During remarks on the Senate floor Thursday, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) spoke about President Trump's attacks against journalists and law firms.
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NewsTranscript
00:00Thank you, Mr. President.
00:05Mr. President, I was sitting with the CEO of one of America's biggest and most influential companies last month,
00:13and I asked him a simple question.
00:15What could President Trump do that would be a bridge too far for you?
00:20What attack on democracy or the rule of law could Trump make that would cause you to speak up?
00:30His answer was pretty simple, and it was pretty confident.
00:33He said that if Trump were to ignore a Supreme Court ruling, that would cross the line.
00:40He was reflecting a familiar theme, that until President Trump thumbs his nose definitively at a court ruling,
00:50then his attacks on democracy are troubling but not lethal.
00:55It's normal politics up until that dramatic confrontation between the executive branch and the judicial branch,
01:04for which the Constitution, as we know, really has no prescribed remedy.
01:08And for many Americans, you know, they may breathe a sigh of relief that America's, you know,
01:15most influential private sector leaders would rise up to defend democracy if this confrontation that we worry about came to pass.
01:24Combined with a massive public mobilization, we could be saved.
01:29But I didn't breathe a sigh of relief.
01:31I'm deeply worried that we have really spent little time studying the paths that democracies take when they collapse.
01:44Most of the time, there is not a singular moment when the executive dramatically seizes power.
01:53There's not normally a brazen attempt to burn down the parliament building.
01:57No, instead, democracies die when gradually, often quietly and methodically, over time,
02:05the structures that hold the executive accountable for corruption, for thievery, for wrongdoing, are dismantled.
02:14Dismantled so that citizens can no longer hold the executive accountable.
02:19Dismantled so that the political opposition never has enough room to maneuver meaningfully.
02:27There are still elections.
02:29The executive doesn't try to stuff the ballot box.
02:33Occasionally, at lower levels, the opposition still wins.
02:36But what happens is that those structures of accountability are either so degraded or so completely co-opted by the regime
02:45that the truth is just buried.
02:48And the political opposition loses the basic tools that it needs to win.
02:53Then, in every democracy that stops being a democracy, then, there's a familiar story.
03:03There are four institutions that the regime attacks and attacks relentlessly until those structures of accountability are so disintegrated
03:15that even though elections continue to happen, the same party or the same person wins power election after election.
03:24And those four institutions are the press, the legal profession, universities, and the business community.
03:31If you degrade or co-opt these four institutions, you never need to have a high-stakes fight with the top court in your country.
03:41You don't need to burn the Reichstag down.
03:43You can still have elections, but only one party will win.
03:46So that's why this CEO's assurance, frankly, sent a chill down my spine.
03:54Because our democracy isn't at risk of dying.
03:57It is dying.
03:59As we speak, we are watching it die.
04:04It is not too late to save it.
04:08Let me say that again.
04:09Again, 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.
04:26Democrats and Republicans need to see what is happening before our eyes.
04:31Democrats rise up and defend the independence of journalists, of lawyers, of universities, and of the private sector.
04:41So I want to spend a minute or two to walk you through what President Trump is doing and how it, frankly, chillingly mirrors the tactics that other leaders have used to transition real democracy into pretend fake democracy.
05:01It always starts with journalists, from Hungary to Belarus to Venezuela, countries that have elections, but elections where one party just keeps on winning.
05:11These are places where journalists are subject to nonstop harassment campaign from the regime, such that people just stop doing journalism or journalists stop telling the full truth.
05:21Last month, for instance, the Turkish president, Erdogan, locked up 11 journalists simply because they were covering protests against Erdogan's jailing of the top opposition leaders.
05:33Now, Trump has not started jailing journalists, but the pace of harassment in the first 60 days of his second term is alarming.
05:41He's denied access to government buildings, including the White House, to journalists who don't use pre-approved language from the White House.
05:50He is preferencing credentials to partisan journalists who simply parrot his party line.
05:57His FCC has begun to deliberately harass media companies that are owned by political opponents of the president.
06:05But Trump's campaign to destroy independent journalism, it has a darker and more menacing side, because Trump isn't just trying to intimidate journalists so that they'll be afraid to tell the truth.
06:17He's also trying to destroy the concept of truth itself.
06:20And again, this is a key facet of leaders who are elected who are trying to transition democracies away and into something very different.
06:31How do you destroy truth?
06:34Well, that's why the Secretary of Defense looks into the camera and tells the American public that the text messages that everybody read, filled with classified information and war plans, did not include classified information and war plans.
06:49The White House wants you to believe that one plus one does not equal two any longer.
06:54That you should doubt even the clear things that you see with our eyes, that nothing is real, that nothing is true.
