Amid record-low approval ratings, the Democratic Party faces an existential crisis. How should they operate as a minority and opposition party? Should the old guard make way for a new generation of leaders? On this week’s show, Alex Wagner speaks with the upstarts who are challenging the Democratic establishment about how they envision the party’s future. Then, a conversation with veteran Democratic Senator Chris Murphy on how his fellow members need to course correct to preserve democracy as we know it.
Note: This is a rough transcript. Please excuse any typos.
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Steve Kornacki: They’re also facing a very unique challenge in our poll right here. The view voters have of each party, neither is good, but look at the numbers —
Alex Wagner: Wow.
Steve Kornacki: — here for Democrats. Twenty seven percent positive, more than double, 55 percent negative. This is what’s happened to the Democrats since the election.
Alex Wagner: That was Steve Kornacki last month explaining a March NBC News poll that showed Democrats’ approval rating at the lowest it had been since 1990.
Now things weren’t great for Republicans either, but the Democrat score was really something. That is astonishing, Steve. That’s an historic low. Right?
Steve Kornacki: That is in more than thirty years of this poll. We’ve never seen either party hit a number this low in terms of negatives here. One thing to note on this for the Democrats too, a lot of that negative rating, it’s coming from Democrats themselves, and a lot of that is coming from Democrats who say the party is being too cooperative in their view with Donald Trump.
Alex Wagner: It’s been nearly one hundred days since Donald Trump was sworn back into office. And despite the utter chaos, the lawlessness, and controversy that has characterized these first days of a new administration, the Democratic Party, the opposition is historically unpopular. If you want to understand why that may be the case, remember this moment, also in March, when President Trump spoke before a joint session of Congress.
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Donald Trump: And these people sitting right here will not clap, will not stand, and certainly will not cheer for these astronomical achievements.
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Alex Wagner: The resistance the Democrats mustered that night took the form of black paddles featuring phrases including save Medicaid and Musk steals. Democrats held up the paddles at various moments during Trump’s speech. It did not go over well.
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Michael: The bingo signs were killing me. I don’t I don’t know who sawed up the bingo signs, but they should be fired.
Unknown: Michael, this is an indictment, in my opinion, on the Democratic leadership. The bench tables are not taken back to House in 2026.
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Alex Wagner: And then last month, the Democrats’ main voice in the Senate, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, broke with most of his party and allowed a Republican spending bill to pass.
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Chuck Schumer: For sure, the Republican bill is a terrible option. But I believe allowing Donald Trump to take even much more power via a government shutdown is a far worse option.
Unknown: Is it time for new leadership in the Senate?
Unknown: Next question.
Unknown: Mister President.
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Alex Wagner: In the face of all of this, a handful of Democrats are pursuing a new, more aggressive form of resistance.
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Cory Booker: I rise with the intention of getting in some good trouble. I rise with the intention of disrupting the normal business of the United States Senate for as long as I am physically able.
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Alex Wagner: The week of March 31, New Jersey Senator Cory Booker held the Senate floor for over 25 hours to protest a Republican budget bill as well as the broader MAGA agenda.
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Cory Booker: For almost twenty hours, we have laid out what they’re trying to do. Twenty hours. I could, I want to stand more, and I will. But I’m begging people, don’t let this be another normal day in America. Please.
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Alex Wagner: Booker not only made the longest consecutive speech in Senate history, breaking segregationist Strom Thurmond’s 1955 record, he also injected some energy back into the party.
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Chuck Schumer: Do you know you have just broken the record? Do you know how proud this caucus is of you? Do you know how proud America is of you?
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Alex Wagner: Senator Bernie Sanders and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, meanwhile, have gone on tour, hosting massive political rallies in typically red states to galvanize voters and paint a different, more progressive vision for the future.
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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: We are here together because an extreme concentration of power, greed, and corruption is taking over our country like never before. Oligarchy.
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Alex Wagner: Maybe unsurprisingly, what has emerged from all of this as Democrats find themselves shut out of power at the national level is a fierce debate about the future of the party and who should lead it.
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David Hogg: And what we’re trying to do here is not just focus on primaries where there’s potentially an older incumbent, but more than anything, an ineffective person in that position, and then replace them with a generational leader to build a future of our party.
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Alex Wagner: David Hogg, the voice you just heard there, was one of the survivors of the 2018 Parkland school shooting in Florida. After standing up to the national gun lobby, Hogg is now a 25-year-old Democratic activist. He was recently elected to become vice chair of the Democratic National Committee. But less than three months after being elected to that position, Hogg has decided to take aim at fellow Democrats by spending $20 million to challenge some older incumbents as they seek reelection. And not everyone is happy about that, including and especially James Carville. Here he is talking to NewsNation’s Chris Cuomo.
