President-elect Donald Trump’s choice of Pete Hegseth, a Fox News host and former National Guard soldier, for secretary of defense is being met with disbelief and outrage among members of Congress and former military officers.

If confirmed, he would be the least experienced defense secretary in the history of the republic, going back to Henry Knox, the first secretary of war who was a key officer in Washington’s army. Those who rise to that post often come from Capitol Hill, industry or the highest ranks of the officer corps.

He served in Iraq and Afghanistan and left the Army National Guard as a major in 2021. Beyond his inexperience, Trump’s selection of Hegseth has also renewed scrutiny of his political and religious views, his advocacy for soldiers accused of war crimes, and his aggressive criticism of the military he would be leading. Many people with experience in defense and foreign policy fear that, if confirmed, Hegseth would politicize the officer corps.

Reaction to the news was swift and cutting. One former senior military official said that the only qualifying quality for Hegseth seemed to be loyalty to Trump, and that the pick was embarrassing, although the language used was more colorful. Another official on the Hill said he had to Google Hegseth’s name.

“The job of Secretary of Defense should not be an entry-level position, and I question President-elect Trump’s choice of a television news host to take on this immensely important role,” House Armed Services Committee Ranking Member Adam Smith, D-Wash., said in a statement. “While I respect and admire Mr. Hegseth’s military service, I am concerned about his inexperience given the security challenges we face around the world.”

Still, others approved of the choice. Republican Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi, who will chair the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he was “delighted at the prospect” of working with Hegseth.

Trump praised Hegseth as “tough, smart and a true believer in America First” in a statement announcing his pick. “Our military will be great again, and America will never back down.”

Hegseth did not respond to NPR’s request for an interview.

The war on ‘woke’

Hegseth and other conservatives have long complained the military cares more about diversity and equity than meritocracy and preparing for war, though there is scant evidence to back up those claims.

“The dumbest phrase on planet Earth in the military is ‘our diversity is our strength,'” Hegseth said in a recent appearance on “the Shawn Ryan Show” podcast.

Hegseth has vowed to undo the military’s diversity programs, saying that they have reduced the force’s readiness.

Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images

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Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images

He went on to laud the integration of the military in 1948, saying it allowed Blacks and Hispanics to serve along “white guys.” Echoing a familiar theme in right-wing circles, he said an obsession with diversity, equity and inclusion, including transgender rights, has eroded military values. He also decried the role of women in combat.

“I’m straight up just saying, we should not have women in combat roles,” Hegseth said on that same podcast. “It hasn’t made us more effective, hasn’t made us more lethal, has made fighting more complicated.”

Claims that the military is succumbing to pressure from social justice activists has long been a mantra on the right and within the military itself. Many in the Marine Corps were long against gays and lesbians serving openly and also opposed women serving in combat.

There is scant indication that any changes in the ranks have fundamentally disrupted the military but there are always complaints, particularly amongst the military old guard.

Hegseth has also spoken forcefully against the military’s efforts to address domestic extremism, which he labeled a “purge.” In the podcast interview, he said he had been removed from National Guard duty at President Joe Biden’s inauguration because he had been “deemed an extremist” by his leadership due to a tattoo on his chest.

A fixation on ‘Crusade’

According to Hegseth’s account, the tattoo in question was identified by his superiors as “white nationalist.” In fact, the symbol — a large cross with four smaller ones in the corners — is a Christian one known as the Jerusalem Cross. It is one of at least two tattoos that Hegseth sports whose origins date back to the Crusades, when Christians defeated Muslims to take the Holy Land.

Hegseth has said that the tattoo is simply a symbol of Christianity. Nonetheless, some far-right extremists have co-opted Crusade symbols. And according to some scholars, they are more precisely correlated with Islamophobia.

Hegseth speaks onstage during the 2023 FOX Nation Patriot Awards at The Grand Ole Opry on Nov. 16, 2023 in Nashville, Tenn.