07:04That if you are a supporter of the regime and I tell you one plus one equals three, then one plus one equals three.
07:11Those weren't war plans.
07:13Those weren't classified documents.
07:15That's also why the official position of the White House on key issues like tariffs changes every hour.
07:21Because if the ground truth just changes constantly, then there's no truth at all.
07:28Journalists are made to look foolish by reporting a true thing at 9 a.m. that becomes untrue at 10 a.m.
07:35Journalism loses its credibility when the facts being distributed by the White House change all the time.
07:41Trump says the tariffs are permanent.
07:44Journalists report the president says the tariffs are permanent.
07:46An hour later, Trump says, I never said they're permanent.
07:49They're not permanent.
07:50I'm cutting deals.
07:51They write that he's cutting deals.
07:53An hour later, they're suspended.
07:55No more tariffs.
07:57When the truth changes constantly, it's hard to believe that there's anything true any longer.
08:03Second, universities are always, always a target of would-be autocrats.
08:08Again, in Turkey, the government has terminated thousands of professors just because they criticized the government.
08:13In Hungary, one of the nation's most prestigious universities was forced to move out of the country because President Orban attacked it so ceaselessly for fomenting protest against his government.
08:27Universities over the long history of democracy have been the place where protest, especially youth protest, begins.
08:37They are a thorn in the side of leadership.
08:43The famous Tiananmen Square protests in China were, of course, started by university students.
08:51So it's no surprise that if you want to crush democracy, you need to crush the independence of universities.
08:56That's why Trump's decision to target universities that permit criticism of President Trump is so bone-chilling.
09:05He pretends like he's standing up to anti-Semitism on campuses.
09:09But what he's really trying to do is make clear that protests against his policies on campuses will result in federal funding being cut off.
09:17Columbia University was forced to agree to a stunning list of free speech concessions in order to gain assurances from President Trump that their federal funding would continue.
09:29They had to agree to allow campus police to arrest protesters.
09:32They had to essentially agree to receivership, federal receivership, over an academic department that houses professors who are critical of Trump and his policies.
09:42Effectively, the President of the United States got to pick the person who will oversee the Columbia Department on the Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies, as well as the Center for Palestine Studies.
09:54That is extraordinary.
09:55That's not what happens in a healthy democracy.
09:57The leader of the country micromanaging academic departments at major universities to assure that academic work aligns with the regime.
10:04And now, having successfully forced Columbia to bend the knee and quell dissent on their campus, Trump is targeting other universities.
10:13Some of them will sign similar agreements, giving President Trump power over those campuses.
10:19But frankly, all Trump has to do is make an example of a handful of universities, and others will simply comply and obey in advance.
10:29Why, as an academic president, when you've got federal dollars that employ people at your university, would you permit a major protest against a Trump policy, if you know that that's going to jeopardize federal funds?
10:41Or maybe you allow it, because you don't want to so brazenly stand in the way of free speech, but you just make sure that it's not too big a protest, or it's not too critical.
10:50You police speech to be on the right side of the regime.
10:54That is what happens in all of these fake democracies, and that is what's happening here.
11:01But controlling speech on campuses is not enough.
11:05Controlling and intimidating journalists is not enough.
11:08You've got to go after the lawyers, too.
11:11Now, maybe there's not a lot of love for lawyers in this country, but lawyers are the ones that bring the lawsuits to stop the thievery and the illegality.
11:20Lawyers are compelled by their oath to stand up for the Constitution.
11:25Putin arrested Navalny's lawyers right on the eve of Navalny's trial.
11:30In Venezuela, Maduro routinely harasses and detains lawyers, human rights lawyers, because he knows those are the ones that will hold him accountable.
11:39In Tunisia, the regime stormed the offices of the Bar administration to intimidate the legal profession into silence.
11:46Here in America, Trump is engaged in a shameless campaign of extortion against any major law firm that has taken a position against Trump or Trump's interests.
11:57What he is doing is extraordinary, and it is mind-blowing to me that it is just being ignored by my Republican colleagues.
12:06He's going firm by firm, and not to every firm, just to the firms that have represented Democrats or brought cases against him.
12:16And he's telling them that if they don't fall in line and stop doing work to oppose him, their clients will lose access to federal work.
12:25That is extortion.
12:26This body, Republicans and Democrats, should stand up against it.
12:32But it is working.
12:34Several law firms have signed deals with Trump that obligate them to support, guess what, causes aligned with Donald Trump.
12:42Paul Weiss was targeted by an executive order and struck a deal.
12:47But so did Skadden.
12:48They struck a deal with Trump before they'd even been targeted.
12:51Already, collectively, these firms have pledged, think about this, about a quarter of a billion dollars of pro bono work to file cases in coordination with the President of the United States' political interests.
