Tackling Trump’s corruption

0:00Astead Herndon:Adobe Acrobat, your new foundation. Use PDF spaces to generate a presentation. Grab your docs, your permits, your moves. AI levels up your pitch, gets it in a groove. Choose a template with your timeless cool. Come on now, let's flex those tools. Drive, design, deliver, make it sing. AI builds the deck so you can build that thing. Do that, do that, do that with Acrobat. Learn more at adobe.com slash do that with Acrobat. So, here's the thing about Donald Trump's blatant, sometimes open corruption. If it's happening out in front of us, if it's largely been accepted by the public and seemingly the courts, is it even fair to call it corruption at all?

0:44Astead Herndon:That was my first question to Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy at a recent forum about corporate monopolies and corruption held by the American Economic Liberties Project in Washington, D.C. That's this week on Today Explained Saturday. Let's dig in.

1:07Astead Herndon:Thank you to the American Economic Liberties Project. Obviously, thank you to Senator Murphy for being here. And thank you to you all, too, for being interested in this topic. You know, when I think about corruption, particularly this bending the knee kind of framework, one thing that comes in, one thing that immediately jumps to mind for me is that, you know, when we think about the Trump administration, this isn't happening in backroom deals. This isn't happening in some secret basement. A lot of these things are happening right in front of us. So I guess my first question was, is corruption the right word to even use when it's been broadly sanctioned by legal and governmental entities?

1:42Chris Murphy:Well, that's a good question to start with. I guess I haven't really thought about it. I think corruption is still a word that resonates. I think people understand that corruption is a bad thing, that it is something that we have broadly tried to expunge from our politics. And I do think that people generally understand corruption, though, to be something that happens quietly behind closed doors. Corruption is something you try to hide. And so I do think the most important piece of this moment in some ways is trying to understand what to do with the brazen public way that Trump is engaging in corruption.

2:24Chris Murphy:Because simply by the very fact that he does it every day, that he does it openly, publicly, and proudly, it is causing some people to question, wait, wait, is this corruption? Because this isn't what I learned corruption is. There's no shame in this. And generally, there's supposed to be shame in corruption. But I don't necessarily know it means you change the word. And I guess as I'm literally just thinking out loud, if you change the word, you're kind of ceding to his terms, right? He's trying to change the very notion of corruption by doing it publicly. And so if you call it something different, then I think you're probably playing his game.

3:04Astead Herndon:You know, your corporate pardons report documents over 160 companies that have had federal enforcement actions dropped. But as we know, corporate influence has been true in Washington for a long time. You know, how do you think this is a qualitatively different moment than the usual pay to play or the usual lobbying influence that we've seen?

3:23Chris Murphy:Yeah, it's just so nakedly transactional right now. And it's just a really easy story to explain, whether it's the donations that Boeing made that got them out of their trouble, whether it's the Toyota donations, whether it's the money that Zelle pumped into the administration. You know, it now doesn't happen through slowly putting money into the political system, slowly building up connections. It's literally just a million dollars for a corporate pardon. And that now happens, you know, within weeks or months. It's put Eric Trump on your board. The lawsuit or the enforcement action is dropped, right?

4:06Chris Murphy:It's just so nakedly quick and transactional that it's hard to hide. And again, it's that same problem. It's so public. It's so transactional that to some people, it doesn't look like they're, you know, bread and butter of corruption. But the story is just a lot easier to tell. It doesn't make it any less forgivable. The slow sort of building of influence in Democratic and Republican administrations is still unacceptable. But in some ways, the way they're doing it makes it easy for us to explain.

4:42Astead Herndon:What do you think is the impact of that kind of flagrant degradation of the process or just doing it out in the open? I mean, we've established kind of how different this moment feels in this in-your-face nature of it. Does that have a democracy corroding impact? Like, what do you think is the consequence of its being in our face in this way?

