Ed Murray is warning Democrats they'll never stop President Donald Trump if they don't move quickly to operationalize the resistance and dispense with progressive purity tests — such as talking down to voters who, like him, take their faith seriously.

The Seattle mayor is positioning himself at the forefront of the pushback to Trump. Last week, his city sued the federal government to stop the crackdown on "sanctuary cities.” And Murray says he’s "beginning to think we’re dealing with America’s first authoritarian administration.”


At the same time, the 61-year-old mayor worries that at this existential moment for his party, Democrats will continue to bicker among themselves into a state of perpetual defeat.

“On the national level, at times, I feel like we are becoming like the tea party on the far right, that we have purity tests,” said Murray, who’s often been the object of fury from local progressives despite a record that includes signing a $15 minimum wage early in his mayoralty three years ago. “If we are starting to have purity tests amongst ourselves, then we’re never going to gain back those working-class and lower-income people that we are building a progressive movement for.”

Murray, until recently, meditated in the mornings, in part as a way to keep up his commitment to his Catholic faith. His religion is as much a part of his identity as being openly gay — indeed, both elements have been intertwined since a monk at a Trappist monastery where he spent some time in college left him books about faith and living as a healthy, out person.

“It was a very influential thing for me to have people affirm something about myself that I wasn’t sure at the time I could affirm,” Murray said, speaking to me for POLITICO’s “Off Message” podcast. “So I read them, that night, but I was going, ‘How the hell does he know?’”

As a public figure, Murray has struggled both internally and externally with being gay and progressive and also a person who connects deeply to the mystical and spiritual traditions of the church.

“In the parishes that I go to, I’ve never had anyone get on me for being gay, but I’ve certainly have had people in the gay political community in Seattle get on me for being a Catholic,” Murray said.

That speaks to a larger problem for Democrats, he said — one he saw in some of the factionalism that broke out within the party in last year’s election.

“The test can’t be, ‘You can’t be a real person of faith and be a Democrat.’ So first we need to check ourselves to be sure that’s not the message we’re saying,” Murray said.

Though the stress of Trump’s presidency has disrupted his own meditation routine — “One of the exercises that some folks do is to count your breaths to 10,” he said, but “I seldom get beyond two” — Murray believes finding a way to balance is important for leaders. Meditation is one way, but so are prayer, exercise or some other method.

I asked him whether he’d be willing to teach Trump to meditate. His answer was one of the shortest of our conversation: “No.”

Murray was in New York last week for former Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s “What Works Cities” conference. But whether speaking there or back home, he said he’s thinking constantly about Trump — how to fight the president and how fellow progressives can make the resistance more than a hashtag.

He thinks back to his own early days as an AIDS activist in the 1980s, years before he started down the path that led him to manage a friend’s campaign for state representative. Murray was later appointed to that seat himself after the friend died and went on to serve in the state senate, before knocking out an incumbent in a 2013 mayoral primary.

“This is a really angry time. And anger is really important. I can remember being young at the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis and the protests we did and the anger that existed,” Murray said. “But eventually anger has to be attached to a strategy. And protesting is very important, because it’s one expression of anger.”

He added, “We really do need to get on with what are the strategies we want to see, what are the things that we want to actually accomplish?”

There have been marches. There have been successful efforts to push back on Trump’s travel bans and his attempt to repeal Obamacare. What there hasn’t been, Murray said, is any kind of proactive agenda from a Democratic Party that went straight from punch-drunk panic in the weeks after Hillary Clinton’s loss to shouting along with an angry base so far not sure what to do other than scream.

“The resistance in general, I think, needs to get really focused on deliverables, on very concrete deliverables. If we’re talking about immigration, I think we know what the deliverable is — we need to reform our immigration policy in general,” Murray said. “If we’re talking about race, let’s talk about race and let’s get really concrete. What are the things that we need to have happen? And stay focused on that.”

Stay focused first, Murray said, on how Trump is trying to reshape the national conversation about immigrants, stoking fears among many as he seeds what looks to the mayor like a tiered system of acceptable immigrants.

“We’ve been here before in our history,” he said, launching into a comparison of his own grandparents’ experience arriving as Irish immigrants and his husband’s grandparents, who arrived from Japan almost the same year.

“You know, my grandparents could become citizens; his grandparents could not. My grandparents could vote; his grandparents could not. My grandparents could own property; his grandparents could not own the laundry they ran in Spokane,” Murray said. “They weren’t allowed to do those things until the 1950s because of the way we treated a certain group of immigrants versus another group of immigrants.”

Murray said he’s not sure he’d go to meet Air Force One if it landed at SeaTac Airport. But he would like to give the president a tour of his city, starting with a classroom of children of undocumented immigrants whom Murray said are living in constant terror about what might happen.

Talk to the people whose lives have been saved by Obamacare, or transgender people who no longer live in fear, Murray said. “Visit homeless people and look at what 35 years of slashing affordable housing has done, as well as visit those school kids who are scared because of him, who cry at night because of him,” he continued.

Trump and his aides have started talking about trying to get Democrats to join them on a much-discussed but still amorphous infrastructure plan. Murray dismissed the idea as hypocritical.

“You can’t be cutting budgets where you’re providing money for infrastructure and then turn around and say somehow you’re going to do infrastructure. You cut HUD, you’re going to cut construction of housing. You cut transportation, you’re going to kill transportation jobs, infrastructure jobs,” Murray said. “This guy is really good at, like, selling people stuff, but he’s selling them junk, in this case.”

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