[W]eeks into President Donald Trump’s second administration, Murphy, D-Conn., has taken steps to put himself at the center of aggressive resistance to Trump — and to let his party’s rank and file know it. Murphy is spending heavily to advertise on social media platforms and is flooding the zone on television and podcasts, positioning himself as the tip of the spear of Democratic Party efforts to oppose Trump in Washington.
… In an interview in his Capitol Hill office last week, Murphy embraced the idea that he’s on a new path “after years pursuing a role as a Senate dealmaker and “foreign policy expert”. [HAHAHAHAH] He argued his newfound push to oppose Trump is an imperative.
[He has] spent more than $1 million on ads on Meta platforms in February alone, delivering his message directly to individuals. It’s more than he has spent on the likes of Facebook and Instagram in the last five years combined, a period that includes his 2024 re-election campaign … Murphy’s aides said he has doubled his Instagram following during the last two months and seen a significant increase in engagement across platforms.
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But he’s not focused exclusively on Trump. Murphy also wants to lead the conversation about what has gone wrong for Democrats and how they can win again in the future.
“We’re actually the party of change, the party of transferring power from powerful people to people who have no power,” he said. “I think that the traditional sort of political rules still apply. If we have people out on the streets protesting, if we’re overwhelming Republican town halls, if we’re lighting up the phone lines here, political gravity still exists.”
Murphy just won re-election in the fall — and outperformed former Vice President Kamala Harris in his state with a 19-point victory, having vastly outspent his Republican challenger. He won’t have to face Connecticut voters again until 2030, so he’s not crunched for time to raise cash. First elected to the Senate in 2012, the year of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, which killed 20 first graders and six educators in Newtown, Connecticut, Murphy spent his first two terms in the Senate championing stronger gun laws. He eventually helped craft a historic bipartisan gun safety bill that President Joe Biden signed after the 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. [And that solved that problem — whew!]
Now, Murphy told NBC News, the reason it seems like he’s trying to be everywhere is that he is.
And of course, the NYT has to ring the bell for him, because that’s what the media branch does for its fellow travelers.