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James Carville: He’s being paid to run against other Democrats. I think it’s the outright I don’t know if I have standing, but I might give the DNC $10 and sue him. He’s a contempt mole little pork if you —
Chris Cuomo: Sue him. Jim, I’ll have you on the show to talk about it. Yes. James Carville: I’m out here. I don’t know if I understand it, but somebody kept saying it.
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Alex Wagner: But Hogg isn’t alone in thinking generational change is necessary. A Gallup poll released last week found that only 25 percent of Americans have confidence in Democratic leadership in Congress. That is 14 points lower than the 39 percent who are confident in Republicans. And that tracks with this reality.
In the past few months, several candidates in their twenties and thirties have launched challenges to veteran Democrats.
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Saikat Chakrabarti: My name is Saikat Chakrabarti. I’m running for Congress against Nancy Pelosi. I used to be AOC’s chief of staff where I learned a lot about how Congress works and, also, how it often doesn’t.
Kat Abughazaleh: Donald Trump and Elon Musk are dismantling our country piece by piece, and so many Democrats seem content to just sit back and let them. So, I say it’s time to drop the excuses and grow a fucking spine. I’m Kat Abughazaleh, and I’m running for Congress in Illinois’ Ninth District.
George Hornedo: I’m George Hornedo, and I’m running for Congress because Indy deserves better. I respect Congressman Carson, but after nearly two decades in office, too many folks are still struggling. Why would we double down on the same people who got us into this mess?
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Alex Wagner: On this episode of Trumpland with Alex Wagner, we look at the state of the Democratic Party. Will the Democrats course correct? And if so, how? We speak with some of the candidates trying to force change at the ballot box.
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Jake Rakov: Congressman Sherman was elected in 1996 when I was eight years old. He is still operating like it’s 1996.
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Alex Wagner: And speak to those already in office about what needs to happen to save the party and the country from MAGA dominance.
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Unknown: We’ve watched democracies die all across the world because the opposition party couldn’t be nimble enough. We used old tools when the old tools were irrelevant.
Unknown: It’s morning again in America.
Jake Rakov: This isn’t mom and dad’s America anymore. This is Donald Trump’s MAGA hellscape, complete with his billionaire crony and a cast of corrupt enablers who are all burning our government to the ground. And too many on our team just don’t have the fight we need right now.
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Alex Wagner: That voice was Jake Rakov in his first ad launching his campaign for Congress. Rakov is running to represent California’s 32nd District in the House of Representatives, a seat that is currently occupied by 15-term incumbent Democrat Brad Sherman, whom Jake Rakov used to work for as a deputy communications secretary back in 2017. I talked to Rakov to discuss why he felt the need to challenge his former boss and what Democrats, in general, are doing wrong.
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Alex Wagner: So, you got, like, a missile of a campaign launch video. And let me just first start, like, why run against your former boss?
Jake Rakov: So, I am running for Congress because the Democrats so desperately need new energy and new voices to shake up the status quo. I have been in this industry for a long time. I have worked for Congressman Sherman, obviously, in 2017. Nothing will change if we keep sending the same people back to D.C. decade after decade after decade. Congressman Sherman was elected in 1996 when I was eight years old. He is still operating like it’s 1996, and that is not where we are.
Alex Wagner: Obviously, the generational divide seems to be a big part of this. But what specifically in terms of his leadership do you take issue with?
Jake Rakov: He has been so absent from the district. And I think nowadays, a, with just, like, how we are social media and technology and everything, voters are demanding that leaders be accessible and accountable, and he is neither of those things. I think he may have been a long time ago, but he has not held a town hall in the district in five years. He doesn’t live in the district anymore. He and his family live in D.C. full time. And I get when you’re with your family. I don’t fault him for that, but then go be a lobbyist. If you’re going to serve this public, you’d need to be in this public to serve them. If you listen to his talking points, he’s very anti MAGA when he actually does voice opposition.
Alex Wagner: Yes.
Jake Rakov: But I think part of where we are right now in this moment, it requires more than snide comments from a committee hearing bench. It requires more than two tweets a week or whatever. I think if you’re going to push back on Trump, you do need to be more active and take action on initiative, like Senator Booker’s marathon speech or —
Alex Wagner: Yes.
Jake Rakov: — AOC and Bernie doing rallies or Senator Van Hollen now traveling down to El Salvador. You are in a position to act. We understand we are in the minority, legislatively speaking, so we don’t have a lot of leverage there. But there is so much more you can do than just simply sitting in your seat in D.C. This is the moment in time when you were elected to be present and active.
Alex Wagner: Do you feel like there needs to be a purge?
