Chris Murphy, a new ‘pugilistic populist,’ maps resistance to Trump

Sen. Chris Murphy was dropped at the L Street entrance of Washington, D.C.’s convention center and hustled through the kitchen to a ballroom where 2,000 progressive activists waited to hear his thoughts on what to do about the 47th president of the United States and the sorry state of the Democratic Party.

The audience was midway through a weeklong, largely off-the-record summit of “America Votes,” the self-described “coordination hub of the progressive community.” It promised “experts, strategists, and renowned progressive leaders to begin writing the next chapter of the American story.”

Among them was Murphy, 51, the Democratic junior senator from Connecticut. Reelected in November to a third term, Murphy is in his third new phase as a senator — the first 10 years building a gun control movement, the last two as a broker of bipartisan deals on gun safety and border control.

“And now I’m trying to convince my party to meet the moment and bash these guys over the head with a baseball bat, metaphorically,” Murphy said.

The moment, as Murphy describes it in increasingly heated terms in person and online, is a campaign by President Donald J. Trump and Elon Musk to undermine the press and bully law firms, universities and business leaders into submission, and the only way it can be met is with uncompromising, if risky, defiance.

“Our democracy isn’t at risk of dying. It is dying as we speak. We are watching it die. It is not too late to save it,” Murphy said in a Senate speech on April 10. “We say that again, it is not too late to save our democracy, but we can’t continue to close our eyes and think that our democracy can survive a coordinated assault on those four key institutions of accountability.”

Murphy is a multiplatform messenger, a believer in repetition. On Thursday night, unshaven and casually dressed after a basketball game with the youngest of his two teenage sons, he delivered a live video briefing on Instagram that repurposed and updated the Senate speech.

“So, I want to go over events that have been developing really, really fast. Trump’s plan is real. He has a plan,” said Murphy, who has 200,000 followers on Instagram and one million on X. “He is implementing it to convert our democracy to some form of autocracy, and that’s the only way that you can get away with the corruption and the thievery.”

Online, where his Instagram remarks got more than 12,000 “likes” by Saturday morning, or the previous week while addressing a live audience in the convention center ballroom, Murphy preaches and teaches the gospel of resistance, rallies and “mass mobilizations” as the counter to Trump’s efforts to quell dissent.

“They’re playing a different game, and whether we like it or not, we have to choose to fight on the terms that they’re setting,” Murphy told the activists. It is time, he said, for Democrats “to take big swings” on both tactics and policies. The message from Murphy is not new, but similar calls are popping up in unexpected places, such as buttoned-down David Brooks calling for an “uprising” on the New York Times opinion page.

As Murphy told the activists, he would have preferred that Democrats boycotted the president’s speech to a joint session of Congress, as he did.

“He has an obligation to give a real State of the Union speech, not run a reality show, not stand up on stage and tell lie after lie after lie,” Murphy said. “He’s not willing to play that on the level. Why are we willing to play that, right?”

Murphy voted to confirm Marco Rubio as secretary of state, but says there will be no more gestures of cooperation, of recognizing institutional norms. If they are a Trump nominee, they are complicit and to be opposed. He wished his Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, had not voted with Republicans for a budget resolution drafted with no Democratic input. Let the government shut down. Let them own it.

Yes, Murphy said, it would have carried a risk.

“For ordinary Americans to take risks, or, for instance, for law firms or universities to take risks and just say no to this guy when he tries to extort them, then political leaders need to be willing to take risks as well. Right?” Murphy said.

It was an applause line.

Fundraising like Bernie

Murphy entered the ballroom knowing that a campaign finance filing soon would show that his relentless, blunt and occasionally profane critiques of the Republican president and Democratic Party was putting him in a league with Bernie Sanders in the online game of raising money off opposition to Trump.

The report filed Wednesday shows Murphy spent $3.4 million in the first three months of 2025 on online pitches for help supporting “a political opposition movement” that remains a work in progress, so far producing a single town-hall meeting in Warren, Mich., and the promise of two more this week in North Carolina and Missouri.

The online appeals, buttressed with constant presence on social media platforms and cable television, plus featured turns with everyone from the New Yorker’s David Remnick to the comedian podcaster Hasan Minhaj, brought in an eye-popping $8 million.

“It’s obviously an uncommon amount of money,” Murphy said. “I mean, it was shocking to me. It was shocking to me that so many people were interested in contributing. And I just feel like I have an obligation to put that money on the ground right now. Even though they were contributing to my election funds, they were really contributing as a means to try to help meet the moment.”

After expenses, Murphy netted $4 million for the quarter, adding to the $5.5 million leftover from his easy reelection last year. 