Terry Wyatt/Getty Images

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Terry Wyatt/Getty Images

“They are far-right Christian symbols that signal a very, very deep antipathy towards Islam,” said Matthew Taylor, senior scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies in Baltimore. “[Hegseth] literally wrote a book called ‘The American Crusade,’ drawing parallels between the Crusades and the present moment in the United States and Europe and pushing back on Muslim immigration to those areas.”

Taylor noted that Hegseth has also spoken about the possibility of reconstructing the so-called “Third Temple” in Jerusalem, a project that would require the destruction of Islam’s third-holiest site. Such an effort would almost certainly trigger a major international war, Taylor said.

“Many far-right Christians have adopted the Crusades as a model, as a template for how they want to remake society for their own kind of militant expressions of Christianity,” he said. “And Hegseth seems very much to be in that current.”

Faith first

Hegseth often highlights his faith as the first concern in his life. On an episode of the “Reformation Redpill” podcast, he said he moved his family to Tennessee in 2022 to be close to a Christian private school for his children, despite the fact that Hegseth is required to be in New York City weekly to host his Fox show.

“He seems to have gravitated … fairly recently, into a circle of pretty extreme Christian theology,” Taylor said. “This is the very militant end of the Christian nationalist spectrum, and it is one of the very active forces theologically in bolstering and endorsing this sort of MAGA Christianity.”

A day after Hegseth was announced for the Cabinet position, Brooks Potteiger, a pastor within the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), posted on X that Hegseth is a member of the church in good standing. The CREC, a denomination of Christian Reconstructionism, is considered by some academics to be an extremist, Christian supremacist movement.

“Their goal is to reestablish biblical law as the standard for society. So when they say they believe that America should be a Christian nation, they actually believe that all nations should be Christian,” said Julie Ingersoll, professor of religious studies at the University of North Florida.

Ingersoll said that others within this movement, such as the author Stephen Wolfe, speak openly of repealing the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote.

“This tradition is deeply patriarchal. Men are in charge, and women exist for the purpose of assisting their men in their exercise of dominion,” Ingersoll said. “Their roles are very limited to home and family. The goal is to have as many children as possible so the women are also otherwise occupied. But they don’t believe that women can or should really even work outside the home.”

Taylor said that recently, this form of Christianity has held particular appeal among some young men: the “theobros.” With the movement’s endorsement of heterosexual male dominance also comes a package of hostilities — toward LGBTQ identities, feminism and liberal democracy.

“They have tended to endorse more solitary and autocratic styles of leaders,” Taylor said. “They are fans of people like Viktor Orban in Hungary or like Vladimir Putin in Russia, because they are these at least de facto Christian monarchs presiding over very illiberal societies.”

What’s ahead for the military

Given his past pronouncements, and those of President-elect Trump, Hegseth is expected to end any diversity programs in the U.S. military, and perhaps retire or replace senior officers he sees as “woke” or who did not get the position through what he sees as merit alone. He has said, again without evidence, that the current Joint Chiefs Chairman General Charles Q. Brown has pursued radical positions from left-wing politicians.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Charles Q. Brown in September 2024. Hegseth says he wants fire Brown if he’s confirmed as defense secretary.

DANIEL ROLAND/AFP via Getty Images/AFP

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DANIEL ROLAND/AFP via Getty Images/AFP

“First of all you gotta fire the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs,” Hegseth said on the Shawn Ryan podcast. “Any general that was involved, general, admiral, whatever, that was involved in any of the DEI woke s***, has got to go. Either you’re in for warfighting and that’s it. That’s the only litmus test we care about.”

But perhaps the most glaring challenge for Hegseth will be running the Pentagon, a sprawling bureaucracy that encompasses 2.3 million troops and civilian workers, with an annual operating budget of some $900 billion.

“We’re talking about someone who is primarily known as a media figure who would be running really one of the largest institutions in the United States, who doesn’t appear to have any sort of managerial experience of that sort, and would be one of the most prominent figures in U.S. politics,” said Nicole Hemmer, a political historian at Vanderbilt University, who has long studied the interplay between media and the conservative movement.