Jake Rakov: I don’t know of a purge, but I definitely think there are some who need to wake up and realize that they are losing the voters in their own district if they are not matching where they are emotionally. And someone like Congressman Sherman who’s been there so long and has not had a real challenge of a race, that incumbency protection that the party insists on is just stifling to the bench of talent that we could have leading this party.
Alex Wagner: You say incumbency protection, but I think some people would say party unity. Right?
Jake Rakov: Yes.
Alex Wagner: But the challenge that you’re offering is so sharp. And I think there are other Democrats, not just you, who are saying these guys got to go.
Jake Rakov: Yes. I think so.
Alex Wagner: Do you think there’s any price that you pay nationally for that? I mean, do you think it does it make the party look like it’s in disarray? Do you worry about that?
Jake Rakov: No. I mean, I think it’s understood that, like, we have had these stalwart people there for so long who have done great things in the past, certainly. But the generational change that we need is to bring the country forward in the party and to get those people back into the party that left it. And I think if there is a price to pay off maybe showing some disarray, quote, unquote, is that we need to have that discussion. We need to have that family meeting. Let’s have that dinner table conversation that we are all whispering about and not really bringing up to the table.
Alex Wagner: It sounds a little bit like 2010 and the GOP.
Jake Rakov: Exactly.
Alex Wagner: It feels like the Tea Party. I mean, do you think about that parallel?
Jake Rakov: I do. Yes. I mean, I’ve been asked about it, and I think from, like, a political science perspective to get real nerdy, I don’t know what that crucial threshold is when it becomes a movement, quote, unquote, because we don’t have a figurative leader of it. And so, I think there is this decentralize just conversation that the party is having writ large that at one point does it actually turn into a cohesive thing. But the notion that we need this new energy, we need these new voices is pretty prevalent throughout the whole thing.
Alex Wagner: One of the things that you propose in your campaign platform is no corporate PAC money, monthly in person town halls. Those are sort of self-explanatory, right? There’s a history there.
Jake Rakov: Yes.
Alex Wagner: No more than five terms in the House. And I kind of wonder if you could elaborate on why you think term limits are necessary because, again, I’m seeing this kind of generational divide where these younger upstart insurgents, opposition candidates, whatever you want to call them, are like, if you’ve been there more than a certain amount of time, you’re not going to be serving the American public. And I kind of get that on its face, right?
Jake Rakov: Yes.
Alex Wagner: But there is something to be said for incumbency and history and institutional knowledge. And we’re not in a moment when it feels like anybody particularly values that on the left or the right. Do you worry at all about —
Jake Rakov: Yes.
Alex Wagner: — what you’re sacrificing in favor of the new thing?
Jake Rakov: I don’t. And the reason is, is that I have on the mindset that Congress was never meant to be a career. Right? I think the rules of the road are you have to reapply for the job every two years, and your basically district is redrawn every 10 years, so your company, quote, unquote, switches every 10 years. Neither of those things point to the fact that the founders and political thinkers that have established the democracy that’s lasted this long meant for Congress to be full of people who’ve only been there for, like, 40 plus years and only operate with the same mentality.
The nation is not where it was forty years ago. So, to think that, oh, we can get it back there, or, oh, you know, we can get the people back there, is it’s just kind of a pipe dream. And it’s not even about age. You know, if you want to be 65 and run for the first time, great. You probably have experience in novel ideas that a 25-year-old doesn’t. And if that’s where the district is and wants, that’s the idea of it. But you don’t need to be there for thirty plus years to get, quote, unquote, “seniority to then finally do something.”
That’s the whole thing is they taught us that, oh, you can’t really get anything done until you’re there for, like you pay your dues for 20 years, and then you maybe get a chairmanship, and then you can maybe get something done. That’s not the way it’s supposed to work.
Alex Wagner: Yes. I mean, I think Trump proves that you cannot have any history in politics and ride on in there and shake ship up.
Jake Rakov: Yes. Exactly. It cuts both ways. I understand that. But, like, this idea that nothing gets done without seniority is our generation, again, this upcoming generation is, like, not on board with that.
Alex Wagner: Do you ever get people saying, you have no idea what you’re doing. You shouldn’t be doing this. What you’re doing is bad for the party, and it’s dangerous.
Jake Rakov: I definitely get some pushback. Congressman Sherman has probably gotten more press —
Alex Wagner: Yes. Sure.
Jake Rakov: — in the last month than he got in the last three years combined, and he has been not shy of throwing barbs.
Alex Wagner: Yes.
