New Jersey Sen Chris Murphy calls for Dems to not 'normalize' DOGE, Trump

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) urged his fellow Democrats to not “normalize” the election of President-elect Donald Trump and especially not the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which he described as “an effort by the billionaire class to privatize government to benefit themselves.”

Murphy talked about a dystopian world in which there is a politically motivated Department of Justice and a compliant mainstream media that sounds a lot like the last four years of the Biden administration. “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,” Murphy said in an interview with The New Republic.

Speaking of Trump’s supposed desire to prosecute his political opponents, Murphy said “I do not think that we can overhype the potentially fatal damage that that will do to American democracy. It is important that we not normalize this. It is important that we talk about the gravity of the challenge right now, before it is too late and everybody just goes back to business as normal.”

Speaking on DOGE, Murphy said it is “not a department” and is “being run by billionaires, people who have no idea how important basic government services like Medicaid, Social Security, veterans benefits are to regular people.”

Murphy is in utter disbelief that “there are a lot of Democrats openly saying, ‘I want to work with them, I want to sit down with this group.’" Doing so, Murphy argued, only belies the fact “that this is something other than either just a TV show or an effort by the billionaire class to privatize government to benefit themselves,” which is what Murphy says is the chief modus operandi of Trump.

He insisted more Democrats need to be “sounding the red alert on this government efficiency racket” and stop “treating all of this as normal … It’s not normal, and we have to start telegraphing that to people.”

Trump’s nominee for director of the FBI, Kash Patel, is the man Murphy believes will initiate and execute a massive wave of political persecution and judicial prosecutions on anyone standing in the way of Trump’s objectives as he makes “the FBI an enforcer of Trump’s political power.”

“Kash Patel’s number one qualification is that he will do anything and everything Donald Trump tells him to do. He has, in fact, made his career off of an advertisement that he believes anybody who’s opposing Donald Trump politically should be prosecuted.”

Murphy suggested the first casualty of this inquisition could be former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) who happily sat on the J6 committee and just as enthusiastically endorsed and campaigned for Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election. Murphy said her potential prosecution for allegedly pressuring J6 witnesses to lie or to not tell the truth will be bad news for the whole nation.

“And all of a sudden, the bodies that are available for the political opposition are cut in half. It’s not that they disappear, but that you just don’t have the same crowds to organize because people become risk-averse for a good reason. So even if it’s just Liz Cheney—and it may not be just Liz Cheney—the chilling effect that it has on speech could be fatal.”