Hegseth will need a strong deputy and an experienced staff given that he’s never run an organization of this size. Regardless, the center of gravity will be at the White House, like it is under the current administration, where Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was never seen as a key player. This means that the incoming national security adviser Michael Waltz will play a central role. Waltz has a lot of experience as a congressman, Green Beret — and as a former Pentagon official.

From Fox News to the Cabinet

Hegseth is far from the first cable news personality to serve in a presidential administration. Fox News in particular has had a “revolving door” into Republican politics in recent years, Hemmer said.

Fox News hosts Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson played informal advisory roles to Trump during his first term in office. This week, Trump tapped Fox contributors Tulsi Gabbard and Tom Homan as director of national intelligence and border czar, respectively, and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who hosted his own show on the network during the Obama administration, as ambassador to Israel.

A 2023 file photo of the New York City building that houses the Fox News studios. The conservative news network has employed many of President-elect Trump’s nominees for his second administration.

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Spencer Platt/Getty Images

But selecting Hegseth for defense secretary “is an entirely new ballgame” given his lack of experience and the scale of the role, Hemmer said.

Hegseth has spent years as a weekend host of the network’s morning news show “Fox & Friends,” where he frequently aired his concerns about the U.S. military.

“One of the things that Hegseth has brought to Fox News is this criticism of the military as a liberal institution, which I think has found a real home in Donald Trump’s Republican Party, which sees every institution as elite and captured by liberals,” Hemmer said. “And so Hegseth really has been the conduit for that new belief on the right about the military.”

In a 2021 segment on “Fox News Primetime,” Hegseth described efforts to root out extremism in the armed forces as “a purge.” He attacked Bishop Garrison, the Army veteran and lawyer tapped by then-Defense Decretary Austin to lead a working group on the issue, as a “powerful, radical leftist.”

Not long after, amid sustained pressure from Republican politicians and other conservative media figures, the anti-extremism initiative folded.

Hegseth also used his perch at Fox News to advocate on behalf of service members accused of war crimes, like former Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher. CNN reported in 2019 Hegseth privately encouraged Trump to pardon some of them; Trump went on to do so.

In a statement after Hegseth’s nomination was announced, a Fox News spokesperson said Hegseth’s “insights and analysis especially about the military resonated deeply with our viewers and made the program the major success that it is today. We are extremely proud of his work at Fox News Media and wish him the best of luck in Washington.”

Hegseth’s persona as a telegenic veteran likely appealed to Trump, an avid Fox News watcher, said Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth College.

“[Trump] appears to respond to people who look the part in some way that he perceives. And for all those reasons you can imagine a combat veteran who’s good on TV and appears on Fox News defending Trump being an appealing person to Trump,” Nyhan said.

Nyhan warned putting Hegseth in charge of the Pentagon could be “a step towards a more politicized military,” given the views he has long espoused. “We don’t worry about the military being a kind of partisan arm of one side of the American political divide. But these kinds of choices could take us down that road.”

Good morning. You’re reading the Up First newsletter. Subscribe here to get it delivered to your inbox, and listen to the Up First podcast for all the news you need to start your day.

Today’s top stories

President-elect Donald Trump will nominate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a former independent presidential candidate, to run the Department of Health and Human Services. On the campaign trail, Kennedy, an environmental advocate and vaccine skeptic, has made claims that he will drastically reduce rates of chronic disease in just two years. He has spread several conspiracy theories including claims that Wi-Fi causes cancer and school shootings are caused by antidepressants.

• 🎧 “The idea of someone who has actively sowed misinformation about vaccines being in charge of the government’s scientific research and public health agencies really horrifies a lot of people in those fields,” NPR’s Selena Simmons-Duffin tells Up First. The Senate will have to vote to confirm Kennedy for this role. Kennedy’s campaign website says he supports abortion access. Simmons-Duffin says it will be interesting to see how that opinion plays out among Republicans who are eager to curtail abortion access federally.