Jake Rakov: So I get some from him. I was at a Democratic club meeting the other night, and I was talking to a group. It was a young Democratic club, and a couple of kids who had just graduated college a couple years ago were like, I’m so excited about your campaign. I heard about it, and it’s awesome, and thank you for doing it. And there was an elected official who, like, was just kind of looking at me in the corner and, like, didn’t say anything, but, like, I could tell was not feeling my vibe. And I was like, yes. That’s the kind of divide we’re going to see right there. So.
Alex Wagner: And you’re fine with it?
Jake Rakov: Yes. That’s, I mean, I knew when we announced how many of the bows I was taking a direct shot across.
Alex Wagner: You were aware that you weren’t only going to make friends in this campaign?
Jake Rakov: Yes. That video was not intended to make everyone love me.
Alex Wagner: Just the ones that you need to love you.
Jake Rakov: Exactly.
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Alex Wagner: Congressman Sherman’s office pushed back on several of Rakov’s claims and told us that Sherman’s primary residence is in Sherman Oaks, California. To Rakov’s assertion that Congressman Sherman does not hold town halls, Sherman’s office responded, the congressman has had numerous town halls every year. He also has an in-person town hall scheduled for Saturday, April 26.
Over in Michigan, Senator Gary Peters’ retirement has set off a race to fill his seat, and state Senator Mallory McMorrow was the first Democrat to throw her hat in the ring. McMorrow defeated a Republican incumbent in 2018 to win her state Senate seat. And in 2022, a speech she gave on the Senate floor in response to an attack from a Republican colleague went viral.
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Mallory McMorrow: Hate will only win if people like me stand by and let it happen. So, I want to be very clear right now. Call me whatever you want. I hope you brought in a few dollars. I hope it made you sleep good last night. I know who I am. I know what faith and service means and what it calls for in this moment. We will not let hate win.
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Alex Wagner: Peters’ seat is expected to become one of the most high profile primary races of 2026, and it will also be a bellwether for what type of Democrat might be best suited to win a key swing state. Let’s talk about where Democrats are. So, you’re running for Senate.
Mallory McMorrow: Yes, I am.
Alex Wagner: And you’ve been very clear about the need for a leadership change among Democrats in the upper chamber. You don’t think Democrats are pushing back hard enough and that the Democratic Party has not woken up to the reality of what they’re facing, which is not just Republicans, but what do you call it? The MAGA party. Did you come to that conclusion after 2024, or had that been brewing? Did you feel like the party was sort of in disarray in advance of Trump’s second victory?
Mallory McMorrow: I don’t know that I would say that the party is in disarray, but I was trying to figure out as I looked at the results of the 2024 election, there’s just a gap, you know, that people may look at somebody like Donald Trump and say, oh, God. I don’t like him, and I don’t like the way he talks or sounds or what he does. But, you know, there was a story in the Washington Post of a woman in Northern Michigan who believed when he said he would make IVF free, and that’s why she voted for him, or people who believed that he was going to bring their cost down. And rebuilding trust is really important.
So, I think two things, that voters do not know what Democrats stand for and that the trust is broken. And part of that is when the end of the 2024 campaign suddenly became all about Donald Trump as a dictator, Donald Trump as a fascist. This is the end of democracy, which implied that if you vote for Donald Trump, democracy will end that day. And then the next day comes, and it hasn’t ended. I don’t think anybody would argue that it’s in a particularly healthy place right now, but it has not ended. You get a little bit of the boy who cried wolf syndrome. And when you speak too much in hyperbole, people don’t trust you.
Alex Wagner: I feel like this is the central argument in the party, which is, like, how many alarm bells should be ringing on any given day around any number of things that the president and his allies are doing? What do you want them to oppose, and what should they be motivated by?
Mallory McMorrow: A lot of it is what you oppose and how you oppose it, I think, is really important. There is so much noise right now, and part of the strategy of the Trump administration is just an onslaught of executive orders and horrific statements and actions to get everybody so angry and overwhelmed that you shut down and you do nothing.
So, something that I try to be very cautious about is I never want to lie to people. I never want to tell everybody, don’t worry. It’s going to be okay. But I also don’t just want to add to the noise in a way that it’s not helping all of us figure out, okay. What do we do about it? It’s not enough just to say, here are all the horrible things going on.
At my town halls and my coffee hours in Michigan, people are coming out by the hundreds. You know? And they are not just demanding to know what I am going to do about it. They want to know what they can do about it, which feels to me very different than this moment post 2016. Democracy is not going to die with one election. It’s going to be death by a thousand cuts. And being able to break that down for people and respond to each one of the cuts instead of you know, when you say to people, this is an existential crisis, people go, okay. What am I supposed to do?
Alex Wagner: Well, right. And to your point, like, I was talking to these professors at Columbia. Zumba class is still happening. Right? People are like, —
Mallory McMorrow: Yes.
