It's the Brian Laird Show. I'm WNYC. Good morning, everyone. Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy is with us.

Since the election last November, he's been perhaps the leading voice among Democrats in sounding

the alarm about authoritarianism.

He's concerned not just about the eventual, but the imminent end of democracy as we know it.

But he's also been a leading critic of his own party in some significant ways.

He joins us now to talk about those things and some breaking issues in the headlines today.

Senator, we always appreciate when you come on with us. We counted 13 times since you first started

running for the Senate in 2012. Welcome back to WNYC. 13 times. It wasn't great to be with you. Thanks for

having me back. Always enjoy it.

Lucky 13.

So you have said, quote, we have months, not a year before our democracy is rendered so damaged such that it can't be repaired.

Unquote.

That's quite a doomsday scenario.

Why only months in your view and what is so damage that it can't be repaired look like?

Well, first of all, that's not inevitable.

I think Trump is waging a very purposeful, very planned, coordinated assault on our democracy.

His goal is to rig the elections so that even if his approval ratings are

mired in the 30s, the opposition party doesn't have enough strength or oxygen to be able

to ever win. That's actually a pretty familiar state of affairs in quasi-democracies. That's

what happens in places like Turkey and Hungary, many other places that have elections.

The opposition party maybe wins at the local level but can never really win at the

national level because the rules are just tilted towards the regime.

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