Trump Really Running An Oligarchy?50:34 - Does the Democratic Party Need a Bigger Tent?53:54 - A Need for a National Consensus on Immigration57:09 - “A Democracy Dies Without a High Stakes Confrontation”(A full transcript of this episode is available on the Times website.) Thoughts? Email us at [email protected]. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Chapter 1: What are the Democrats' challenges in the Trump era?
From New York Times Opinion, I'm Ross Douthat, and this is Interesting Times. It's a difficult time for the Democratic Party. Donald Trump's approval ratings have dropped sharply, but the Democrats remain incredibly unpopular. Liberalism is searching not just for a clear agenda, but also a clear idea of why it lost, why the country turned right, and where the left might go from here.
One notable searcher is Democratic Senator Chris Murphy, who happens to represent my own home state of Connecticut, the green suburban heart of blue America. Murphy has been front and center lately as an advocate of renewed capital R resistance to the Trump administration. But he's also been a would-be theorist of the rise of populism.
He's argued, in language that, let's just say, doesn't always come easily to Democratic politicians, that the Trump era should be understood in terms of cultural, even spiritual, crisis. Can this theory fit with the practice of Democratic Party politics? Can you resist Trump while understanding and adapting to Trumpism? Let's find out. Senator Murphy, welcome to Interesting Times.
They are interesting times. Thanks for having me. That's right. Well, we paid you extra to confirm that for us. You're joining me from the bowels of the Capitol in Washington, D.C.
Chapter 2: What is Senator Chris Murphy's view on Trumpism?
I'm in what they call my hideaway office. So I'm in the basement of the Capitol right now. You may hear some bells going off here during our conversation as the votes for the day get
All right. Terrific. That will give us some real urgency behind this conversation. So I want to jump right in and talk about your party and the state of the Democrats, because we just marked 100 days of the second Trump administration. The media was full of takes on those 100 days, how Trump was doing, how the White House is governing. And I want to ask you about the Democrats' first 100 days.
What do you think of your party's performance since Donald Trump was inaugurated?
I don't know that anyone was ready for Trump in his second term. I think there was an assumption both in the public and within the Democratic Party that Trump 2 would look very much like Trump 1, that it'd be a lot of rhetoric and bluster, but it wouldn't be matched with actual action. Things have gone very different than the public imagined and that the party imagined.
Trump, from day one, began to wage a very coordinated, thoughtful assault on the rule of law in order to enable the transfer of our government from democracy into some form of quasi-democracy to put his billionaire friends in charge. And I just don't know that the Democratic Party was ready.
And I think even to this day, a lot of folks in the party still think this is politics as normal, still think that we're really not. at risk of losing our democracy, that we're going to have an election in 2026, and that if we just continue to push his approval ratings down bit by bit, that everything will turn out okay.
I think that the broad public has been very dissatisfied with the Democrats' reaction, and that's in part why you see approval ratings for the party in the toilet. Slowly, I think the party is beginning to understand that democracy itself is at risk. So our response is getting better. It's getting more precise. But there is still an open discussion inside the Democratic Party as to how
urgent this moment is. And I'm not sure which side is going to win. I think if my side, the side that believes it is like five alarm urgent, doesn't win, we might not actually have an election that Democrats can compete in in 2026.
So just as an outsider to Democratic Party debates, it doesn't seem to me like the party went easy on the argument that Donald Trump is a threat to democracy in 2024. This was obviously a centerpiece of Joe Biden's arguments in the midterms and before he ultimately dropped out of the race.
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Chapter 3: How do Democrats need to respond to Trump?
And while there were various different, you know, Harris Waltz messages over the course of the campaign, democracy ended up being a big part of the closing argument. So one, what makes you say that Democrats weren't ready for a thing that Your standard bearers were campaigning on. And two, just as a political matter, Democrats did lose with a version of that message just four to six months ago.
However, however long it was, time time has changed a bit. So on on both fronts, why didn't that message land and why would it be the right message for Democrats right now?
So I don't actually know the answer to the first question. If Democrats ran, telling the public that Donald Trump was going to be a threat immediately to democracy, why did Democrats not stand up a more effective, more urgent response immediately? I think losing to Trump for the second time...
When Trump had openly advertised to the public that he was going to try to degrade our democracy, I think it was a body blow to Democrats. And I think there was just, you know, in those early days, a real lack of energy. I didn't understand why when he pardoned all of the January 6th protesters, there wasn't a more immediate response a day later.