Bond investors say parts of Trump’s economic agenda are alarming. Though the stock market surged after Trump’s victory, the bond market has been selling off. The U.S. government sells bonds to investors like banks and other countries. Bond sell-off can affect things like interest rates and inflation. If interest rates are low, your company and government can borrow money cheaply. If rates climb, things will get expensive fast. The bond market can also influence interest payments on credit cards, auto loans and mortgages.

• 🎧 Although Trump has promised to lower inflation, bond investors believe he could do the opposite, NPR’s Rafael Nam says. Trump is proposing a wide range of tariffs that will make things that the U.S. imports like clothes, toys, shoes, and tech gadgets more expensive. He also wants to exempt workers in restaurants and other locations from paying taxes on tips. These things could make the country’s finances worse. Bond investors wield power through their money, Nam says. If the interest the U.S. pays on its bonds surges, the financial hit to the country can spread fear to other markets, like stocks.

President Biden is meeting with leaders from the Asia-Pacific region, including China’s President Xi Jinping, in Lima, Peru. The two will sit down tomorrow in what’s expected to be the final summit between the leaders before Biden leaves office.

• 🎧 The meeting has two main missions: Biden wants to cement the policy cooperation he feels he has been able to achieve in this relationship and emphasize the importance of keeping the lines of communication open. NPR’s Asma Khalid says one of those lines in particular is military-to-military communication. The White House feels that competition with China is going to be the defining issue for what the world looks like in decades to come.

Special series

Gender rights activists demonstrate outside the U.S. Supreme Court on June 30, 2023, in Washington, D.C. Many of the bans states passed this year against gender-affirming health care for youth are in federal court and may be on their way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Olivier Douliery/AFP via Getty Images

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Olivier Douliery/AFP via Getty Images

Gender rights activists demonstrate outside the U.S. Supreme Court on June 30, 2023, in Washington, D.C. Many of the bans states passed this year against gender-affirming health care for youth are in federal court and may be on their way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Olivier Douliery/AFP via Getty Images

Each day this week, Morning Edition will dive deep into one of the promises President-elect Trump has made for day one of his administration. 

Trump has promised to sign an executive order instructing every federal agency to stop the promotion of sex or gender transition at any age. Jamie Taylor, a professor at the University of Toledo who has written about the transgender rights movement, talks about what the executive order could do and how health care providers will be impacted. She also dives into how transgender athletes could be impacted by changes to Title IX, a federal civil rights law that prohibits sex-based discrimination at schools and education programs that receive government funding.

Weekend picks

Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans in Red One.

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Karen Neal/Amazon MGM Studios

Check out what NPR is watching, reading and listening to this weekend:

🍿 Movies: The holiday season comes to an emergency halt when Santa is kidnapped in Red One. It’s up to his head of security and a ne’er-do-well to save Christmas.

📺 TV: In Say Nothing, a woman was kidnapped and killed by members of the Irish Republican Army. Decades later, one of the women involved in her disappearance grapples with her memories.

📚 Books: NPR book critic Maureen Corrigan found two books this week that delivered beauty, inspiration and humor: Water, Water by Billy Collins and The Dog Who Followed the Moon by James Norbury.

🎵 Music: Composer Laura Kaminsky’s intimate new opera, Lucidity, revolves around Lili, an aging opera singer portrayed by the 80-year-old soprano Lucy Shelton, who deals with the effects of memory loss.

3 things to know before you go

The California Department of Insurance says detectives found this bear costume at the home of the suspects accused of orchestrating fake bear attacks on their vehicles.

California Department of Insurance

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California Department of Insurance

1. Four Los Angeles residents allegedly used a life-sized bear costume to stage attacks on their vehicles to defraud multiple insurance companies out of a six-figure payout.
2. Have you ever had a dispute with loved ones over the holidays? If so, we want to hear about how you navigated it. Your response could be featured in the Up First newsletter on Nov. 24.
3. NBC announced yesterday that Craig Melvin will replace Hoda Kotb as the new anchor on the Today show.

This newsletter was edited by Suzanne Nuyen.

