US Senator Chris Murphy took the floor of the US Senate on Thursday afternoon to warn his colleagues and the nation about the threat that President-elect Donald Trump and his “billionaire cronies” pose to American democracy.

“There are far too many people who are in denial about what they see,” Murphy said at the beginning of his remarks. “What is happening right now is that Donald Trump and his billionaire national advisors are devising a plan in real time to transform this country from a democracy into a restrictive oligarchy where the political opposition is silenced, where the media are not free.” and where the government only serves to enrich a small elite group that surrounds the man in charge.”

Murphy highlighted three events in the last week that he said signaled the United States’ shift from a representative democracy to, in his words, a “restrictive oligarchy.”

The first was the finding by the House Oversight Subcommittee of the House Administration Committee that former U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyoming, is under investigation for criminal misconduct related to her role as acting chairwoman of the U.S. House of Representatives should committee on the attack of January 6th.

“Liz Cheney did nothing criminal,” Murphy said. “There is not even a hint of a criminal allegation. She just led a commission that rejected Donald Trump. But House Republicans followed Donald Trump’s lead and recommended that the next administration, the next Justice Department, prosecute Liz Cheney.”

Murphy continued: “And by the way, Liz Cheney won’t be the last. There will be other political opponents of Donald Trump who will be prosecuted. That would be ridiculous today under an FBI and a Justice Department that don’t lock people up for political reasons. Donald Trump changes guard at the FBI. He appoints someone loyal to him as the next attorney general. The person he will appoint to the FBI has written a book about the importance of eliminating anyone from the government who does not agree with the president’s policy priorities.”

Trump nominated Kash Patel to head the FBI and Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi to be attorney general after his first nominee, Matt Gaetz, withdrew his name amid allegations of sex trafficking and sexual relations with minors.

The second event Murphy drew attention to was a lawsuit Trump filed against Iowa pollster J. Ann Selzer and… The Des Moines Register about a poll released just before Election Day that showed Vice President Kamala Harris with a three-point lead over Trump. The former president won the state by 14 points, and his lawsuit accuses Selzer and the Register of engaging in fraud and election interference.

“That poll, which suggested the race would be close, drove many people to donate to his political opponent and gave the people of Iowa hope that perhaps a Democrat could win,” Murphy said. “That’s not allowed in Donald Trump’s world. In Donald Trump’s world, nothing is allowed to serve his political opposition. So he files a lawsuit that has no chance of success because he wants to try to intimidate journalists and the press into submission. Whether we like it or not, it is simply true that perhaps in the future a pollster who has a poll in front of him that shows a race is coming to a close, shows a race that is favorable to the Democrats, will call that poll Fear of not publishing a lawsuit.”

Finally, Murphy pointed to the settlement with ABC News, in which the company agreed to pay $15 million to Trump’s presidential library. The settlement resolves a lawsuit filed by Trump alleging that news anchor George Stefanopolis defamed him by falsely claiming that Trump was held civilly responsible for the rape of writer E. Jean Carroll.

Murphy called the lawsuit “false” and said it never succeeded in court.

“But ABC decided for some reason that it would be better for them to just pay Donald Trump to make it go away,” he said. “And you see repeated decisions by members of the media to simply follow Donald Trump rather than risk his wrath, rather than potentially risk their profits if Donald Trump and his regulators turn on them. You saw Jeff Bezos telling his newspapers not to support Kamala Harris. You’ve seen Comcast’s efforts to divest from MSNBC. You saw ABC paying out Donald Trump $15 million. Time and time again you see members of the press coming to the conclusion that it’s simply better not to fight him.”

Murphy said Trump and his billionaire advisers sought to intimidate political opponents and bully the press so they could enrich themselves at the expense of the American people.

“They want government contracts, they want to privatize government programs, they want greater regulatory relief, they want lower taxes,” he said. “Donald Trump and his billionaire cronies want the government to serve them, but they know they can only get away with it if no one holds them accountable. To steal from us, they must silence the political opposition, intimidate activists and try to hold the press accountable. If they do that, they can get away with using the government as a tool for enrichment.”

Murphy highlighted the torpedoing of a bipartisan deal to keep the government funded through March through a team effort by Trump and Elon Musk, who railed against the plan on the social media platform X, formerly Twitter, which he bought in 2022. Murphy said they scrapped the deal and instead called for a debt ceiling increase to finance a potentially large package of tax breaks and other benefits for the rich.

He warned that if political opponents are silenced, the wealthy people who control the media will ultimately “join the regime” and that such an outcome could come sooner in the United States than Americans realize.

“For most of our history, America has been a functioning, robust democracy in which the party or person in power changes regularly because the people have all the tools necessary to choose their leaders,” he said. “But that could change so quickly in a heartbeat, but without a single exciting moment, that the transition could be narrowly missed by all of us. “You might just wake up one day and find that the rules of democracy have been rigged so that Republicans or the Trump family never lose again and billionaires can steal from us all with no accountability.”