5:02Chris Murphy:Yes. Listen, Trump takes over at a moment when a lot of Americans were seriously contemplating giving up on democracy. Right. And while that conversation may not be sort of on the surface of kitchen table talks in our country, it's right below the surface. People just don't think that their voice matters any longer. They, for a long time, have believed that the elites get whatever they want out of the system. And the way in which Trump has chosen to do this so transparently, I think, is an effort to permanently shatter people's faith in the entire enterprise, so as to transition the country to a kleptocratic oligarchy.

5:49Chris Murphy:And so, yes, I think this is a particularly vulnerable moment for the country in which a lot of Americans are unfortunately ready to just say, fuck it. Like this thing doesn't work any longer. It now clearly doesn't work because we have an elected president who is just stealing from us. I'm just going to walk away from the whole enterprise. And when people give up, right, when people just retreat from public action, that's the moment that the oligarchs seize power and never give it up. So, yes, the reason that I have been sort of raising the unacceptability of the corruption, right, raising for people the fact that it is abnormal, that we should not normalize it, is because I think Trump's core case here is in and is if he is successful in normalizing it, it may be the death blow to people's faith in the entire democratic enterprise.

6:50Astead Herndon:More from Senator Chris Murphy in a minute.

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7:55Astead Herndon:We're back. It's Today Explained Saturday, and we're talking with Senator Chris Murphy. As you mentioned, I've kind of explicit examples. Donald Trump Jr. is a strategic advisor at Market Couchy. He's joined the board of another prediction market. Your Bets Off Act targets prediction markets banning bets on government actions, war, assassination. But as we know, this kind of insider trading isn't a bug of these kind of things. It's a feature. And these companies have kind of built it into the cost. Has the trade left the station on these prediction markets? Is there a way to rein them in as your BetSof Act tries to do?

8:31Chris Murphy:No, it definitely hasn't left the station. And you're right. I mean, these prediction markets are designed to make insiders and powerful people filthy rich. So what the Bets Off Act essentially does is say anytime – first of all, you can't bet on government action, right? Just period, stop, right? Nobody should be able to make money off of war or famine. You can't bet on government action. But second, you also can't bet on an event where there is one person who controls and knows the outcome. because in almost every case where those bets are offered, you know, bets as benign as what a celebrity is going to say on the Jimmy Fallon show that night, the bet is controlled by a powerful person, meaning the powerful person and anyone who surrounds the powerful person knows the outcome of the bet, can place wagers that they know will make money on the bet.

9:28Chris Murphy:It's rigged and only and always rigged in favor of the rich and the powerful. So the prediction market game is really all about bets where powerful people know the outcome and can profit. And that's why Eric Trump and Donald Trump are deeply integrated into these industries because they and their friends are the ones that profit. They are the ones very likely that placed those bets on Friday before the Iran war started that the war was going to start 24 hours later. And they see an infinite amount of enrichment that comes from these markets. Now, here's where, your question is an interesting one, right?

10:09Chris Murphy:And I literally got it two or three times yesterday. Is it too late? And of course it's not too late, but people - I feel kind of baked into the culture, baked in the - Yeah, but it doesn't, but people are beginning to smell how corrupt these markets are. Like a lot of people do know what happened with those Iraq war bets. And here's where I just think the Democratic Party perpetually suffers from lack of imagination, right? So we should say that if you elect us, we are going to take all these corrupt prediction markets down. Now, whether we can or not, right, that's a question of the politics of the moment.

10:51Chris Murphy:But we should promise that we are going to eliminate corrupt prediction markets the minute you elect us, just like we should be saying to the broader case of the work that this organization does. If Democrats are elected, we are going to break up all these big, corrupt, monopolistic media companies that have been constructed under Donald Trump's regime. We should just say, like, OK, Paramount, enjoy this well you have it, because as soon as we get elected, we're going to break you into pieces. Right. And people would respond to that boldness of vision when it comes to antitrust. And I think they would respond to that boldness of vision when it comes to the most corrupt new ways that people in and around the president are profiting, like the prediction markets.

11:37Astead Herndon:And people would definitely respond. I guess my question is, there is some form of a conflation between the overcorruption we were talking about in the beginning and something like corporate consolidation. Or do you see those as kind of a one in the same when we're talking about these monopolistic media companies?