Among senators not facing reelection in 2026 or 2028, only Sanders raised more in the same period. The independent from Vermont and undisputed leader of the American progressive movement raised $11.4 million, while spending only $1.3 million to prime the pump with digital appeals.

The 83-year-old Sanders has been on the road since Feb. 21 with his “Fighting Oligarchy Tour,” staging 15 rallies in the midwest and west with his 35-year-old ally, U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. Their stops in Denver and Los Angeles each drew more than 30,000 people.

Sanders figures prominently in Murphy’s retooled messaging: Economic populism should have been the tentpole of Kamala Harris’ campaign, and elements of the Democratic Party owe Sanders an apology for dismissing the two-time presidential candidate as occupying a place on the fringe of politics.

Pugilistic populism

At the America Votes’ summit, which ended as Congress left Washington for a two-week recess on April 11, Murphy insisted the Biden administration, by reinvigorating the Federal Trade Commission and authorizing antitrust actions, had a credible record of standing up for workers and against corporations.

“But Joe Biden wasn’t out there every single day beating the hell out of the tech companies that were poisoning our kids, against the oil companies that were price-gouging us at the pumps, the retail companies that were shipping all of our jobs overseas,” Murphy said. “You have to be engaged in a daily fight with the corporations, the greedy corporations, the price gouging corporations that are screwing Americans.”

Murphy said his new populist rhetoric signifies a change in tone, not philosophy.

“While I’ve always, I think, been a populist, I’m maybe a louder populist,” Murphy said. “I’m maybe more interested in being more pugilistic in my populism.”

During an interview in his office the next day, between speaking at a tax-fairness rally in a park by the Capitol and then giving a floor speech on the mounting threats to democracy, Murphy said a pugilistic populism means naming names, not blandly promising to “fight special interests.” 

“That’s a purposefully cowardly term,” Murphy said. “But when you say, ‘I’m going to attack the way that Amazon is destroying local businesses. I’m going to stop Pfizer and Bristol-Myers from bankrupting families, I’m gonna stop big agriculture from driving up the cost of food’ and tell them how you’re gonna do it, that’s a much more believable populism.”

Stylistically, Murphy runs cooler than Sanders and AOC, who draw energy from crowds. Murphy can sound like he is giving a TED Talk, conversational and informative. On Thursday, after warning that civil disobedience might be necessary sooner than later, he paused and said, “OK, listen, it is scary. I’m not going to tell you it’s not scary.”

Murphy, who managed a congressional campaign when he was 22, always has thought like a political strategist as much as a politician. His rhetoric and fundraising have renewed speculation of presidential ambitions, but some admirers wonder if a better role model would be LBJ, the master of the Senate, not president.

“As long as you are nimble, there are a lot of ways to be continually relevant and make a difference on behalf of things that you care about,” he said, taking break in office. He had just addressed a tax fairness rally outside the Capitol and was about to deliver a speech to the Senate.

He insists his rainmaking, his road trips and his social media are not prepatory to a campaign for higher office.

“I think part of the reason that my voice is breaking through a little bit right now is that it’s not poisoned by personal ambition,” he said. “I think the reason that I feel and sound a little bit more authentic in my worry about where the country is is because I’m genuinely seized by my worry. And I’m posting videos not to gain followers. I’m posting videos to try to change people’s minds and to try to raise people’s urgency.”

He asserted a strategic role on Nov. 10 with a series of tweets and a 4-minute video in which he delivered a calm if devastating post-mortem of why so many blue-collar Democrats either defected to Trump or didn’t show up.

“We are not listening to the people we claim to represent,” Murphy said in the video. “We claim to be the party of the working class, the party of poor people, and yet we let interest groups and think tanks tell us what those people need. That’s why we end up with these relatively small-ball solutions. Not saying they don’t matter, but more roads and bridges, bulk negotiation of prescription drug prices, little bit bigger tax credit for families with kids, that’s not meeting the moment.”

That video created an immediate buzz, especially among Sanders supporters who had given up on the Democratic Party, people like Mike Figueredo, the founder and host of “The Humanist Report” podcast. On a show in November, he summarized Murphy’s message as an unexpected validation of Sanders.

“Wow. I’ve got to say I am genuinely shocked to see a sitting Democratic Party senator admit this about the party,” Figueredo said. “I mean, we all know it’s true, but to see them admit it is quite the thing to behold. And of course, he’s exactly right. Democrats shun their working class base because they think that those high income supporters are going to be the ones to carry them.”

