from WNYC Studios. I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my daily politics podcast. It's Wednesday, May 14th.

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. So he's doing that.

Trump is doing that work in a number of ways.

He's trying to destroy the ability of the press to tell the true story.

He's trying to own as many of the algorithms as he can on social media feeds.

He's trying to destroy the ability of lawyers to represent people's rights.

He's trying to stop the opposition party

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