Chris Murphy's Paranoiac Visions (aka TDS)

Salvador Dali, "Paranoia (Surrealist Figures)" (1944)

Byron York, "For one leading Democrat, Trump paranoia, Musk paranoia, and Putin paranoia merge into one"

FOR ONE LEADING DEMOCRAT, TRUMP PARANOIA, MUSK PARANOIA, AND PUTIN PARANOIA MERGE INTO ONE. Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy is one of the Democrats urging his party to resist President Donald Trump more aggressively across a broad range of issues. “Mr. Murphy has seemed to be everywhere, all at once, since Inauguration Day,” the New York Times recently wrote, “staging a loud and constant resistance to Mr. Trump at a time when Democrats are struggling to figure out how to respond to him.”

Murphy has exhibited the usual Resistance obsessions, focusing furiously on Trump, Department of Government Efficiency head Elon Musk, and Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. And now, as he devotes his energy to trying to stop the president’s effort to bring peace to Ukraine, Murphy has combined all those fixations into a sort of grand unified theory of Trump — what he calls the “bigger story.”

Murphy explained the theory in an appearance on CNN on Sunday. Trump and Musk, he said, are scheming with Putin to “transition America into a kleptocratic oligarchy” to “steal our data, to steal our Medicare, to steal our Medicaid.” Huh? Here’s the complete quote, beginning with Murphy’s assessment of the contentious Oval Office meeting between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky:

The entire pretext for that meeting was an attempt to rewrite history in order to sign a deal with Putin that hands Putin Ukraine. That is disastrous for U.S. national security. That means that China will be on the march. Putin may not stop. America may be at war with a nuclear power. And for what? For what? It appears as if America is trying to align itself with dictators, that Donald Trump wants us to have our closest relationships with despots all around the world, because that makes it easier for him to transition America into a kleptocratic oligarchy, where Elon Musk and Donald Trump rule and steal from the American people. If we were allied with democracies, that would be harder. But if the United States’s closest partner is Russia, then it makes it a lot easier for Donald Trump, Elon, and their billionaire pals to steal from the American people, to steal our data, to steal our Medicare, to steal our Medicaid in order to enrich themselves.

Can’t you see it? It all fits together if you just look at it the right way. When Murphy finished, the CNN host, Dana Bash, diplomatically said, “There was a lot there.”

Without any psychiatric training, it would be unfair to suggest the senator exhibited some signs of particularly fevered thinking, of, say, apophenia, the phenomenon by which “a person inclined to believe conspiracies may tie together unrelated information and events, weaving together a narrative that is in line with what they perceive as truth,” as described by Psychology Today. But it does appear that Murphy believes he has discovered a pattern of relationships between things, such as Medicaid and Ukraine, that are not in fact related. You might not see it, but Murphy does. Maybe it would be OK to say he appears to suffer from political apophenia. (Just to be clear, hopefully, most people can agree that, for example, long-standing efforts to curb the skyrocketing costs of Medicare and Medicaid are not a Kremlin plot.)

How many Democrats share Murphy’s views? It’s not clear. But it is clear that if Murphy plays a leading role in his party’s response to Trump, Democrats will fall into the same Russia mania that characterized the Resistance in Trump’s first term in office. “The White House has become an arm of the Kremlin,” Murphy declared on CNN. “Every single day, you hear from the national security adviser, from the president of the United States, from his entire security team, Kremlin talking points.” How is the president to negotiate an end to the Ukraine war with domestic opposition like that?

There was a moment in the Oval Office meeting when a reporter asked Trump what his message was for Europeans who worry “that you align yourself too much with Putin.” Trump responded, “Well, if I didn’t align myself with both of them, you’d never have a deal. You want me to say really terrible things about Putin and then say, ‘Hi Vladimir, how are you doing on the deal?’ It doesn’t work that way. I’m not aligned with Putin. I’m not aligned with anybody. I’m aligned with the United States of America.”

Trump won the presidency by pledging to pursue American interests above other interests. What he said in the meeting with Zelensky was a concise restatement of his campaign theme. After the blowup, someone posted words to the effect, “What did y’all think America First meant?” It meant what the world saw in the Oval Office.

What Murphy seems unable to understand is that the Trump plan could well be the best path forward for Ukraine, which is in a terrible position after being invaded by Russia, is now in its fourth year of war, and is totally dependent on outside aid. Just two days before the Zelensky meeting, Trump told reporters, “I’ve had very good conversations with President Putin. I’ve had very good conversations with President Zelensky. And until four weeks ago, nobody had conversations with anybody. It wasn’t even a consideration. Nobody thought you could make peace. I think you can.”

Then, a reporter asked, “But if Mr. Putin gets to keep the land that was claimed by force, if the Russians get to keep the territory that they claimed by force, doesn’t that send a dangerous message to China about Taiwan?”

“You try and take it away, right?” Trump said to laughter around the room. “We’re going to do the best we can. We’re going to do the best we can to make the best deal we can for both sides. But for Ukraine, we’re going to try very hard to make a good deal so that they can get as much back as possible. We want to get as much back as possible.”

Analyst Michael Lind recently wrote that Trump’s response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine fits into a long tradition of American presidents, from Lincoln to Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Eisenhower to Johnson and beyond, dealing with wars and aggression around the world. Perhaps there are good reasons to oppose Trump’s Ukraine strategy, Lind wrote, “but to be consistent, moralists who invoke American ideals ought to condemn FDR and Churchill for agreeing to a Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe that lasted half a century after 1945. And they must condemn Eisenhower and Johnson for failing to take significant action to punish the Soviet Union from crushing democratic rebellions in East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956, and Czechoslovakia in 1968. … American statesmen in every generation usually are guided by considerations of the national interest in their dealings with other major powers, including those whose internal regimes are repugnant to American principles.”

“I’m not aligned with anybody. I’m aligned with the United States of America,” Trump said. The point is Trump’s plan, or at least what we know about it, is a reasonable way to approach a terrible problem in Ukraine. It is not a Russian conspiracy. If the political opposition were able to judge it on its own terms rather than hysterically hypothesizing about Kremlin talking points — and it is not clear that Murphy would ever be able to do that — they might see it as possibly the best way out of a bad situation.

Salvador Dali, "Paranoia" (1935)