There was a proposal to sort of speed through the Senate the nomination of the director of the CIA, and Democrats were all ready to fall in line, not understanding that this was an opportunity to make an argument over why Trump was actually terrible for national security, why he didn't care about the security of this country when he was authorizing his followers to engage in mass violence against our democracy.
But to the extent that the country voted for him having listened to him say that he was going to be a dictator on day one, I think that explanation is pretty easy. They just didn't believe him. They believed him when he said he was going to be serious about lowering prices. They didn't believe him when he said he was going to be a dictator.
And so I think the reason that his disapproval ratings are going up so fast is that a lot of his own voters are now coming to the realization that he didn't mean it when he said that he was going to tackle prices. And the thing he was serious about was dismantling our democracy. And that's not exactly how they sort of read his rhetoric during the campaign.
So what is it that you think Democrats should be doing then? What is the strategy, given that obviously Democrats don't have a majority in the House, don't have a majority in the Senate? You already mentioned the idea of it sounds like, of slowing down Trump's nominations to various cabinet agencies.
You've obviously had figures like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez doing a kind of politics of rallying, basically, sort of around the country. But what more is there that a engaged Democratic Party sort of focused on the threat to democracy in Washington, D.C. would be doing right now?
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Chapter 4: What is the spiritual crisis in American life?
at least 10 or 12 Democrats refuse to vote against their continuing resolution because shutting down the government might have gone badly for Democrats.
But if you're not taking exceptional tactical steps in the opposition right now, then you're not providing any inspiration for people out there in the public to engage in the kind of risk-taking that will be necessary to save the republic when we need hundreds of thousands of people to mobilize on the streets. And then if I just sort of give one suggestion on the sort of policy front,
One of the reasons why the pro-democracy message did not work in 2024, and I agree it was the tentpole of the Harris campaign, is because Democrats aren't seen as credible Well, let me say this a different way.
Chapter 5: What are the implications of big tech on democracy?
Democrats can't really argue for this version of democracy because people think this version of democracy is rigged in favor of the billionaires and the special interests, and they're not really interested in protecting this version of democracy. For Democrats to credibly argue against Trump's destruction of democracy, we have to –
make it credible that if we win power, we will unrig the democracy. So that means Democrats have to talk a lot more about campaign finance reform, getting a constitutional amendment to get all private money out of politics, things like the Stock Act or closing the revolving door of lobbyists and staff and members of Congress. We've got to have
a real focus on the way in which we would fix democracy if you give us power. In the last 10 years, I would argue that that set of issues was like never top 10, certainly not top five for Democrats. It's got to be top two now, because that's the only way that you will convince people that are starting to get pretty tired and pretty worried about Trump's assault on democratic norms.
But so are any of those issues actually top one or top two or top three for voters?
Because it seems to me that if you look at Trump's relative unpopularity at the moment, it's heavily driven by pocketbook concerns, by anxieties over tariffs and trade wars and their effect on people's incomes to the extent that a lot of the cuts that Elon Musk and Doge have done or tried to do, to the extent that those have been unpopular, it's because they've been touching on
Places like Social Security that obviously are sort of crucial to American sense of their own economic security. Whereas talking about insider trading by members of Congress, talking about campaign finance reform, those aren't kind of bread and butter issues. economic issues. They may be part of a plausible narrative about what's gone wrong in our democracy.
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Chapter 6: How should Democrats talk about religion?
But if I look at the polls right now, Donald Trump has become substantially more unpopular since he took office. Democrats have not become substantially more popular. So it seems like there has to be some other missing element to a democratic narrative beyond just attacking insider trading and self-dealing and corruption.
Right, which is why I say it has to be a top two issue, right? The first issue is how Democrats would unrig the economy. Right. So talk about that.
How do you unrig the economy from the point of view of the Democratic Party?
But let me make the connection first, which is that one of the only ways you unrig the economy – is to unrig the way the government works in which the special interests and the billionaires get everything they want out of government, right?
The reason that the economy is rigged is because the government is rigged, is because the way in which campaigns are financed means that the billionaires and the corporations get a seat at the table and you don't. So if you are interested in changing the structure of the economy so that small businesses get a
or workers don't get abused in their workplace, then you have to fundamentally unrig the way the government works. So the two are intimately connected. And I would argue, Ross, that there's plenty of examples of elections that actually have turned on the issue of corruption, because it's kind of like a baseline issue.
