Is this the best they’ve got?
Is this the best they’ve got?
I n case you were wondering, no, Chris Murphy isn’t going to calm down about DOGE.
Asked on This Week with George Stephanopoulos about John Fetterman’s advice that Democrats calm down a little rather than elevate every Trump controversy to a matter of existential urgency, the Connecticut senator replied with a flurry of apocalyptic rhetoric about Elon Musk and all his works.
“This is a fundamental corruption,” he huffed, adding that “democracies don’t last forever.”
Murphy further observed, and not the least bit calmly: “And what those who are trying to destroy democracies want is for everyone to stay quiet, for everyone to believe that the moment isn’t urgent. They want to use violence and the threat of violence and the threat of arrests to keep the opposition at home.
“We are not going to do this. We see this as a crisis of epic proportions. We were watching the billionaires try to steal government from the people.”
The dastardly anti-democratic act here involves a democratically elected president asking one of his advisers to review the federal government for efficiencies. Saving federal money, by the way, isn’t ordinarily considered “theft.” But Murphy, whose tinny and hysterical anti-Musk advocacy is the best Democrats have at the moment, gets points for creativity, if not for persuasiveness.
There are legitimate legal issues regarding Musk’s reorganization of federal agencies on the fly, but Murphy isn’t content simply to raise questions about those, not when we are witnessing “the billionaire takeover of government” and “the evisceration of democracy.”
First, they came for the foreign aid . . .
It is obviously true that Musk is a billionaire many times over and that he has enormous influence in the Trump administration. But cutting waste, fraud, and abuse and rationalizing government operations are not inherently priorities of billionaires — in fact, these things are broadly popular.
Neither does Elon Musk personally have anything to gain from whether USAID is a bloated operation or a skeletal one.
To make his lurid accusation of corruption, Murphy has come up with a conspiracy theory: USAID is, through its awesome mustering of soft power, checking China’s influence in the world, and since Musk has business interests in China, the tech entrepreneur wants to bolster Beijing by removing USAID as an obstacle to China’s geopolitical interests.
QED.
Given that Musk is a very bright man, surely he could find some less convoluted and indirect way to assist Beijing if he were really an agent of Chinese influence.
Another Murphy allegation is that Trump “is trying to crush his opposition by making them afraid of losing federal funding, by making them afraid of physical violence.”
If we take this literally, it is a concession that Trump’s opposition is dependent on federal grants, which, one would think, Murphy would be at pains to deny. (Meanwhile, it is the January 6 pardons that, according to Murphy, make the opposition fearful of physical violence.)
If USAID is really the keystone of the American republic, the way Murphy portrays it, our system of government is more fragile than anyone imagined. Who knew we were so dependent on the work of a relatively small federal agency that spends its money overseas? Somehow, though, U.S. democracy managed to survive for about 200 years prior to the establishment of USAID in 1961.
This is also an odd fight to try to make a populist rallying cry. “Hands off the people’s USAID!” won’t have much resonance for anyone who isn’t a USAID employee or the head of an NGO.
Murphy, though, refuses to be calm or contribute anything to the public debate that isn’t desperate-sounding tripe.