Alex Wagner: — I can I can still get, like, you know, a beer at my local bar? How is democracy over?
Mallory McMorrow: Right. It’s a little bit jarring. You know, when we even watching the insurrection. Right? I think about that moment in time. And here in Michigan, we had already lived through what was effectively the trial run insurrection where we had —
Alex Wagner: Yes.
Mallory McMorrow: — armed gunmen in our state capital. And even talking to my staff, like, as we went through that and then we were watching January 6, she said it felt strange that we just have to come to work.
Alex Wagner: Yes.
Mallory McMorrow: And we’re just answering emails. Right? It’s like the normal things keep happening even though all of these big crises are happening simultaneously. And when you speak only in hyperbole, it sends the message that everything is just going to come crashing to an end, and that’s not how it happens.
Alex Wagner: As Democrats kind of reassess what the path forward is, on one hand, there seems to be accepting someone like Bernie Sanders, who I know some people have called out as working outside the sort of Democratic firmament. It seems like it’s a generational divide as much as anything in terms of the appetite for innovation and opposition and fight.
I know that you said that you do not believe Chuck Schumer should be the Senate minority leader. You called on President Biden to leave the race last summer. Is there any Democrat that has been in office for multiple terms, who’s been in the game for decades, who you think is actually innovating and thinking differently and thinking more strategically and effectively?
Mallory McMorrow: Yes. We see pockets of it all across the party right now, from Senator Van Hollen to Senator Booker to Senator Murphy, just thinking about members of the Senate.
It’s not about age. It is about approach and recognizing that we now have more means of communication than we ever have before. You can connect directly with voters and have real dialogue in real time in ways that we have not been able to before. And what we’ve seen is that when people do raise their voices, we can change what the Trump administration does. We saw it with the funding freeze for head start programs where they said funding is cut off, people showed up, the doors were locked, they sounded the alarm, and within 48 hours, they pulled that back.
So it shows, I had somebody in my office yesterday who said, it seems like the approach from the Trump administration is to try everything, and they will only keep the things in place so long as nobody is raising their voice about it, which is a challenge to realize we’re going to have to sound the alarm on a lot of things.
Alex Wagner: Yes.
Mallory McMorrow: But it’s also empowering to know that, yes, we can actually push back because they’re not as bulletproof as they think they are.
Alex Wagner: After a break, we’ll hear from Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy. We’ll be right back with more from Trumpland.
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Alex Wagner: For Democrats currently in office, the work is determining a party strategy right now, as Trump and his allies dominate the federal government. Senator Chris Murphy was elected to the House in 2006 when he was only 33 years old. Six years later, he was elected to the Senate where he became a national voice on gun safety following the Sandy Hook shooting, which occurred in his former House district.
As a senator, Murphy has gained a reputation as a foreign policy expert and a deal maker. But right now, Murphy is also one of the most vocal opponents of the Trump agenda, which he sees as a direct threat to American democracy. First of all, can I just say I’ve been enjoying your X threads?
Chris Murphy: I still call it Twitter. I’m not giving in.
Alex Wagner: Yes. I know. It’ll always be Twitter to me. But they’ve been very provocative and have raised a lot of questions that I have for you. So, let’s start there. I mean, I know that you believe that the country is moving very quickly towards what you call a kleptocratic oligarchy. And I think there are a lot of Democrats who would agree with you and maybe non-Democrats. But the reality is that the polling we have, shows deep dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party, that it’s near an all-time low in popularity, that Democratic voters very clearly and strongly want elected Democrats to do more to oppose Trump’s policies.
How do you account for both the swiftness with which we’re moving towards an oligarchy, the darkness of that with the deep dissatisfaction with the only party that stands in opposition to that future.
Chris Murphy: I think they’re connected together. I don’t think that the American public was ready for how ready Trump was for inauguration day. Right? They had worked for four years on a plan, a plan to transition American democracy to autocracy, a plan to put a handful of billionaires who think they know better than us in charge of our government and to essentially authorize the large-scale theft of resources from regular people, poor people, the middle class to the wealthy.
And they started putting that plan into action right from the beginning, starting with the pardoning of every single violent rioter from January 6, and they’ve been at it ever since. That has been a shock to the system. And I think the American public is asking sort of a simple question, why don’t Democrats stop it?
And so, I think it’s worth exploring the narrative of Democrats being more unpopular than ever before. First, the polling tells you that the Republican Party is more unpopular than ever before. It’s just true that organized political parties don’t have a lot of friends these days. But the reason why the Democrats look like our popularity is in the toilet is because lots of Democrats, who are still going to vote for the Democratic Party, are just blown away by how fast Trump is moving to try to destroy norms, to wage an assault on democracy, and they’re really worried the Democrats can’t and don’t have the tools to stop it.
