US Sen. Chris Murphy took to the floor of the US Senate Thursday afternoon to warn his colleagues and the nation about the threat that President-Elect Donald Trump and his “billionaire cronies” pose to American democracy.
“There are far too many people that are denying to themselves what they are seeing,” Murphy said at the beginning of his remarks. “What is happening right now is that Donald Trump and his billionaire advisers are unfolding for the country in real time a plan to transition this country from a democracy to a restrictive oligarchy, where political opposition is silenced, where the media isn’t free, and where government just exists to enrich a small cabal of elites that surround the man in charge.”
Murphy highlighted three events in the last week that he said portended the transformation of the United States from a representative democracy to, in his words, a “restrictive oligarchy.”
First was the finding by the Committee on House Administration’s Subcommittee on Oversight in the House of Representatives that former US Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyoming, should be investigated for criminal wrongdoing in regard to her role as vice chair of the United States House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack.
“Liz Cheney did nothing criminal,” Murphy said. “There’s not even a whiff of a criminal allegation. She was just in charge of a commission that Donald Trump opposed. But House Republicans, taking orders from Donald Trump, just recommended that the next administration, the next Department of Justice, criminally prosecute Liz Cheney.”
Murphy continued: “And by the way, Liz Cheney won’t be the last. There will be other political opponents of Donald Trump who were referred for prosecution. Now, that would be laughable today under an FBI and the Department of Justice that doesn’t lock up people for political reasons. Donald Trump is changing the guard at the FBI. He’s putting in someone loyal to him as the next attorney general. The person he’s going to put in at the FBI wrote a book about how important it was to eliminate from government anybody that doesn’t line up with the political priorities of the president.”
Trump has nominated Kash Patel to lead the FBI, and Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi for Attorney General after his first pick, Matt Gaetz, withdrew his name due to allegations of sex trafficking and sexual relations with a minor.
The second event that Murphy drew attention to was a lawsuit that Trump launched against Iowa pollster J. Ann Selzer and The Des Moines Register over a poll released just before election day which showed that Vice President Kamala Harris had a 3 point lead over Trump. The former president went on to win the state by 14 points, and his lawsuit alleges that Selzer and the Register engaged in fraud and election interference.
“That poll, which suggested that the race was close, got a lot of people to donate to his political opponent, gave people in Iowa some hope that maybe a Democrat could win,” Murphy said. “That’s not allowed in Donald Trump’s world. It’s not allowed in Donald Trump’s world for anything to be in service of his political opposition. So he’s filing a lawsuit that has no chance of succeeding because he wants to try to intimidate journalists and the press into submission. Whether we like it or not, it just is true that maybe in the future, a pollster who has a poll in front of them that shows a race closing, shows a race that’s favorable to Democrats, won’t publicize that poll out of fear of a lawsuit.”
Finally, Murphy pointed to the settlement by ABC News in which the company agreed to pay $15 million to Trump’s presidential library. The settlement resolves a lawsuit from Trump, claiming that news anchor George Stefanopolis defamed him by inaccurately stating that Trump had been found civily liable of raping writer E. Jean Carroll.
Murphy called the lawsuit “bogus,” saying that it would have never succeeded in court.
“But ABC for whatever reason decided it would be better for them to just pay Donald Trump to make it go away,” he said. “And you are seeing repeated decisions by people in the media to just go along with Donald Trump rather than risk his ire, rather than potentially put their profits at risk if Donald Trump and his regulatory agencies turn against them. You saw Jeff Bezos tell his newspapers not to endorse Kamala Harris. You have seen an effort by Comcast to divest itself from MSNBC. You’ve seen ABC pay off Donald Trump 15 million dollars. Over and over and over again you see members of the press starting to decide it’s just better not to fight him.”
Murphy said that Trump and his billionaire advisors are attempting to intimidate political opponents and bully the press so that they can enrich themselves at the expense of the American people.
“They want government contracts, they want to privatize government programs, they want to get bigger regulatory breaks, they want lower taxes,” he said. “Donald Trump and his billionaire cronies want government to serve them, but they know the only way they get away with that is if no one holds them accountable. So in order to steal from us, they have to silence political opposition, intimidate activists into submission, and try to get the press to fault. If they do that, then they can get away with using government as a mechanism to enrich themselves.”
Murphy highlighted the torpedoing of a bipartisan deal to keep the government funded through March by a tag team effort of Trump and Elon Musk, who railed against the plan on the social media platform X, formerly Twitter, that he bought in 2022. Murphy said that they killed the deal and asked for a debt ceiling increase instead to fund a potentially massive package of tax breaks and other benefits for the wealthy.
He warned that ultimately, as political opponents are silenced, that the wealthy people who control the media “fold into the regime,” and that such an outcome in the United States could happen sooner than Americans realize.
“America has been, for almost all of our history, a functioning, robust democracy, where the party or individual in power changes regularly, because people hold all the tools necessary to choose their leaders,” he said. “But that could change in a heartbeat so quickly, but without any one galvanizing moment, that the transition might just be missed by all of us. You could just wake up one day and find out that the rules of democracy have been so rigged that Republicans or the Trump family never ever lose again, and billionaires get to steal from all of us without any accountability.”