With Republicans taking control of the White House and both chambers of Congress in January, Democrats are undergoing some introspection.

Senator Chris Murphy, D-Conn., says his party misread blue collar voters who chose to support President-elect Donald Trump in particular.

“We claim to be the party that represents working people, poor people,” he told NPR’s Morning Edition. “And yet, as you saw in this election, they are moving to the Republicans in droves. I think that is in part because we aren’t listening to what is really driving people’s emotional center right now.”

He shared his thoughts with NPR’s Steve Inskeep.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Steve Inskeep: What do you think is wrong with your party?

Sen. Chris Murphy: Right now, people are feeling out of control of their lives. In particular, poor people are feeling like they have no agency over their lives. And so, you know, we look at Republicans’ focus on immigration and the border and we say, well, you know, they’re playing to people’s xenophobic, racist instincts. Now, that’s true to an extent, but it’s really about control. President Trump was saying, ‘I’m going to put us back in control of our borders. I am not going to subject you to these extraterritorial forces.’ So I just think we have to do a better job of listening to the folks that we claim to represent.

Inskeep: I think you’re telling me that regardless of what someone’s view of immigration is, it is a real political problem that any political party has to address in a realistic way. Is that it?

Murphy: Yeah, I think during the first four years of Donald Trump, we were a resistance party. And we didn’t actually articulate a view of how we would control the border, how we would speak to a very legitimate issue that people have this question of how you become an American citizen, how you become a member of this multicultural club. I also think that people are in a mood to fight. You know, people know that power has become concentrated in a handful of elites, and they want a real explanation of how that power gets moved to them.

Inskeep: If people are concerned about the concentration of power, why do you think you lost to a billionaire hanging out with the world’s richest man?

Murphy: These people want to blow up the status quo, and everything that Trump does telegraphs that he is willing to defy conventional wisdom. We should be proud of the child tax credit and bulk negotiation of prescription drug prices. But to most people, those are small ball solutions. You know, we scoffed at the fact that Trump was talking about this sort of massive set of tariffs on Chinese goods. It was and is bad policy. It will raise prices for a lot of Americans, but it is a way to fundamentally blow up the global economy.

Inskeep: Is there a case to be made, Senator, that as appealing as it might be, blowing everything up—a revolution, so to speak—is a very risky idea when we do, in fact, live in the richest and most powerful nation in the history of the world, where not only the very wealthy but even the average person is doing way better than most people in the world?

Murphy: Well, that’s true by our traditional measurements of policy success, which is income, employment, and GDP. But if you look at the statistic that matters most—self-reported rates of happiness—we are doing much worse than many other countries with much lower rates of income. And people are much more unhappy today than they were 20 years ago. People are feeling much more isolated, much more devoid of purpose and meaning, and much angrier than they were 20 years ago. And it should be alarming to us that we have structurally low unemployment, GDP growing at a pretty good clip, crime coming down, and people reporting being more unhappy than at any other time in the last 50 years.

Inskeep: Well, you’ll be part of the new Senate led by Republicans. Would you anticipate sometimes voting for Trump’s priorities, given what you’ve said?

Murphy: I think that there is an interesting conversation happening inside the Republican Party that, at times, J.D. Vance was a part of—that does see government playing a bigger role in people’s lives. I actually do support some brand of economic nationalism in which we recapture industries to the United States. Yes, of course, I’m going to be open to efforts to fundamentally reform the American economy. I guess I just worry that it’s all show and that, when Trump governs, he doesn’t actually end up doing anything to rebuild the American middle class or the American industrial base. He ends up just giving a big round of tax breaks to his Mar-a-Lago friends.

Inskeep: We’ve gotten pretty far in this discussion without talking about politically correct speech, wokeism pronouns, trans issues, any number of other social issues, gender issues in society. Do you think that those things were less important than maybe some commentary would suggest?