13:12And just like what happened with the universities, there's a lot of extra compliance that's happening.
13:18I know for a fact that firms that have already signed these agreements with Trump have gone above and beyond the terms of the agreements to quiet their criticism of the government.
13:30And no doubt, every single major law firm will think twice before bringing an action against an illegal or corrupt action of the President in fear of Trump retaliating against their business.
13:44That's the point.
13:44The point is to try to crush dissent.
13:48The point is to try to stand in the way of anybody who is going to hold Trump accountable by using the power, the official power granted to him by the people of the United States,
13:58to try to signal retaliation against anyone who dares oppose him.
14:05But collective action, it can be a powerful tool.
14:10Together, the collective might of our universities and our law firms is significant.
14:16So they could choose to ban together and decide to sign no agreements with Trump,
14:23to refuse to let the President of the United States dictate the terms of their speech, their business, their defense of the rule of law.
14:30And I don't want to make the victim the perpetrator.
14:35This is all Trump's fault, what he is doing to extort political loyalty from universities and law firms.
14:43But instead of there being collective action on behalf of these industries, the opposite is happening.
14:50In the legal profession, when Paul Weiss was being targeted, the other big firms didn't rise to their defense.
14:57They started making calls to Paul Weiss' clients and lawyers using Trump's assault as a means to poach business or partners.
15:07That's shameful, acting like ravenous vultures, putting your profits first instead of your country's interests
15:14or the interests of the legal profession, which pledges before a court to stand up for the rule of law.
15:21Instead, these big firms are aiding and abetting the destruction of the rule of law by doing Trump's work for him.
15:29Making targeted firms even more vulnerable by working behind the scenes to strip them bare for parts.
15:37There are good patriotic lawyers at many of these high-priced firms who know that this is wrong, and they should speak up.
15:44Some of them already have.
15:47And now, finally, Trump is coming for the rest of the private sector.
15:52Listen, I have no idea what the Trump tariff policy is.
15:56The constantly shifting positions of the last week, they're an embarrassment.
16:00It's complete incompetent malpractice.
16:03It's jeopardized jobs and retirement savings and college funds all across this country.
16:08But the tariffs are complicated and convoluting and hard to understand, likely because they aren't actually economic or trade policy.
16:16They're a political tool.
16:18This one, designed to force every major company to come before Trump to plead for tariff relief in exchange for giving Trump the company's political loyalty.
16:30No different than what's happening in the legal profession or in America's universities.
16:34A tariff can be written very easily to favor one industry over another or one company over another.
16:41And the confusing nature of the tariff regime is a means for Trump to require every major company in the country to come on bended knee to him to get the relief they need.
16:50And that loyalty pledge could be anything, the purchase of some Trump crypto coin, public support for Trump's economic policies, donations to his political campaign.
17:00But having watched what Trump has done one by one to universities and law firms, why would we assume the tariffs aren't just simply a tool to do the same thing to big companies?
17:09So what I'm trying to say here is that you don't need a battle royale between the president and the Supreme Court for democracy to die.
17:19If journalists are constantly looking over their shoulder and unable to report on the truth, if protest is suppressed, even moderately, at universities,
17:29if lawyers start giving cover instead of uncovering corruption and illegality in the regime,
17:34if companies start being mouthpieces for the regime as a price of doing business,
17:40if all that happens, then we are not a real democracy anymore.
17:44We are a fake democracy.
17:46Elections still happen, like in Turkey, like in Hungary, like in Venezuela,
17:50but the rules are going to be tilted and dissent will be suppressed so much that the same side, Trump's side, wins over and over and over.
18:00And this should matter not just to Democrats, not just to members of the minority party.
18:05This should matter to Republicans as well.
18:08We swear an oath to uphold the Constitution.
18:11And it is time for us to see the game that is being played.
18:15The good news is that the rules have not been fully rigged yet.
18:19There is still time, not loads of it, but there is still time for this body
18:23to set a tone that causes the kind of massive public outrage necessary to stop this campaign of destruction in its tracks.
18:33But that requires those of us who believe that the threat to democracy is urgent to act like it.
18:38That means saying to our Republican colleagues that we're not going to act like business as usual,
18:43that we're not going to proceed to legislation unless we have agreement, Republicans and Democrats,
18:47to stop this assault on free speech and dissent.
18:50It requires the minority party to say that right now.
18:57Only if we come together are we going to have a chance to save ourselves from the fate that has befallen so many other countries
19:05that have slowly, too quietly, seen their countries transition from real democracy to fake democracy.
19:13I'll yield the floor.
19:14Clerk will call the roll.
19:20Clerk will call the roll.
19:20So, let's go.