By Michael Woyton
If there was any doubt that the current occupant of the White House was eager during his second term to line not only his pockets but the pockets of many others, that was dispelled when a senator connected the dots, and all of corruption happened in the first six freaking weeks in office!
For almost 30 minutes Thursday, Democratic Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut spoke from the floor of the Senate about President Donald J. Felon’s normalization of pay-to-play politics.
“In the first six weeks of the Trump presidency, Trump and Elon Musk and their billionaire friends have engaged in a stunning rampage of open public corruption,” Murphy said.
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“It’s not fundamentally different than what happened in Russia. These are efforts to steal from the American people to enrich themselves,” he continued. “And their strategy is to do it all out in the open, to do it at such a dizzying pace that the country just gets overwhelmed or anesthetized or dulled into a sense that we just all have to accept the corruption — or, maybe more charitably, that this is just how government works, that government is just corrupt, and so the fact that it’s happening out in the open instead of happening secretly, well, it’s really nothing new.”
Watching the video (below), I was blown away by the number of easily verifiable facts presented by Murphy that all occurred within a matter of days.
To say that the more than 20 examples of corruption perpetrated by the felon-in-chief and his billionaire entourage was overwhelming is a massive understatement.
There are so many things that have happened and are continuing to happen that it is incredibly difficult to keep up with them, much less to remember when they took place.
Murphy did the public a real service by compiling the list, beginning with the launch of a meme coin on Jan. 17 and ending March 4 with Musk’s cancellation of Verizon’s contract with the FAA and substitution of his own company in its place and the gutting of IRS employees who investigate tax evasion.
In between, as outlined by Murphy, were the firing of inspectors general, who were tasked with rooting out corruption; dismantling the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which has saved billions of dollars for Americans who were taken advantage of by large corporations and banks; “pausing” the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which opens the door for foreign officials to offer bribes to American officials, and the cancellation of meetings to formulate a vaccine for the next flu season, which could likely result in deaths.
There is much, much more.
Murphy is not saying that there hasn’t been corruption in other administrations or even in Congress on other sides of the aisle.
“But never before has the corruption happened this openly or this frequently,” he said.
None of this is OK, Murphy said, adding that doing things by the rules still matters.
“This is how democracies die,” he said. “Democracies die when the very powerful people steal from us so regularly, so openly, so unapologetically, that we come to believe that it’s normal.
“And it’s our decision, as a body and as a country, to decide not to normalize this scale of corruption,” Murphy said.
I urge you all to take a few minutes to watch Murphy’s video or read the transcript and share this article or the links with others.
Then call or email your representatives in Congress and ask them what they are going to do about it.
To repeat: It’s not normal.
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Lead art: Screen grab from Sen. Chris Murphy’s YouTube page.
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