Senator Chris Murphy Sounds the Alarm: Freedom Is In Danger
My Republican friends have repeatedly assured me that Trump isn’t going to carry out his most extreme promises. They told me he was just bloviating. (Why you vote for somebody who believe will break his most important promises?) It appears as though we’re not getting the decaffeinated version of Trump that was promised — he is going to attempt to implement his authoritarian agenda.
One of the central themes of Trump’s 2024 campaign was revenge and retribution. On a regular basis, he threatened to investigate and jail his political opponents. Trump compiled a long list that contained at least 71 people, including many prominent Democrats like the Biden family, the Clintons, Harris, Schiff and the members of the January 6 Committee. There’s never been anything like it in American history.
Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) is one of the Democratic Party’s most articulate leaders. I have followed him for years on social media and I would recommend that everybody give him a follow. He recently posted a series of tweets and gave a separate interview about the danger to freedom in America. It’s a very important message.
Here is Murphy’s tweet storm of December 18:
“It’s happening right in front our eyes. It’s accelerated rapidly in the last 24 hours. Not sure why everyone doesn’t see this.
Can I take a minute to connect the dots — on how Trump is putting into action a plan to cripple our democracy in a way we may never recover from?
He wasn’t kidding when he said Democrats were the no. 1 threat to America and needed be dealt with by law enforcement and the military. Today House Republican’s referral of Liz Cheney for criminal prosecution — on made up charges — shows you the plan.
Who will stand in the way of Cheney and others being put in jail? Not DOJ. Kash Patel was chosen to lead the FBI BECAUSE he wants to prosecute Trump’s opponents. Not the courts. Trump’s pliant DOJ can handpick a jurisdiction with a MAGA judge.
Not every Trump opponent will fold, but many will. If you have a family at home, are you really going to stand up to Trump if there’s a chance you could end up in jail? History shows that selective prosecution of a regime’s opposition has a broad chilling effect.
The second part of Trump’s plan is to use the White House to destroy the free media. Today’s lawsuit against the Des Moines Register — just because they released a poll showing a close race in Iowa — is stunning. We shouldn’t pretend this is normal.
Already, you see how the big media companies are giving in. ABC paid Trump $15m even though his defamation suit had no merit. Bezos told the Post to not endorse against Trump. MSNBC is up for sale because Comcast doesn’t want to get in trouble.
Sometimes Trump will win these suits because he controls the DOJ and some courts, but other times he doesn’t care. After he lost one case against a journalist, he said, “I did it to make his life miserable, which I’m happy about.” He gladly admits it’s about intimidation.
Trump has also said he will use the FEC and regulatory agencies — all of which will be run by his blind loyalists — to intimidate news orgs. Even if he uses this power rarely, media companies have already shown they are reluctant to put up a fight.
Is there a chance this is all show and bluster? Maybe, but the developments of just the last few days — ABC’s bogus settlement, the referral of Cheney for prosecution, Trump’s suit against the Register — all point to this being very, very real.”
More from Senator Chris Murphy in his December 19 interview with the New Republic:
“There is a very real possibility, increasing by the day, that one or many more of Trump’s political opponents, perhaps starting with Liz Cheney, end up in jail in 2025.
What we see all across the globe is that when you start to put a couple of the regime’s political opponents in jail, there are literally just thousands of people who say, You know what, forget it. It’s just not worth it. I think this is important, to oppose Donald Trump, but I got a family at home. I just don’t want to put my name in the mix.
I don’t think there are signs that the media is folding. They are folding. They are. We’re watching them fold.
When the media decides to start hedging, or not telling the full story, combined with people being reluctant to engage in political opposition because they fear they will land in jail, that’s just not a democracy any longer. And it’s not like we’re six months away from that. It feels like we might be a month away from a world in which people start to retreat from politics for fear of criminal prosecution, and the media just uses kid gloves in dealing with the regime.
I don’t think this is hypothetical two years from now; we may be living in a very restricted democratic space in January.
If a couple of Democrats or critics of Trump go to jail, it could have an immediate chilling effect on the number of people who will ever get involved in politics on the side of the opposition, which is the Democratic Party. And if over the next six months, the number of donors, the number of volunteers available to Democrats running in elections gets cut by 20 or 30 percent, that may be the end, in and of itself.
We’ll still have elections at the end of this year. There will still be a free media, but it will be a space where the opposition doesn’t have enough oxygen to breathe. And that’s the reality in many countries in this world today. If you go to a place like Turkey or Hungary or Serbia, the opposition doesn’t win elections very often — sometimes never. That is because though they have elections, the space for journalists and the space for the political opposition is too crunched for the opposition to ever win. That is what I am worried about.”
In the wake of the attack in New Orleans on New Years Day, Trump lied when he alleged that the evildoer was an immigrant. Instead, the perpetrator is a U.S. citizen and former Army veteran. “Why does it matter? Because he is going to use episodes of violence to justify his crack down on immigrants and his attack on dissent — whether the facts line up or not.” Senator Chris Murphy.
Trump and his henchmen don’t have to prosecute opponents to scare them into submission. Bad faith investigations and frivolous civil lawsuits will do it, costing them millions of dollars. MAGA’s objective is to create a population of fearful people.
The GOP and their oligarch allies will soon control all three branches in Washington. They also own most mainstream media outlets and social media platforms. Nevertheless, a majority of the American people oppose their radical agenda. That is a powerful force — once mobilized — that can make a big difference. There is a long standing democratic tradition in America.
Another reason for optimism is that the Trump coalition is divided and already fighting a civil war over immigration. Elon Musk has posted that the anti-immigration MAGA Republicans are “racists,” “fools,” and agreed with a post that alleged that they are “r*tarded.” Vivek Ramaswamy charged that American workers are mediocre. This is ugly stuff and it won’t end well.
“Right now Trump is busily flooding the zone, threatening people, making it seem as if he is a juggernaut who can’t be stopped and any opposition is impotent. That’s just not true. Yes, he has the trifecta and he’s threatening any of his own party who might stand in his way. But there is no reason for people to make it easy for him. Anyone in a position to do so should delay everything they can, fight on any front, and make him work for every single abuse he’s planning to inflict.” Heather Digby Parton
Trump and the MAGA Republicans don’t have a mandate to implement their radical agenda. Trump and his allies barely won the election and they did it with the support of millions of soft or reluctant Trump voters. That’s why the Democrats need to vigorously oppose the Republicans.
The Democrats would be reflecting majority opinion by opposing Trump’s extreme agenda. New polling from Reuters Ipsos indicates that Trump has an anemic 41% favorability rating. His unfavorable rating is 55%. Trump was never above 50% during his first failed presidency.
There will be millions of disappointed and angry soft Trump voters next year. The comeback begins in 2025 with the city elections in Omaha and Lincoln. Resist! Organize! Vote! Blue Wave 2026!
Sources consulted:
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/11/06/trump-retribution-enemy-list-00187725