Murphy: I think there has been a broad intolerance in our party toward people who don’t line up with us on 100% of social and cultural issues and other hot-button topics like climate and guns. My argument to the party is that we should build a bigger tent. I think populist economics should be the tent pole. I think if you want in, you should believe that government should be on a mission to break up corporate power and dramatically raise the average income of working families in this country. But if you don’t agree with us on abortion, or you don’t agree with us on guns, or you don’t agree with us on climate, we still want you in the tent. We want you to be part of that conversation as long as you’re aligned with us on trying to make the economy fair.

I don’t think that’s the message we have sent over the last 10 years. We’ve become very used to having 12 or 13 litmus tests, but I think that’s ultimately a losing gamble for us.

This interview was edited for digital by Majd Al-Waheidi.

On this week’s episode of Code Switch, we spoke to a young woman who had this to say on Election Day: “I’m disgusted by the blood I carry in my veins because I’m related to these people.” By “these people,” she was referring to her relatives who had supported a presidential candidate that she found abhorrent. She went on to say that in order to support said candidate, “you have to be next-level dumb or next-level evil.”

And look – homegirl was obviously not mincing her words. But to be honest, they didn’t surprise me. Because those words reflect a sentiment I’ve heard repeated for years now, about the pain and immense frustration at seeing the people you love make decisions that you hate.

So what do you do about that? It’s a question that many people are grappling with, especially as the holidays draw near. How should we approach the prospect of breaking bread – or not – with people whose beliefs or actions sometimes seem to grate at the very core of what we believe to be right and good?

[Editor’s note: This is an excerpt of Code Switch’s Up All Night newsletter. You can sign up here.]

There are many approaches, some of which we’ve talked about before. And I think it should go without saying that it is OK to opt out of spaces that make you feel unsafe or uncomfortable. (Thanksgiving is still two weeks away – that’s plenty of time to uninvite yourself from Cousin Jan’s potluck.)

But if you do decide to participate in an event where you’ll be in close quarters with someone you deeply disagree with, it’s worth remembering a few things:

1. You don’t need to label anyone as ultimately good or bad. In her new book, Do You Still Talk to Grandma?, author Britt Barron writes, “We are always trying to make a world where there are heroes and villains, good and evil, right and wrong, and where we can be the heroes, where we can be good and right. People love categories and boxes and clean lines.” But people are complicated, and it’s important to acknowledge that. Especially if you have any hope of ever convincing someone to change their beliefs (or of being convinced to change your own.)

2. You neither have to ignore reality – or forgive it.  In a conversation on the pod a few years ago, author Ashley C. Ford rejected that false binary. She said, “I can decide how I want to move through reality. I can decide how I want to react to reality. But I think what’s most important is that I just accept reality.” And she posed this set of questions: “What are you going to do on a day-to-day basis while you’re living your life? Are you going to live in a place where you deny reality and you think to yourself, I love this person, but only because I choose to forget that they’ve done terrible things, heinous things? Or do I say this is reality? This is what it is, and I love you. And this thing that you’ve done…I can’t forgive you for, and I’ll never try.”

3. You don’t need to deny your humanity. In times of deep political division, there’s often the pressure for people – especially marginalized people – to set aside their differences for the sake of some supposedly higher ideal, like “unity” or “civility.” At those moments, it’s worth remembering the eternal words of James Baldwin: “We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.” And once again — if that’s the dynamic, feel free to cancel those dinner plans and instead, spend your one precious life with people who believe that your life is precious.

This story was written by Leah Donnella and edited by Courtney Stein.

With Republicans taking control of the White House and both chambers of Congress in January, Democrats are undergoing some introspection.

Senator Chris Murphy, D-Conn., says his party misread blue collar voters who chose to support President-elect Donald Trump in particular.

“We claim to be the party that represents working people, poor people,” he told NPR’s Morning Edition. “And yet, as you saw in this election, they are moving to the Republicans in droves. I think that is in part because we aren’t listening to what is really driving people’s emotional center right now.”

He shared his thoughts with NPR’s Steve Inskeep.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Steve Inskeep: What do you think is wrong with your party?

