Murphy’s ‘Awesome’ Problem

By Abe Greenwald

Tuesday, April 21, 2026

 

I’m going to give Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy the benefit of the doubt—not really, just stick with me.

 

Yesterday, he wrote, “awesome” on a retweeted X post claiming that 26 Iranian shadow fleet vessels made it through the U.S. blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. The world came down on Murphy’s head for seeming to cheer on the Iranian regime against the United States Navy. But Murphy claimed he was being sarcastic and is saddened by Donald Trump’s supposed bungling of the war.

 

It's not that I would put it past Murphy to root for the Iranians. In 2020, he did some foreign policy freelancing and met in secret with former Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference. He’s also spoken multiple times at the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), an NGO that denies any connection to the Islamic Republic while forever downplaying the regime’s crimes and pushing the U.S. to adopt a more accepting posture toward Iran.

 

Murphy has peddled the NIAC line at every turn. He opposed Trump’s 2020 assassination strike on IRGC leader Qassem Soleimani and, in 2022, he supported the idea that the Biden administration should remove the IRGC from its list of designated terrorist organizations.

 

All of which is to say that Murphy holds repugnant views on Iran and the Middle East. And he may very well have thought it was “awesome” that Iran reportedly outwitted the U.S. at sea. I just don’t think he’s quite dumb enough to have knowingly blurted out what was in his heart at that moment.

 

He is, however, thoroughly dumb enough to have believed the fake story in the first place. It turns out, no Iranian vessels made it through the blockade. And he’s repugnant enough to have used the false story as a zinger against Trump before bothering to verify it.

 

I therefore judge Chris Murphy guilty of wanting pro-regime, anti-American propaganda to have been true. And that’s more than bad enough.

 

Think about it. If Murphy felt the news was too good to fact-check, then he can’t logically have been sarcastic about declaring it awesome. So while he probably wanted the retweet to be understood as sarcasm, he was obviously thrilled to have a snippet of bad war news to aim at Trump. In other words, it turns out that Murphy is more than dumb enough to have unwittingly revealed what was in his heart.

 

That’s what shines through here, and it’s why he looks and sounds so uncomfortable in trying to explain himself after the fact. You can’t do sarcasm when you’re in earnest agreement with your own supposedly sarcastic comment.

 

I’d call this emotional dissonance, except people like Murphy aren’t really conflicted at all: They want Trump to fail. This, by extension, means they want the U.S. to fail and Iran to triumph. The only thing that’s tripping up Murphy is logical dissonance. There’s no way to pretend that you’re patriotic while rooting against America. The mask won’t fit your face.