So there’s a lot of folks who are essentially expressing their disapproval of Trump and their anxiousness about Trump and their anger about Trump through their opinion of the Democratic Party. Now, I have critiques of the party. I do not think that we’ve met the moment, but I also think that the public reaction of the Democratic Party is as much a measurement of how upset they are about what Trump is doing.
Alex Wagner: Why do you think the party hasn’t met the moment?
Chris Murphy: Well, I think it’s a lot easier for any political leader to decide that things are still normal instead of having to rethink your entire political strategy. So, it’s a lot easier if you just decide that, you know, Trump is presenting threats but not immediately existential threats to our democracy. And thus, you know, we should just keep punching at him every day, and we’ll get him unpopular enough such that we can win in the midterms. That’s an easier thing to believe because if you believe what I believe, that we might not have a free and fair election in 2026 if we don’t take immediate steps like this year, like this summer, to arrest this slide away from democracy. If you believe that, then you actually have to come up with brand new tactics. I mean, things that we’ve never done before in American politics.
You have to fundamentally change the way that you spend money. You have to fundamentally change the way that you operate inside the institutions like the Senate and the House. And that’s a hard pivot for United States senators and House members who have spent their entire careers doing one thing, existing in only one paradigm, prep for the next election, prep for the next election. This is brand new. The next election might not arrive, at least on terms where we can win it, so you have to operate fundamentally differently.
Alex Wagner: When you say things like, that’s not how people in the Senate who’ve spent their entire careers there, it suggests to me that you see a generational divide on this issue. Is that fair?
Chris Murphy: I don’t know that that’s fair because when I look at the people who I think get it interacting with urgency, it’s not always the young members. I would say Bernie Sanders understands this moment, and he’s one of the oldest members of the Senate. I mean, maybe it tends to be the younger crowd, but there are plenty of young congressmen and young senators who are of the belief that we can kind of act as if things are normal. I think it’s just sort of, do you believe that we’re going to have an election? Or do you think that there’s a good chance we might not have a free and fair election?
Alex Wagner: Do you think that it is inevitable that the party will come around eventually to the way you’re thinking of this, which is as an existential crisis for democracy? Or do you think that there is a fair amount of back and forth and that it’s unclear kind of how, you know, what direction the party ends up going in advance of 2026?
Chris Murphy: It is certainly not inevitable. I mean, we’ve watched democracies die all across the world because the opposition party couldn’t be nimble enough, we used old tools when the old tools were irrelevant. We’ll know soon enough. The government funding expires in the fall of this year. And, you know, I don’t know exactly what the terms of the debate will be, but there will probably be a really risky option that raises the stakes for the public, and there will be a safe option.
The last time around, when the government funding was set to expire, we chose the safe option. I think that was a mistake. We’ll have another chance in just a matter of months. And so, we’ll have these tests every few months to decide whether we’re still operating on the old rules or whether we’re actually willing to engage with the urgency at the moment.
Alex Wagner: Do you think some of the alarm that’s being rung, in particular, by insurgents who are trying to oust long time incumbents or just incumbents generally within the party, and you have these kind of younger upstart candidates who have announced the old way, even if you’re not old, the sort of business-as-usual approach in the House and the Senate is not going to work. Do you support that? Or do you think that there’s a question about how much that kind of public criticism of and by Democrats for Democrats hurts the party more broadly in a in a national sense?
Chris Murphy: No incumbent has a right to their seat. If you’re not doing a good job, you don’t deserve to get the nomination. And right now, doing a good job as a member of the United States Senate or the House of Representatives means recognizing that the number one priority is to wake up every single day with urgency fighting the corruption, the thievery, and the destruction of our democracy.
You know, I worry, Alex, that there’s a narrative here where we’re waiting for something to happen. Right? We’re waiting for there to be this grand confrontation between the president and the Supreme Court on a major ruling —
Alex Wagner: Right.
Chris Murphy: — that he ignores or we’re waiting for a coup or we’re waiting for, you know, the Parliament building to be burned down, right? That’s not actually how democracies die any longer. Democracies die invisibly. Like, there’s not a moment when democracy is here and then it’s gone. It’s just that the structures of accountability, the structures that support the opposition just get weakened and atrophied by the regime over time that one day the opposition just can’t win any longer. They just can’t win. They don’t have the tools to win.
And so, the election still happens, but the rules are rigged such that the regime, the party in power, never loses. That’s, I think, what we’re headed for. It’s not inevitable. We can stop it. But I do think that there’s a lot of folks out there who are sort of thinking that the only thing that matters is if Trump violates a sort of major blockbuster ruling from the Supreme Court. That doesn’t need to happen for democracy to die.