Sen. Chris Murphy: Right now, people are feeling out of control of their lives. In particular, poor people are feeling like they have no agency over their lives. And so, you know, we look at Republicans’ focus on immigration and the border and we say, well, you know, they’re playing to people’s xenophobic, racist instincts. Now, that’s true to an extent, but it’s really about control. President Trump was saying, ‘I’m going to put us back in control of our borders. I am not going to subject you to these extraterritorial forces.’ So I just think we have to do a better job of listening to the folks that we claim to represent.

Inskeep: I think you’re telling me that regardless of what someone’s view of immigration is, it is a real political problem that any political party has to address in a realistic way. Is that it?

Murphy: Yeah, I think during the first four years of Donald Trump, we were a resistance party. And we didn’t actually articulate a view of how we would control the border, how we would speak to a very legitimate issue that people have this question of how you become an American citizen, how you become a member of this multicultural club. I also think that people are in a mood to fight. You know, people know that power has become concentrated in a handful of elites, and they want a real explanation of how that power gets moved to them.

Inskeep: If people are concerned about the concentration of power, why do you think you lost to a billionaire hanging out with the world’s richest man?

Murphy: These people want to blow up the status quo, and everything that Trump does telegraphs that he is willing to defy conventional wisdom. We should be proud of the child tax credit and bulk negotiation of prescription drug prices. But to most people, those are small ball solutions. You know, we scoffed at the fact that Trump was talking about this sort of massive set of tariffs on Chinese goods. It was and is bad policy. It will raise prices for a lot of Americans, but it is a way to fundamentally blow up the global economy.

Inskeep: Is there a case to be made, Senator, that as appealing as it might be, blowing everything up—a revolution, so to speak—is a very risky idea when we do, in fact, live in the richest and most powerful nation in the history of the world, where not only the very wealthy but even the average person is doing way better than most people in the world?

Murphy: Well, that’s true by our traditional measurements of policy success, which is income, employment, and GDP. But if you look at the statistic that matters most—self-reported rates of happiness—we are doing much worse than many other countries with much lower rates of income. And people are much more unhappy today than they were 20 years ago. People are feeling much more isolated, much more devoid of purpose and meaning, and much angrier than they were 20 years ago. And it should be alarming to us that we have structurally low unemployment, GDP growing at a pretty good clip, crime coming down, and people reporting being more unhappy than at any other time in the last 50 years.

Inskeep: Well, you’ll be part of the new Senate led by Republicans. Would you anticipate sometimes voting for Trump’s priorities, given what you’ve said?

Murphy: I think that there is an interesting conversation happening inside the Republican Party that, at times, J.D. Vance was a part of—that does see government playing a bigger role in people’s lives. I actually do support some brand of economic nationalism in which we recapture industries to the United States. Yes, of course, I’m going to be open to efforts to fundamentally reform the American economy. I guess I just worry that it’s all show and that, when Trump governs, he doesn’t actually end up doing anything to rebuild the American middle class or the American industrial base. He ends up just giving a big round of tax breaks to his Mar-a-Lago friends.

Inskeep: We’ve gotten pretty far in this discussion without talking about politically correct speech, wokeism pronouns, trans issues, any number of other social issues, gender issues in society. Do you think that those things were less important than maybe some commentary would suggest?

Murphy: I think there has been a broad intolerance in our party toward people who don’t line up with us on 100% of social and cultural issues and other hot-button topics like climate and guns. My argument to the party is that we should build a bigger tent. I think populist economics should be the tent pole. I think if you want in, you should believe that government should be on a mission to break up corporate power and dramatically raise the average income of working families in this country. But if you don’t agree with us on abortion, or you don’t agree with us on guns, or you don’t agree with us on climate, we still want you in the tent. We want you to be part of that conversation as long as you’re aligned with us on trying to make the economy fair.

I don’t think that’s the message we have sent over the last 10 years. We’ve become very used to having 12 or 13 litmus tests, but I think that’s ultimately a losing gamble for us.

This interview was edited for digital by Majd Al-Waheidi.