Not all of Murphy’s prescription was applauded by Figueredo or others on the left. While pushing the party to be more aggressive and risk-tolerant in fighting Trump, he is also urging it to be less judgmental as a necessary step to reestablishing Democrats as the big-tent party.

On X, Murphy wrote, “You need to let people into the tent who aren’t 100% on board with us on every social and cultural issue, or issues like guns or climate.” In his speech to the activists, Murphy noted he spent the better part of a decade making sure that support for universal background checks and a ban on assault weapons was a litmus test for Democratic presidential candidates.

“I remember patting myself on the back in 2020 when we held a big forum on gun violence in Las Vegas, Nev., and every single Democratic candidate for president was there, right?” he said. “And every single one of them was singing the same tune. Everyone was for a ban on assault weapons and universal background checks. And I was like, ‘Alright, I did my job.’”

Cultural litmus tests have limited the ceiling for Democratic seats in the Senate to 52, Murphy said, and he suggests across-the-board litmus tests might be counterproductive, even on his issue of guns. 

“We maybe should be nominating candidates who believe in the economic populist tentpole but might not line up with us on all of the other cultural, social and hot-button issues,” Murphy said. “That’s a difficult call to make, but I think that might serve two purposes: That might grow the coalition so we win more elections, and that might actually put us in a position to change people’s minds.”

That was not an applause line, nor did Murphy expect it would be. Murphy was doing his TED Talk thing. He was in teaching mode.

“Frankly, if you are zeroed in on this question of the billionaire takeover of government, the corporate seizure of our economy, then you can frankly confront the right on their unconscionable scapegoating of gay, transgender kids or immigrants in the exact same sentence in which you are anchoring our message on economic populism, right?” he said.

Distraction and division are elements of Trump’s playbook, he said. Forget about Greenland, the 51st state of Canada and the Gulf of America and keep focused on the real threat of funding tax cuts for the rich by cutting Medicaid, most likely by rolling back the expansion passed as part of the Affordable Care Act. Ninety percent of the expansion is federally funded, and a retreat to the 50-50 state and federal split for the rest of Medicaid would cost Connecticut nearly $1 billion.

“You can say, ‘Listen, the Republicans are corporate shills. They are in the pockets of billionaires, and so they want you to believe that your problems are being caused by gay kids or drag shows or Mexican immigrants,’” Murphy said. “That’s not who’s screwing you, right? Who’s screwing you are unscrupulous insurance companies. What’s screwing you are the tech companies that are poisoning and addicting your kids to their devices. Who’s screwing you is your billionaires who are so rapacious that they’re arguing to cut your insurance off so that they can get another $50,000 tax cut.”

Murphy has been warning about the dangers of disaffection and loneliness since 2022, both in a political and sociological sense. He did so again at the convention center. At a time when the economic metrics were good, he said, too many voters just weren’t feeling it.

“You were seeing epidemic rates of self reported unhappiness in America at a time when unemployment was at a structural low, crime was dropping, test scores were going up,” Murphy said. “And I don’t think you were doing your job as a political leader if you didn’t step back and ask yourself, ‘Why?’ ”

Democrats didn’t answer that question, at least not in a manner that was heard by disaffected voters, he said. The beneficiary was anyone who practiced the politics of grievance.

“When you’re feeling powerless, when you’re feeling alone, when you’re feeling empty and devoid of meaning, that’s the moment the demagogues live for, right?” Murphy said. “That’s the moment where somebody who is going to sell a message of division and scapegoating, man, that’s their opportunity.”

Murphy’s higher profile comes at an awkward time. Five days after issuing the election post-mortem, Murphy and his wife, Cathy Holahan, informed friends and, ultimately, the general public of their separation. Five months later, there is no record of either filing for divorce. The topic is one Murphy declines to discuss.

Last week, the first of the two weeks of the congressional recess, Murphy had no public schedule and spent time with his two sons, who are 13 and 16. Next week, he is going on the road with town-hall meetings in Saxapahaw, N.C., on Thursday and Chesterfield, Mo., on Friday. Both are in Republican congressional districts.

His wingman will be U.S. Rep. Maxwell Alejandro Frost, an up and coming 28-year-old Democrat who represents the 10th Congressional District of Central Florida. He was with Murphy at his event in Warren, Mich. Elected at age 25, Frost is the youngest and first Generation Z member of the House.

Frost ran with the backing of Sanders, and he appeared on stage with him at the Coachella music festival last week.

“I just think he’s one of a handful of members that is meeting the moment,” Murphy said. “I have a real sense of urgency. And if I’m going to be traveling with somebody, I want them to have the same sense of urgency.”