Alex Wagner: Help me understand though because I think there are some people who look at 2024 and they’re like, well, all Biden and Harris did, as much as they said they were going to and it was kind of a back and forth, was talk about existential threats to democracy and how Trump represented them and it didn’t work. And here we are, and he’s doing exactly what, you know, Democrats predicted he would do, if not considerably worse. So how do you make that a winning strategy, I guess, given where the American public is?
Chris Murphy: Yes. So I think it lies in sort of two lanes here. The first is to understand that the story is not just the destruction of democracy. The story is the mass scale corruption. Right? The evisceration of Medicaid, throwing millions of people off their health care in order to pass along a task cut for the very, very wealthy. Trump essentially monetizing the White House to help himself to the detriment of the rest of us.
The only way that you get away with that kind of thievery, that kind of corruption is to destroy democracy because what they’re doing, cutting Medicaid to pass a tax cut for the wealthy, is deeply unpopular. You couldn’t get reelected as a party if you did that unless you also were destroying democracies.
So, the two things are tied together. And every single time you’re talking about the destruction of democracy, you have to explain why. And the reason that they are doing it is because they are the most corrupt administration in the history of the country. They are engaged in the biggest, most massive transfer of wealth from the poor and the middle class to the rich in the history of the country, and the only way they get away with that is by destroying the democracy.
Then second, we have to talk about how we would reform democracy. The problem in 2024 was that we were rooting for the existing version of democracy. And the existing version of democracy sucks.
Alex Wagner: Yes.
Chris Murphy: And people know it. It has been co-opted by the billionaire and corporate class, so the government works only for them. So, Democrats have to get back to where we were, like, twenty years ago when, like, a top three issue for us was getting private money, special interest money, corporate money out of politics. Now today, that may require a constitutional amendment, but let’s be for that. Let’s loudly be for a constitutional amendment to get private corporate money out of politics. Let’s be for the STOCK Act. Let’s be for closing the revolving door between lobbyists and members of Congress and staff. Let’s have a really loud and central argument about how we are going to fundamentally change the rules of government if we win. People will listen to our message on corruption, but only if they think that we’re actually going to change the rules to make corruption less prevalent if we win.
Alex Wagner: So what I’m hearing is less kind of ideological argument about the importance of free and fair democracy and more concrete examples of the corrupting influence of money as the endgame of disassembling democracy.
Chris Murphy: We want to fight to save democracy. And if you give us a chance to run this country, we will fundamentally unrig the democracy. We will put you back in charge.
Alex Wagner: In the last week, there’s, like, this huge story about Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s deportation. And Governor Newsom, who’s probably going to be running for president in 2028, though don’t tell him I said that, has said that it’s a distraction. This is a debate the right wants. If you’re Gavin Newsom, he thinks the attention Democrats should be paying is to tariffs, which is more of a political winner, if not, you know, a devastating thing for the American economy. Do you agree with that?
Chris Murphy: The central story is the thievery, is their plan to cut programs that matter to regular people like Medicaid, like public school funding, in order to pass along a massive tax break for the very, very wealthy. That’s the central story. You have to wake up every day talking about that.
But the reason that the Abrego Garcia case is important is at the very least, it kind of rattles democratic institutions to understand that they actually are engaged in a rapid campaign to destroy the rule of law. And so while I’m not a percent sure that swing voters are paying a lot of attention to the Kilmar Abrego case. It is evidence for people in our party who thus far have been sort of hoping that we can engage in politics as normal, that this isn’t politics as normal.
Alex Wagner: It seems like it’s not just about how the party handles it, but it’s also the medium. It’s the way in which they’re tackling these issues. Senator Booker, you know, holds the record. Was it 25 hours on stage? Right?
Chris Murphy: Twenty-five hours. Yes.
Alex Wagner: There was like a Cory Booker cam on the lower third of cable news stations and, you know.
Chris Murphy: I was there with him for all 25 hours.
Alex Wagner: So, you know, you were wingman to that. You talk about Chris Van Hollen, and this isn’t to undermine the legitimacy of the voyage, but the Van Hollen stuff was very much a photo op too when he finally got to meet Abrego Garcia. Brian Schatz has placed holds on Trump nominees in the Senate. I mean, do we need to see more spectacular tactics from Democrats? Because it just feels like information has become so atomized or siloed. And having the American people understand the stakes, it’s not enough to just talk about it. You really do need to have it seems like if you’re citing these couple of examples, you’re saying that it needs to be attention grabbing. It needs to be something that isn’t usually done.
