Sen. Chris Murphy was dropped at the L Street entrance of Washington, D.C.’s convention center and hustled through the kitchen to a ballroom where 2,000 progressive activists waited to hear his thoughts on what to do about the 47th president of the United States and the sorry state of the Democratic Party.

The audience was midway through a weeklong, largely off-the-record summit of “America Votes,” the self-described “coordination hub of the progressive community.” It promised “experts, strategists, and renowned progressive leaders to begin writing the next chapter of the American story.”

Among them was Murphy, 51, the Democratic junior senator from Connecticut. Reelected in November to a third term, Murphy is in his third new phase as a senator — the first 10 years building a gun control movement, the last two as a broker of bipartisan deals on gun safety and border control.

“And now I’m trying to convince my party to meet the moment and bash these guys over the head with a baseball bat, metaphorically,” Murphy said.

The moment, as Murphy describes it in increasingly heated terms in person and online, is a campaign by President Donald J. Trump and Elon Musk to undermine the press and bully law firms, universities and business leaders into submission, and the only way it can be met is with uncompromising, if risky, defiance.

“Our democracy isn’t at risk of dying. It is dying as we speak. We are watching it die. It is not too late to save it,” Murphy said in a Senate speech on April 10. “We say that again, it is not too late to save our democracy, but we can’t continue to close our eyes and think that our democracy can survive a coordinated assault on those four key institutions of accountability.”

Murphy is a multiplatform messenger, a believer in repetition. On Thursday night, unshaven and casually dressed after a basketball game with the youngest of his two teenage sons, he delivered a live video briefing on Instagram that repurposed and updated the Senate speech.

“So, I want to go over events that have been developing really, really fast. Trump’s plan is real. He has a plan,” said Murphy, who has 200,000 followers on Instagram and one million on X. “He is implementing it to convert our democracy to some form of autocracy, and that’s the only way that you can get away with the corruption and the thievery.”