Sen Murphy: Trump on a ‘Slippery Slope to Autocracy’

Thursday on MSNBC’s “Power and the Presidency” college forum, while discussing the Trump administration expecting career federal employees to not openly criticize the administration, Sen/ Chris Murphy (D-CT) said, “This is how you get on a slippery slope to autocracy.”

Partial transcript as follows:

MATTHEWS: We’re in Washington. And you’re an elected official from Connecticut, but so many people work in the government here. Parents of these people, people we know in this city are great Americans they work for the government, they are foreign service officers, they probably took an examine in their twenties and have been serving overseas. Speaking on behalf of the president, Kellyanne and Sean Spicer have made it clear they don’t like people in the foreign services speaking their minds in this petition program. Even though they do their job. What’s you’re view?

MURPHY: You can’t get much more dangerous than this, the idea that descent isn’t allowed in government. Now this channel that these civil service employees are using, it’s been long-standing. In fact, lots of people used it to protest inside the department what President Obama was doing. This is how you get on a slippery slope to autocracy. This is how democratic norms start to fade away. When you can only work for an administration, even in civil services position, if you agree with everything they do. That is how administrations make mistakes.  How we got into the Iraq war, how we got thousands killed, wasted billion of dollars is because everybody was telling the President of the United States what he wanted to hear. And a good CEO, if he really is a good executive like he tells everybody, he should have somebody who tells him he is wrong every now and again. Apparently if you don’t agree with President Trump, you have no place in his government. That’s dangerous.

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