Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) argued that Donald Trump is “a symptom of the problem,” not the root cause of America’s political crisis, contending that deeper social, economic, and “spiritual rot” created the conditions for Trumpism. During an appearance on MS NOW’s “The Weekend” to promote his new book, Crisis of the Common Good, Murphy called Trump “one of the best interpreters of the emotional state of America.” “People feel that this country is unspooling spiritually, that there are more lonely people in America than ever before, that it’s harder to wake up with a clear sense of purpose and meaning in your life,” Murphy said. “And that’s because we’ve made a bunch of choices in this country, choices that we made way before Trump showed up on the scene.” “I say in this book that he’s really a symptom of the problem, not the primary problem. That’s a controversial thing to say, but I think it’s true,” the Senator said. “What he’s speaking to is this exhaustion people have with a rabidly consumerist culture in which you’re told that to be a good American, you just have to participate in the market,” Murphy said of Trump. “He was defending his tariffs, which, of course, don’t work. But what he’s saying is that this value, bringing manufacturing jobs back to this country should matter more than just prices. We should care about something other than being an easy consumer or making a profit. And I think that that speaks to something that people are talking about in this country. They want to be called to a higher purpose. They don’t want to just be told, keep your head down, buy stuff and you’ll be happy.”

EUGENE DANIELS, CO-HOST:  Senator Chris Murphy is back with us. His new book, Crisis of the Common Good, dives into the underlying societal ills that led us into the political moment we’re in today. He writes, quote, “America would not have elected a man this corrupt and divisive, a clean break from every president in our lifetimes if something were not badly wrong. Our country would not have sought out such radical untested medicine if the body politic were not deeply sick.” Senator, thank you for sticking around. I want to also read something else from your book about kind of going into 2028 and whether or not beating Trump is enough. “Our mission cannot be merely electoral.” So we mean Democrats here. “It must be spiritual. It is not enough to win the midterm election in 2026 or even to defeat Trump’s chosen successor or Trump himself in 2028. Democrats already ran that play in 2018 and 2020 and it did little to change the societal conditions that make America so fertile for Trumpism. Unless we repair the underlying emptiness in American life and restore belief in the common good, new demagogues will always find an opening.” You have the six cults that America must escape in the book as well. The message, I think, it is one full of hope and I wonder how you think that lands in a country where hope feels like it doesn’t exist anymore. Right before we went to break, you talked about people looking at all politicians as the same, at the political system as being corrupt, period, at power corrupting no matter what. So how do you sell this message to voters that feel the way they feel now?   SEN. CHRIS MURPHY (D-CT):  This book is trying to explore a conversation that’s happening all over this country, right? People feel that this country is unspooling spiritually, that there are more lonely people in America than ever before, that it’s harder to wake up with a clear sense of purpose and meaning in your life. And that’s because we’ve made a bunch of choices in this country, choices that we made way before Trump showed up on the scene. I say in this book that he’s really a symptom of the problem, not the primary problem. That’s a controversial thing to say, but I think it’s true. We’ve created an economy that is valueless, an economy that consolidates all this power at the top and leaves scraps for everybody else. Work doesn’t have dignity. It gets hard to wake up feeling like you have purpose in your work any longer. We’re told that just buying things will make us feel good. If you just upgrade your iPhone or you buy the dress that the influencer has on, that you’ll feel great. Well, citizenship is actually what makes you feel good. You know, joining together with your fellow neighbors to do good things for a community is what makes you feel good. The technology is poisonous. It’s spiraling us into lives of isolation, and we’re not doing anything about it. And so, this book says, listen, there’s a spiritual rot in this country that we have to address. We’ve got to build a common good capitalism, for instance, where we spread the wealth and we spread opportunity. And I think it is important to connect this back to politics, because I want Democrats to think about how people are feeling. And people are feeling powerless in this country. They’re feeling powerless because they put a lot into the economy and they get nothing out. We could choose to change that. But they’re also feeling powerful because our politics are captured by corporations and billionaires. I want us to think about the emotional state of the country. I want us to build policies that make people feel less lonely, more connected, more powerful. And I think, frankly, the right has often done a better job of connecting into the emotional state of the country. Now, they answer that diagnosis with scapegoats, with hatred. We could answer it with constructive policies about how to build more meaning, purpose and connection in people’s lives, how to make them feel more powerful and speak that emotional language in a way that we haven’t for a long time. So, yes, I think a lot of people know that there’s just something rotten in our culture and our economy today. They want a structure to understand it. And this bill, this book sort of gives them that structure and a whole bunch of solutions. JONATHAN CAPEHART, CO-HOST:  Congressman — Senator, I interviewed you at Sixth & I earlier this week. I got my dog-eared copy here. In the book, you talk about President Trump’s comment about how girls don’t need 30 dolls. And you write, “Trump’s initial comments were not a not a gaffe. He was repeating this line of argument for a purpose. Yes, Trump is a corrupt racist would be tyrant. But among modern political figures, he is also regrettably one of the best interpreters of the emotional state of America. I started to wonder if there was a method to his madness.” Real quickly, what was that method? MURPHY:  Yes, that sounded like such a gaffe when he said it. You know, you should buy less dolls for Christmas. But what he’s speaking to is this exhaustion people have with a rabidly consumerist culture in which you’re told that to be a good American, you just have to participate in the market. He was defending his tariffs, which, of course, don’t work. But what he’s saying is that this value, bringing manufacturing jobs back to this country should matter more than just prices. We should care about something other than being an easy consumer or making a profit. And I think that that speaks to something that people are talking about in this country. They want to be called to a higher purpose. They don’t want to just be told, keep your head down, buy stuff and you’ll be happy. I propose in this book, for instance, that every young people should have to do some amount of public service, mandatory public service, so that we’re calling people to serve their community instead of just telling them to go buy cheap stuff at Walmart. People want that calling. They want to feel that there’s something bigger in life than buying things for themselves and their kids. And I think Trump, in a ham-handed way, kind of tapped into that with those comments. ANTHONY COLEY, CO-HOST:  Senator, we have about 30 seconds left. I want to get as much as you can tell. I personally don’t believe that the Democratic Party is fighting back aggressively enough right now on any number of fronts. What’s your take on that? And what more can Democrats be doing right now to push back on all of the things that Donald Trump is doing to our country? MURPHY:  Yes, I just think that when you live in a world where the party in charge is destroying all the norms and all the institutions, you can’t hold fast to those norms and institutions. And so tt that’s why we started changing districts in blue states when they started changing districts in red states. It’s why I’ve been disappointed sometimes in the Senate that we haven’t fought harder for our values when it comes to giving our votes for these budgets. So yes, we’ve got to employ tactics that make us a little uncomfortable in order to save our democracy, because if we’re standing by norms while they’re breaking them, well, that’s the recipe for disaster. CAPEHART:  The name of the book is Crisis of the Common Good, The Fight for Meaning and Connection in a Broken America. Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, thank you very much for coming to The Weekend. See, here it is. It’s actually, it’s a really good book.

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