Chris Murphy Emerges as a Clear Voice for Democrats Countering Trump

As Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, sat seething in his office last month watching President Trump blame diversity requirements at the Federal Aviation Administration for the deadly plane crash over the Potomac River, members of his staff warned him against publicly venting his rage.

The midair collision had happened less than 12 hours earlier, they reminded him; bodies were still in the water and families were still being notified about the deaths of loved ones. Perhaps it would be more befitting of a U.S. senator to be respectful of the tragedy and all of its unknowns, rather than seize the political moment and respond?

Mr. Murphy had no time for that.

“Everybody in this country should be outraged that Donald Trump is standing up on that podium and lying to you — deliberately lying to you,” he said in an impassioned video he recorded and posted within 30 minutes of Mr. Trump’s news conference. “Every single senator and member of Congress should call him out for how disgraceful it was.”

Many did, but none managed to do so quite as quickly or concisely as Mr. Murphy, 51, who has seemed to be everywhere, all at once, since Inauguration Day, staging a loud and constant resistance to Mr. Trump at a time when Democrats are struggling to figure out how to respond to him.

Mr. Murphy, a career politician who rose to national prominence as a gun safety advocate after the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school shooting in Newtown, Conn., has emerged in the opening weeks of Mr. Trump’s second term as one of the most effective Democratic communicators pushing back against a president unbound.

In two-minute videos on social media, which he records from his office on Capitol Hill; an almost constant stream of posts on X; passionate floor speeches; and essays he writes on his Substack, Mr. Murphy is attempting to explain in digestible sound bites that what is happening in Washington is very simple: It’s a billionaire takeover of American democracy.

He is also seizing a political opportunity to position himself as a future national leader for Democrats who find themselves deep in the wilderness as they seek a strategy for simultaneously rebuilding their party and resisting Mr. Trump.

“It’s an overwhelming moment,” Mr. Murphy said in an interview on Wednesday in his office on Capitol Hill. “Our political brand is fundamentally broken, the rule of law is disintegrating and a lot of people still don’t know what Trump’s actual agenda is.”

Mr. Murphy has spent the past three years immersing himself in the literature and ideas of the “new right,” listening to the podcast “Red Scare” and reading thought leaders like Curtis Yarvin and Patrick Deneen. He credits that immersion for his being prepared for Mr. Trump’s return to power.

“It gave me a window into how thoughtful they were being to make sure they were ready on Day 1,” he said.

Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, said that Mr. Murphy has been meeting the moment “when too many Democratic elected officials seem several steps behind. He’s providing Democrats with a messaging blueprint for how to take on Trump and Musk and win back working-class voters.”

Mr. Murphy, who is aging out of the “boy wonder” phase of his political career (he was 33 when first elected to the House), is not exactly charismatic; he is cerebral and serious. At a recent news conference, he did not crack a smile when Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, made corny jokes about his grandson losing his first tooth, waiting them out stone-faced until it was his turn to speak.

The comedian Hasan Minhaj recently described him as having the look of a McKinsey consultant, “just blending into congressional crowds of white men like an arctic fox.”

At times, Mr. Murphy can sound like a high school history teacher giving a civics lesson.

“Dictators and despots, they use law enforcement to try and compel loyalty,” he said in one video, explaining why people needed to care that the Justice Department had dropped its charges against Mayor Eric Adams of New York. “They threaten you with arrest if you’re not loyal; they will let you get away with crimes if you are loyal. That’s what’s happening in America today.”

But a constitutional crisis can offer an opportunity for a civics refresher, and Mr. Murphy appears to be breaking through.

Over the past two months, he has doubled his Instagram following on both his official and political accounts. Since Jan. 1, Mr. Murphy’s Facebook and Instagram accounts have racked up 29.2 million impressions. On Substack, Mr. Murphy’s subscribers have increased by 223 percent. His campaign has spent more on fund-raising ads on Meta in 2025 than it did in the entirety of the 2023-24 cycle, when he was running for re-election.

“My 16-year-old son for the first time, he said to me, ‘What’s going on? My friends are seeing your stuff,’” Mr. Murphy said. “I’m showing up on a 16-year-old’s TikTok feed.”

That is one of his current metrics of success.

“People are trying to understand this moment,” he said. “They’re looking for people who can explain it in terms that are pretty simple. I want to create explanations and content that get sent to people that are not reading and thinking about politics every day, but know something is screwy and want to understand it.”

Mr. Murphy insists he is not just doing all this to set up a run for president, in part because he thinks it is no sure thing that there will even be a race to enter in four years.

“Right now, there is a distinct possibility that we do not have a free and fair election in 2028, and all of our work is to make sure that doesn’t happen,” he said.

Mr. Murphy said he can easily envision a future where “the press is so demoralized, the opposition is so beleaguered and harassed that you just don’t have the ability to mount an opposition.”

For a decade, the issue of gun violence has defined Mr. Murphy’s career; the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School took place a month after he won his Senate seat, having served in the House since 2007. For years, he has been haranguing his colleagues to go out and run on the issue of gun safety, because he thinks it is a winning electoral issue that politicians are scared to touch.

After the pandemic, he dove into the issue of loneliness, calling it an epidemic and “one of the most important political issues of our time.”

But for now, those issues are all on the back burner.

“Nothing matters other than the question of whether or not we let the billionaires destroy our democracy,” he said. “There’s a ticking time bomb inside our body politic right now. It’s very possible this thing could be completely rigged by the summer or fall of this year.”

So Mr. Murphy has decided to set his hair on fire to get people to pay attention. He is on YouTube, doing interviews with Mr. Minaj and political influencers like Brian Tyler Cohen, Mehdi Hassan and Jack Cocchiarella. He is on Substack, talking to Anand Giridharadas. He is on TikTok talking to Aaron Parnas. And he is wherever you get your podcasts, talking to Jon Favreau.

“The actual TV appearance has limited impact right now,” he said. “What you’re actually doing those TV appearances for is to create content that ultimately lives somewhere else.”

Mr. Schumer, who has come in for criticism from some progressive activists for failing to effectively respond to Mr. Trump, has been encouraging him to keep going.

“Chris Murphy’s frustration and anger at what Trump is doing is genuine and he has a unique, strong, and incredibly valuable way of pushing back,” he said.

Mr. Murphy is also shifting with the times. These days, he bemoans the fact that economic populists in Congress like Senators Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont, and Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, are treated like radicals. He thinks their ideas have the best chance of crossing over and picking up voters who are currently in Mr. Trump’s camp. But in 2016, Mr. Murphy was an early and eager backer of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign over Mr. Sanders in what became a heated Democratic primary.

His party’s devastating 2024 losses, coupled with Mr. Trump’s blatant abuses of his authority, have made Mr. Murphy rethink a conventional approach to politics. These days, he has been meeting with his Senate colleagues to persuade them that this is not a time to play by any old political rules.

“They do not deserve the benefit of the doubt,” he has told other Democrats of Mr. Trump and Republicans. “They are deliberately hiding what they are doing so that responsible, thoughtful, fact-based people will say nothing.”

When Elon Musk made a straight-armed gesture on Inauguration Day that drew comparisons to a Nazi salute, Mr. Murphy was not among those wringing his hands about misinterpreting it.

“It was absolutely a ‘Heil’ — a Hitler salute,” he said. “Their pattern of lying allows us to assume the worst.”