And now, here’s John and Sen. Murphy…

Chris Murphy, the junior senator from Connecticut, has made no secret of the fact that he’s mulling a presidential bid in 2028—and in traditional fashion, he’s got a new book out as a possible prelude. But whereas most tomes in this genre tend toward the soporific and self-serving, Murphy’s Crisis of the Common Good defies the rules of senatorial publishing in that it’s actually pretty damn good. It’s not a policy tract or meandering memoir, but instead tries to grapple with the larger issues that make this moment in our national life so fraught: how capitalism has gone awry, how technology is messing with our culture, how so many people feel lost and unmoored.

At bottom, the book is about the crisis of meaning in our public life, and it’s all the better for not proposing quick fixes. Plus, its publication allowed me the opportunity to talk to Murphy for my Impolitic podcast about its themes as well as the more headline-driving stuff: Donald Trump’s war in Iran and the nightmare of finding a way out, the blatant corruption that’s marked the president’s return to office, and the extraordinary spate of Trump’s stock trades that came to light last week. As always, this conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity, but you can listen to the whole thing here.

John Heilemann: On Friday, Trump was supposedly considering a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and extend the ceasefire to begin negotiating on the nuclear issue. The Iranians have since said they’ve suspended negotiations with the U.S., though Trump says talks are continuing “at a rapid pace.” If the purported deal does get done in the end, what’s your take?

Chris Murphy: First of all, we have no idea whether a deal even exists. They’ve been telling us that they’re on the precipice of a deal for 30 days, and this might all be total fiction, and there is no agreement—or they’re going to do what [Trump] often does, which is announce a diplomatic agreement that doesn’t exist in principle and on paper. So let’s just admit that this whole thing might be a fiction. Here’s my analysis: Whatever the deal is, he should sign it, because the deal is not going to get better, it’s going to get worse.

The war is a disaster for the United States. Every single day it goes on, we get more humiliated, we get weaker, our economy gets worse, and Iran gets stronger. So, the terms of this deal are likely bad, but continuing this war for an additional day is worse. We basically fought this whole war to beg them to get back to the place we were before the war, when the strait was open. We haven’t done anything really about their military capabilities: They still have 70 percent of their missiles, they still have a full nuclear program. We spent $25 billion, over a dozen Americans got killed, we humiliated ourselves all around the globe, and we got nothing out of it. It’s just the most incompetent management of American national security in probably our lifetime.

Even if there was a deal tomorrow, it will take months before you get back to a normal supply chain, and we’re going to have high prices all the way through the midterms. The political consequences seem pretty dire for Republicans. They’ve missed the window here for a deal that will save their bacon on this front.

If you believe that the political consequences are downstream of the economic misery, then I would actually argue that it’s not totally baked, because even if the war ends, the economic consequences are likely to get worse before they get better. Why is that? Because so much of the supply chains that have relied on products coming out of the Middle East—not just petroleum, but helium, for instance—have been badly damaged. So you saw a big increase in grocery prices in April—the biggest in years, in one month.

Those increases are likely to continue through the summer and the fall, and you’re going to see all sorts of other things, from medical devices to fabrics that need that petroleum, putting price increases in as we go through the rest of the year. It wasn’t an immediate shock to those systems, because they had contracts that were still good. I think the price impact of this gets worse, even if the war ends, and thus the political impact on Republicans probably gets worse. It doesn’t just stand still.

Trump has dropped plans for a $1.8 billion slush fund for supposed victims of Biden-era “lawfare,” including convicted insurrectionists. Granted he did this under pressure, but that fund was just one of many examples of something you’ve been talking about lately: the extraordinary level of corruption that we’ve seen so far in Trump 2.0, from the crypto scams and the memecoins to the White House ballroom. Have we reached a tipping point where this corruption issue is finally breaking through with ordinary voters?

I spent a lot of time talking about his corruption last year, because I did worry that people were becoming anesthetized to it, and I wasn’t hearing that kind of daily outrage. I’m hearing a lot more today—still not as much volume as I’d like. That’s probably happening for two reasons. One is, there is likely a tipping-point phenomenon where the sheer weight of it now has become unavoidable, and the last few scandals have been, frankly, easier to understand as pure corruption than some of the earlier ones. I’m not sure everybody understood how the crypto scheme worked, but they definitely understand grabbing $1.8 billion out of the Treasury and using it to pay cop beaters.

I think the other thing that’s happening is that the economy is going off the cliff. He got away, for the first year, by saying, “This is Biden’s economy, I didn’t do this.” Well, everybody knows that the gas prices and the grocery prices are now directly connected to his policies. So that makes the corruption even harder to bear and understand, because my life is getting worse, your life is definitely getting better, and you seem to be spending all of your time enriching yourself instead of ending the war.

To stick with this corruption issue, Trump bought between $1 million and $5 million worth of Dell stock back in February. Last Wednesday, the D.O.D. announced a $10 billion deal with Dell Federal Systems—and Dell stock soared 40 percent in after-hours trading, putting a ton of money directly in Trump’s pocket. And it turns out that’s not an anomaly: Trump made 3,711 stock trades worth between $220 million and $750 million in the first quarter of this year alone—40 trades per market day on average. He bought stock in Nvidia, Apple, and Oracle, all of which skyrocketed after things happened that Trump either knew about or the government did. Are these stories breaking through, or do people just shrug and say the whole system is rotten?

There’s definitely a storyline here about people already pricing in his corruption. I just think we have to admit that. But people priced in his corruption and were willing to live with that because they really did think he was going to cause a revolution in the way power works in our democracy, in our economy. So these stories matter, because what you see is him getting deeply in bed with the companies that you thought he was going to take on. So it flips on its head people’s conception of him, and frankly, the reason that they were willing to live with his lack of general morals and ethics.

We have to do a better job of telling the easy-to-understand stories. Nvidia is really easy to understand. Nobody knew, other than him and a handful of people, that he was about to allow Nvidia to sell these microchips to China, which was going to dramatically inflate their value. Days before he announces this, he personally—remember, he signs all these trades, this is not a blind trust—buys a bunch of Nvidia stock and makes a shitload of money. We have to tell those simple stories to people. But it does upset the entire conception of why people originally were willing to live with his moral lapses. He’s not doing any of the good stuff you thought you were gonna get.

Reading your book put me in mind of Jimmy Carter’s 1979 “Malaise” speech—his warning about a crisis of confidence, a growing disrespect for institutions, a nation that had turned away from community and toward self-indulgence and consumption. The themes in your book are very similar, and I guess we didn’t really heed that warning 50 years ago.

Arguably, we made a decision in 1980 to double down—we elected a president who essentially concretized this turn away from communitarianism and toward market fundamentalism. It’s in the 1980s that this idea really built into our mainstream—that our economy should measure worth only by how much profit companies make. It’s during that time that the institutions start to fail even more deeply. It is eerie that a lot of the things Carter is talking about in that speech are things I’m talking about today. Arguably it’s two to three times as bad today.

But this book is intended to be both a warning and a reminder that our politics aren’t as permanently cast in political gelatin as you may think. Right and left aren’t going to agree anytime soon on guns and abortion and climate, but on the things necessary to create a softer capitalism that cares more about the common good, to regulate the technologies that are spiraling us into isolation, and to help people lead lives of citizenship rather than just lives of participation in the market—I actually think there’s a lot more opportunity for alignment than people believe. Maybe not until Trump is gone, but there’s some hope.

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