Chris Murphy: Yes. Listen, you have to exist on the platform we’re all standing on. And we are dealing with a master showman, somebody that has lived his whole life knowing better than anybody else how to command complete total attention of the country for days, weeks at a time, blotting out everybody else. That’s what I’m talking about. If we engage in sort of normal political theater holding, you know, our daily or weekly press conferences, we will never get any attention. So you’ve got to do things that are exceptional.
That’s why, you know, for instance, you know, I recommended that we boycott the State of the Union in mass, that we all decide not to go. What ended up happening, six different forms of protests, you know, looked feckless. It wasn’t really a story. But had Democrats, three days beforehand, decided none of us were going to attend, that would have dominated the headlines. So, yes, I think this is a conversation, you know, not just about message and strategy, but also about day-to-day tactics.
Alex Wagner: I want to go back to sort of how you were framing the disappointment the public feels within the Democratic Party just as we close this out. I think it’s an interesting sort of psychological profile that you’re painting of the American voter or Democrats that they’re expressing some of their dissatisfaction and anger and upset with Trump by mapping it on to Democrats. Like, you guys didn’t protect us from this. We’re angry with you. But could it also be that they’re just upset that the Democrats are in disarray? That they’re just like, where are they? I mean, just anecdotally, I know so many people who can’t even follow the news because they just see Trump as dominant, unstoppable, organized in a way that Democrats can’t even hold a candle to. And that, you know, reality could not sink the party’s futures but really turn people who might otherwise be recruited to help or come from the middle to the left, that it is a real, you know, structural issue from the party independent of Donald Trump.
Chris Murphy: No. Listen. I’m not saying the only reason that people are angry with Democrats is because they are just transferring onto us their anger with Trump. They’re legitimately upset. And, you know, some of that is, I think, deserved. Some of it is not. Some of it is that people just don’t understand how this could be happening. Don’t we have some lever inside our democracy to stop the president of the United States from, on a daily basis, upending constitutional norms? And the reality is we actually don’t have those tools. The levers actually don’t sit in the hands of the opposition, especially when we are the complete total opposition. Right? We don’t have a foothold in the House, the Senate, or the White House.
The tools actually are in the judiciary. The tools are actually in the hands of the public through mass mobilization. And so, what we have to understand is that we actually do have very limited means to stop him through our official duties as United States senators. What we have to be doing is inspiring the levers that exist on the outside. We have to be, you know, helping to fund the legal efforts. We have to be engaging in risk tolerant tactics internally to inspire the public to be engaging in risk tolerant tactics out in America.
Alex Wagner: Are you optimistic that that inspiration is going to happen?
Chris Murphy: I am, in part because I think we’re learning. Right? Because I think, you know, between, you know, what Cory did and what Chris did, what Harvard (ph) did, incredibly important. Right? That may go down in history as one of the most important acts of democratic protection in the history of the country because it may inspire all sorts of other industries and institutions to say, oh, wait a second. If we band together and engage in collective action, we can stop this.
So, I’m absolutely confident, optimistic that we will sort of hold on to this tiger tale for the next year and a half, that we will have a free and fair election, that we’ll win at least the House, and that that will be the story of democracy’s survival. But we are going to have to, as a collective body in the Senate, be willing to take some risk. I know shutting down the government feels awful nasty, but just think there’s going to be moments, whether it be on the debt ceiling, whether it be on a government shutdown, in which we are going to have to intentionally raise the urgency level of the national conversation, and that will involve much more risk tolerant behavior than we’ve been willing to engage in in the past.
Alex Wagner: He got your work cut out for you, Senator.
Chris Murphy: Yes. But, like, you know, what a, like, what a project. I mean, I just do every —
Alex Wagner: Yes. What a moment.
Chris Murphy: Right.
Alex Wagner: This is why you’re in it.
Chris Murphy: Yes. I tell every group that I go talk to, like, feel lucky that you got, you know, dumped onto the earth, at this country, at this moment. You get to save the greatest experiment in societal organization in the history of the world, multicultural democracy. So, feel lucky for it and go to work.
Alex Wagner: Next week will mark one hundred days of the second Trump administration, which means that after next week, our show, Trumpland with Alex Wagner, will be coming to an end. So be sure to tune in next Thursday for a very, very special episode.
Until then, you can continue to get this show and other MSNBC podcasts ad free when you subscribe to MSNBC premium on Apple Podcasts. As a subscriber, you’ll also get bonus content, including an exclusive bonus episode of Trumpland after our last official episode next week. So be sure to subscribe.
Trumpland with Alex Wagner is produced by Max Jacobs along with Julia DeAngelo and Kay Guerrero. Our associate producer is Janmaris Perez. Our audio engineers are Bob Mallory and Katie Lau, and Bryson Barnes is head of audio production. Matthew Alexander is our executive producer, and Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC audio. And I’m your host, Alex Wagner. We’ll see you next week.
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