As a senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, sat down in his office last month by looking at President Trump blame diversity requirements at the Federal Aviation Administration for the fatal plane accident on the Potomac river, Members of his staff warned him not to publicly evacuate his rage.
The outdoor collision occurred less than 12 hours earlier, they reminded him; The bodies were still in the water and the families were always informed of the death of relatives. Perhaps it would be more appropriate for an American senator to be respectful of the tragedy and all his strangers, rather than grasping the political moment and responding?
Mr. Murphy did not have time for that.
“Everyone in this country should be indignant that Donald Trump gets up on this podium and lies you deliberately,” he said in a passionate video that he recorded and published within 30 minutes of the Trump’s press conference. “Each senator and member of the congress should call him how shameful it was.”
Many have done so, but none managed to do it as quickly or concisely as Mr. Murphy, 51 Democrats find it difficult to understand how to answer him.
Mr. Murphy, a career politician who has acquired national importance as a defender of firearms after the shooting of the Sandy Hook 2012 primary school in Newtown, Connecticut, emerged in the first weeks of Trump’s second term as one of the most effective democrats, the communicators who are repelling against an unrelated president.
In two -minute videos on social networks, which he records from his office on Capitol Hill; An almost constant flow of posts on X; speech passionate about floor; And the tests he writes about his substitution, Mr. Murphy tries to explain in digestible sound bites that what is happening in Washington is very simple: it is a billionaire control of American democracy.
He also took a political opportunity to position himself as a future national leader of democrats who find themselves deeply in the desert as they seek a strategy to simultaneously rebuild their party and resist Mr. Trump.
“It’s an overwhelming moment,” Murphy said in an interview on Wednesday in his office in Capitol Hill. “Our political mark is fundamentally infringement, the rule of law is in disintegration and many people still do not know what Trump’s real agenda is.”
Mr. Murphy has spent the last three years immersing himself in the literature and the ideas of “new law”, listening to the podcast “Red Scare” and Reading Thought leaders like Curtis Yarvin and Patrick Deneen. He attributes this immersion for his preparation for Mr. Trump’s return to power.
“It gave me a window on how they were thought out to make sure they were ready day 1,” he said.
Adam Green, co-founder of the Committee of the Progressive Change Campaign, said that Mr. Murphy had met “when too many elected democrats seemed to several stages. It provides Democrats with a messaging plan for how to face Trump and Musk and reconquer the voters of the working class. »»
Mr. Murphy, who aged the “Boy Wonder” phase of his political career (he was 33 years old during the first elected officials in the Chamber), is not exactly charismatic; He is brain and serious. During a recent press conference, he did not smile when Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the chief of the minority, made cheesy jokes about his grandson losing his first tooth , waiting.
The actor Hasan Minhaj recently described it as the appearance of an McKinsey consultant, “simply melting in crowds from the white men’s congress like an Arctic fox”.
Sometimes Mr. Murphy can look like a secondary school teacher giving a civic lesson.
“Dictators and despots, they use the police to try to force loyalty,” he said in a video, explaining why people should care that the Ministry of Justice has abandoned its accusations Against the mayor Eric Adams of New York. “They threaten you with arrest if you are not faithful; They will let you go with crimes if you are faithful. This is what is happening in America today. »»
But a constitutional crisis can offer an opportunity for a civic refreshment, and Mr. Murphy seems to be piercing.
In the past two months, he has doubled his Instagram after his official and political accounts. Since January 1, Mr. Murphy’s Facebook and Instagram accounts have accumulated 29.2 million impressions. On substitution, Mr. Murphy’s subscribers increased by 223%. His campaign spent more on Meta fundraising in 2025 than in the entire 2023-24 cycle, while he presented himself to re-election.
“My 16 year old son for the first time, he said to me,” What’s going on? ” My friends see your things ” said Murphy. “I present myself on the tiktok flow of a 16 year old child.”
This is one of its current success measures.
“People are trying to understand this moment,” he said. “They are looking for people who can explain it in terms that are quite simple. I want to create explanations and content that are sent to people who do not read and do not think of politics every day, but know that something is screwed and who wants to understand it. »»
Mr. Murphy insists that he does not only do all this to set up a race for the presidency, in part because he thinks that it is not sure that there is even a race for Enter four years.
“For the moment, there is a distinct possibility that we have no free and fair elections in 2028, and all our work is to ensure that this does not happen,” he said.
Mr. Murphy said he could easily imagine a future where “the press is so demoralized, the opposition is so besieged and harassed that you simply do not have the capacity to set up an opposition.”
For a decade, the question of armed violence defined Mr. Murphy’s career; The 2012 massacre in Sandy Hook Elementary School took place a month after winning his headquarters in the Senate, having been used in the House for 2007. For years, he has harangus his colleagues to go out and run on the issue of arms security On fire, because he thinks it is a winning electoral problem that politicians are afraid of touching.
After the pandemic, he plunged into the question of loneliness, calling him an epidemic and “one of the most important political questions of our time”.
But for the moment, these problems are all on the rear burner.
“Nothing has more than the question of whether we let billionaires destroy our democracy or not,” he said. “There is a time bomb inside our political body at the moment. It is very possible that this thing can be completely rigged by the summer or fall of this year. »»
Mr. Murphy therefore decided to set fire to his hair to encourage people to be careful. He is on YouTube, doing interviews with Mr. Minaj and political influencers like Brian Tyler Cohen, Mehdi Hassan and Jack Cocarella. He is there, speaking to Anand Giridharadas. He is on Tiktok talking to Aaron Parnas. And it is wherever you get your podcasts, speaking to Jon Favreau.
“The real television aspect has a limited impact at the moment,” he said. “What you really make these television appearances is to create content that finally lives elsewhere.”
Schumer, who was criticized by some progressive activists for having effectively responded to Mr. Trump, encouraged him to continue.
“The frustration and anger of Chris Murphy towards what Trump does is authentic and he has a unique, strong and incredibly precious way to repel,” he said.
Mr. Murphy also moves over time. These days, he deplores the fact that economic populists at Congress like the Sanders Sanders senators, independent of Vermont, and Elizabeth Warren, Massachusetts Democrat, are treated as radicals. He thinks that their ideas have the best chance of crossing and collecting voters who are currently in Mr. Trump’s camp. But in 2016, Mr. Murphy was an early and impatient contributor to the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton against Mr. Sanders in what has become a Houleuse Democratic primary.
The losses devastating in 2024 of his party, associated with the flagrant abuses of Mr. Trump of his authority, made Mr. Murphy a conventional approach to politics. These days, he met his colleagues from the Senate to persuade them that this is not the time to respect the old political rules.
“They do not deserve the benefit of the doubt,” he told other Democrats of Mr. Trump and Republicans. “They deliberately hide what they do so that people responsible, thought and based on the facts say nothing.”
When Elon Musk made a linear gesture on the day of the inauguration which made comparisons with a Nazi saluteMr. Murphy was not among those who torlled his hands about to interpret it badly.
“It was absolutely a” Heil “-a Hitler’s salvation,” he said. “Their lies model allows us to assume the worst.”