11:52Chris Murphy:Yeah, it's all part of the same story. The only way that Paramount Skydance gets to be as big and as corrupt and as manipulative as it is is because of corruptions, because of an underlying deal that is done between the Ellison family and the Trump family. I mean, Hegseth literally says it on stage, right? I can't wait until my friends, the Ellisons, get control of CNN because then you'll stop telling the truth about the war. The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better. Like that's literally what he says on stage is that I don't like the criticism that we're getting, but it's cool because pretty soon my buddies will be in charge of the storytelling.

12:39Chris Murphy:So, no, it's all part of one story. And again, back to how you message this. Yes, I understand that it's a hard thing to break up that corrupt consolidation. Yes, I understand that by the time we get control of things here, the prediction markets will be even more mature. But by stating what you are going to do, you can actually bend reality, right? By being bold in your claims about what you will do with power, people start signing up for the project. Not just people out in the public, but members of Congress start signing up for the project the bolder it is. So, yes, those are hard things to unwind, but they become less hard if you state very clearly at the outset about what your intentions are.

13:32Astead Herndon:To this point, you signed a memo with Senators Schiff, Warren, and Smith that argues the Democrats can't run on affordability without naming the corporations and the billionaires driving the crisis. I guess I wanted to ask about that with the context of what the Democratic Party's history has been in mind. You know, there's close relationships between the Democratic Party and some of these, let's say, Silicon Valley money or tech money. There's close relationships between Democrats and folks in big law. Are those relationships an impediment for Democrats doing that clear naming and shaming that you're talking about?

14:05Astead Herndon:Absolutely.

14:06Chris Murphy:I mean, like, absolutely. So what did we do last year? We passed a bill essentially greenlighting the massive expansion of the crypto industry and corruption inside the crypto industry with Democratic votes. The Stablecoin Act, the Genius Act, which has like a modicum of consumer protections, literally has in it a carve out from ethics rules for the president of the United States to be able to issue his own cryptocurrency. Like, that's incredible that the Democratic Party signed off on a crypto regulatory bill that greenlights Donald Trump's corruption scheme. There's no explanation for why we did that other than the integration of parts of our party and very powerful people in the crypto industry.

15:06Chris Murphy:Or maybe more charitably, our fear that the crypto industry is going to spend a ton of money against Democrats in the next election if we don't do what they want. But that's, you know, just a slightly more acceptable form of corruption, right? Just the I'm going to do what you want because I fear that there's going to be political consequences in the next election. So, yeah, the memo that Adam and Elizabeth and Tina and I sent says very simply, you're not going to win over the public unless you tell a story about corporate and billionaire corruption. Because people are smarter than a lot of us think they are.

15:48Chris Murphy:People understand that the corruption of the economy, right, their stagnation in their economic lives is derivative, is downstream of the corruption of our politics. Like they get that. And if you don't tell that full story, the influence that the corporations and the billionaires have in our politics and how that has limited your economic opportunities, your message is just not believable. If you just like start with, let's trim the sales of the way that the pharmaceutical companies price drugs. It's like you're not telling me the whole story. Like the real story is that we got into this mess with prescription drug prices that are so high because our politics is corrupt.

16:33Chris Murphy:And the prescription drug companies have way too much control over Washington. So don't just tell me your plan for lowering prescription drug costs. Tell me your plan for knocking out the prescription drug industry's power in Washington.

16:47Astead Herndon:Like, I need to know both things. I mean, that really rings true from, you know, even my some experience on the road. I mean, oftentimes leading up to 2024, things like corporate capture or corporate consolidation were things I heard even more Trump supporters or RFK supporters sometimes talking about and not necessarily coming from Democrats. What took so long to name this, to name something that feels like it's been in the populist air for a while?

17:14Chris Murphy:I mean, listen, I think inside the Democratic Party, there is an enormous hangover from Barack Obama. And I mean this, I'm going to do this in a complimentary way to Obama, right? So Obama lifted our party, right, into power. And we did really important things with him. He did not use this frame for the world, right? A frame of corporate capture and an agenda of release from that capture. He was more technocratic, right? More market-based in his reforms. And we got away with that as a Democratic Party because of the unique talent of Barack Obama as a messenger. He was just somebody that we were never going to reproduce in our party as someone who just made folks feel better about government because he was in charge.

