October 12, 2025

When I think of “fight,” I think of Senator Chris Murphy. Recently, we sat down to talk about the government shutdown, Trump’s crypto scam, and his leadership on gun control. Senator Murphy is at the front-lines of the battle for our country, and I hope this conversation motivates you as much as it motivated me. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Marc Elias: Senator Chris Murphy, welcome back to Defending Democracy.

Chris Murphy: What's up, man? Thanks for having me back.

Marc Elias: All right, so we are at a strategic inflection point in our nation's history. We have Donald Trump in office. You have been one of the strongest, loudest, most morally clear voices about what we face in America today at the hands of Donald Trump and his authoritarian regime. As we're recording this right now, we are still in a government shutdown. You have been very clear-eyed about that as well. Tell us what you see as the stakes right now, what you see as the path forward for people who want to be fighting against Donald Trump, and how you are approaching this moment.

Chris Murphy: I think it's a moral moment. And Trump's behavior inside the shutdown is showing you exactly how serious the stakes are. Hours after the government shut down, the president announced that he was basically canceling spending in states represented by Democrats as a mechanism to try to bully his political opposition into submission by hurting the people in our states. That is, of course, exactly why the founding fathers put the spending power in the hands of Congress, not in the hands of the president, because they had watched a king use the power of the purse to try to reward loyalists and to try to punish opponents.

If we normalize that behavior by...