People don't care about corruption until they are looking in the face of a corrupt elected official. And then really, regardless of your positioning on corruption, economics or immigration or choice or guns, they will vote you out. On this question of how you unrig the economy, I'll just start with this, and I'm sure we'll have a longer discussion about it.
Democratic economic policy during the Biden administration, I would argue, was very heavily reliant on subsidy. The child care tax credit, the increased Obamacare subsidies, the forgiveness of student loans, essentially a whole bunch of efforts to write families a check in order to paper over the unfairness of the economy. I don't think that's actually what voters want.
Those are good economic policies, but they feel unfair. Kind of dirty, kind of lousy to just have to be compensated for the fact that work doesn't pay, which is why that has to be the structure of our efforts to unrig the economy, making work pay. That means a much higher minimum wage. That means much more empowered labor unions.
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Chapter 7: What does a bigger Democratic tent look like?
The Republican Party has been recently talking a big game on populism, but has not delivered. And in fact, the way in which Trump is implementing the tariffs seems to be just another nod to sort of former market based neoliberalism in which the companies with the biggest megaphones and the biggest bank accounts get exemptions from the tariffs.
And those without political power are subject to the tariffs. The Democratic Party has a chance to use this fake populism to win over a chunk of his base, but only if we are less judgmental about the differences that may exist inside that tent on really tough issues like gay rights and abortion and guns. And I, you know, Ross, I'm...
partially to blame for that judgmentalism, because I think I helped, for instance, frame our litmus test on the issue of guns in a way that probably has been unhelpful to building a broader coalition for the Democratic Party.
Well, yeah, let's get into your personal responsibility for everything that's gone wrong with the Democratic Party or not your personal responsibility, but let's call it your geographical responsibility, because you and I were both from Connecticut. Where did you grow up?
In Wethersfield, just south of Hartford, which for those who don't know Connecticut geography intimately is a beautiful colonial era town with all these houses from the 1700s. If you've read the children's novel, The Witch of Blackbird Pond, right? Isn't that set in Wethersfield? It's the kind of place where you can go and, you know, do...
drawings of gravestones from the 1680s and all these kind of things.
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Chapter 8: What role does government play in addressing loneliness?
The largest collection of preserved 17th and 18th century houses, I think, in the country.
If you drive through it, you will believe it. So I like Wethersfield. I like Connecticut. It's a beautiful state. But it does often seem to me like the perfect embodiment of a kind of liberal or left-of-center politics That you personally seem to be saying is part of what's wrong with the Democratic Party. Right. In the sense that just in my lifetime. Right.
So I grew up in Connecticut in the 1980s. And at that point, there was still a kind of residual Rockefeller Republican, upper class Republican mentality. base in the state. If you went down to the richest towns closest to New York, you found a lot of Republicans. And if you went to sort of the more middle class areas, you found a lot of Democrats.
Since then, the state has generally moved to the left. But the way the Democratic Party works in Connecticut is you have rich people who've become more Democratic close to New York in finance and industries connected to finance. You have university towns like New Haven, where I live, which have a lot of academic liberals. And then you have some very poor cities, Bridgeport and Hartford, notably.
What you don't have is a big middle to working class Democratic constituency. The rural parts of the state are quite Trumpy. And just in like the towns near me, the sort of lower middle class, working class towns, at the very least, they're purple. They're not blue. Right. So this is the coalition. This Connecticut is in a way the sort of the modern Democratic coalition.
So I guess the straightforward question is, are you saying that the Democrats need to reject the Connecticut model of Democratic politics? Tread carefully with your re-election.
Well, I think you are describing the demographic makeup of Connecticut, which is right now well-matched with this version of the Democratic Party. If the Democratic Party was to, let's say, become more tolerant of views that are outside our social and cultural mainstream, would we lose... Voters that are currently in our coalition, I'm not sure that we would.
Would we be able to pick up some slice of Trump's base that now see him handing the government over to his billionaire friends and are willing to vote for Democrats who support industrial policy and a higher minimum wage so long as they don't feel like they are being judged and looked down upon for their views on transgender girls in sports.
That's my theory of the case, is that you are not necessarily going to lose folks that are already in your coalition. You'll just build a bigger, more enduring coalition, especially if the Republican Party doesn't learn from what's happening right now and actually grapple with real populism versus fake populism.
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