18:13Chris Murphy:And what it exposed, though, in his absence is a lack of a narrative that the Democratic Party tells about who has power, who doesn't have power, and how we're going to fix that. And so I do think our reliance on Barack Obama as kind of a savior for the party's messaging exposed us as not having a coherent underlying message when we didn't have a uniquely talented political figure at the top.

18:42Astead Herndon:Makes sense. I'm going to end on a question about people's own kind of emotions in this moment. I think the scope of Trump's corruption can feel disempowering. The administration seems immune to public opinion at many times, undeterred by legal and kind of institutional restraints. And it feels like, you know, we're kind of strapped in the beginning of a roller coaster that, you know, you don't know where it ends. Is that true? Like, do we have our constraints coming? Is moderation coming? Or is it just a matter of like, you know, fingers crossed?

19:12Chris Murphy:Yeah, I think it's – again, I think it's only coming if the Democratic Party, as we head into this election, the 2020 election, makes the unrigging of our democracy a tentpole for our party's messaging, right? If it's up to me, our party's message is unrigging the democracy, unrigging the economy, kind of period stop, right? And if you're, like, signed up for those two projects, and we got to fill out what that means to unrig the democracy, it probably means that we're running on a constitutional amendment to get dark money and billionaire money and anonymous money completely out of politics. But, like, people are up for that.

19:52Chris Murphy:And I guess I'll end here because you are right that people are feeling super discouraged and super powerless right now. And so we as a party have to sort of start our analysis of what this moment needs through a diagnosis of the way that people are feeling. And people are feeling like they have no agency, like they have no control. So both our economic and political messaging has to be about returning control to human beings and explaining to them, as we've talked about a few times, that it goes both ways. the corruption of our economy is downstream of the corruption of our democracy. But also, and I'll try to say this the right way to end, the corruption of our democracy is also downstream of the corruption of our economy in this way.

20:44When our economy is an economy that only cares

20:48Chris Murphy:about profit and efficiency, it's a virtuous economy. It's an economy where morality doesn't matter, where the health of workers or the health of communities is just irrelevant to economic decision-making. It becomes this just winner-take-all economy in which the folks who do well just grab it all. And we've normalized that because we've normalized the idea that sort of shared prosperity is not a value any longer in our economy. Okay, when that becomes normalized inside our economy, it becomes normalized inside our politics too. Our politics becomes winner-take-all politics. So if a CEO is justified in making a thousand times more than the average worker and using his power as CEO to abuse workers in order to enrich himself, and that's okay, then why is it wrong for a president of the United States to use his power to abuse the people under his authority and enrich himself maximally in the same way that a CEO would.

21:58Chris Murphy:So when we normalize zero virtue in our economy, it's really easy to say, well, maybe virtue shouldn't matter in our politics either. And so that's why the project is so big, right? There's cross currents between what has happened in our economy affecting our politics, what's happened in our politics affecting our economy, which is why your willingness to confront this question of corruption in government and in our economy and recognizing how they flow back and forth, I just think is so critical and why I was so glad to help kick this off today.

22:32Astead Herndon:Senator Murphy, thank you for coming. Appreciate it.

22:34Chris Murphy:Thank you.

22:39Astead Herndon:That was Senator Chris Murphy. This episode was produced by Jesse Ash. It was edited by Today Explained executive producer Miranda Kennedy. fact-checked by Andrea Lopez-Cruzado and mixed by Shannon Mahoney. Thanks, as always, to supervising producer David Tattashore and Christina Vallis, our head of video. I'm Estet Herndon, and you'll find me here every Saturday morning. Next week, we're excited to bring you the first episode of our new podcast, America Actually, where we'll be asking the question, what is the U.S. beyond Donald Trump? He's been defining our politics for more than a decade, but we get a clean slate in 2028.