The Democratic Party has a long history of failed marriages
Chris Murphy has a new (and younger, but not necessarily more attractive) lover less than four months after ditching his wife. The prominent social media user and Democratic senator from Connecticut is reportedly dating Tara McGowan, the Soros-funded dark money operative who has been denounced by the Washington Post for pushing “partisan propaganda” via a network of misleading “local news” websites. The happy couple was spotted canoodling at a hipster bar in Washington, D.C., earlier this month.
It’s unclear when Murphy, 51, and McGowan, 39, initiated their love affair. Both of them recently exited failed marriages. Murphy announced his separation from Cathy Holahan, his wife of 17 years and the mother of his two children, days after winning reelection to the U.S. Senate in November. McGowan finalized her divorce from husband Michael Halle, a former adviser to Pete Buttigieg, in April of last year. She has been described by former employees as a shameless grifter and “soap opera villainess” who destroys morale with her “constant gaslighting.” She recently posted a photo with Murphy last week on her private Instagram account, along with the caption, “not postponing joy,” which appeared to confirm the relationship.
Murphy has allegedly distinguished himself in recent months, according to mainstream political journalists, for his relentless opposition to Donald Trump and his even more relentless efforts to promote himself. NBC News reports that Murphy spent more than $1 million on Facebook and Instagrams ads in the month of February, which is more than he’s spent on such advertising over the last five years combined. He’s also raising lots of money despite having just won reelection. He’s constantly on television, or sounding off on a podcast with liberal influencers. It’s all part of his strategy to “flood the zone” with anti-Trump hysteria. “We don’t have another year to fight this attempt to destroy democracy,” Murphy said last week. “Our democracy might be gone in six months.”
McGowan has been promoting Murphy’s content on social media for years, touting the senator as a “prominent pro-democracy leader” in November 2023, when her divorce was still making its way through the court system. McGowan deactivated her X account on Monday after her relationship with Murphy was first reported by Semafor. The self-described “childless woman voter” is the founder and CEO of several liberal activist groups funded by billionaires George Soros and Laurene Powell Jobs, which allows her to exert tremendous influence within the Democratic Party. McGowan, who made nearly 20 visits to the White House under President Joe Biden, has urged Democrats to adopt a more aggressive form of online activism, a message she shared during a recent meeting of party operatives and liberal journalists to plot resistance strategies in Trump’s second term.
One of the activist groups McGowan founded, Courier Newsroom, also spends heavily on Facebook to promote Democratic talking points under the guise of local “news,” which allows Courier to avoid labeling its content as political ads. McGowan has claimed the organization’s goal is to combat so-called disinformation. One of Courier’s local “news” websites, the Nevadan, spent considerable sums during the 2024 election advertising its misleading “stories” about how Trump was plotting to reinstate the draft. Current and former employees complained that McGowan actively discouraged “honest journalism” in favor of partisan “propaganda” explicitly aimed at “low-information voters.” Gabby Deutch, a correspondent for the nonpartisan media watchdog NewsGuard, argued in a 2020 Washington Post op-ed that McGowan was “exploiting the widespread loss of local journalism to create and disseminate something we really don’t need: hyperlocal partisan propaganda.”
Murphy stands to benefit from his new lover’s ties to Democratic billionaires. Powell Jobs, who owns a majority stake in the Atlantic through her investment firm Emerson Collective, has extensively supported McGowan’s activist ventures, including the for-profit media company Good Information, Inc., which launched in 2021 to “counter the right’s disinformation machine.” Soros was a major investor, as was LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, a former associate of the notorious sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Murphy insists he is not interested in running for president in 2028. That’s probably a lie. If he does end up running, he will almost certainly lose on account of his obnoxious personality. “Murphy … is not exactly charismatic; he is cerebral and serious,” the New York Times wrote in an otherwise friendly profile last month. “At times, [he] can sound like a high school history teacher giving a civics lesson.”
Murphy is best known for vigorously defending Biden in February 2024 after the release of Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report, which argued the president was unlikely to be convicted by a jury for mishandling classified documents because he would come across as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Murphy insisted Biden was “ready” for the reelection campaign several months before Biden dropped out of the race. “There are literally thousands of people alive in this nation today because Joe Biden is incredibly competent, and he’s incredibly effective,” said Murphy, who now joins the esteemed ranks of prominent Democrats who ended their marriages under problematic circumstances.
Rep. Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.), a member of the left-wing “Squad,” famously destroyed two marriages after allegedly having an affair with her married political consultant, Tim Mynett, whose firm raked in hundreds of thousands of dollars from Omar’s campaign. In 2016, Rep. Ruben Gallego (D., Ariz.), who was elected to the Senate in 2024, filed for divorce from his wife when she was nine months pregnant and “likely to give birth any day.” Disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner ended his marriage to Hillary Clinton’s longtime servant, Huma Abedin, after repeatedly sending photos of his genitals to teenagers. Abedin was recently engaged to Alex Soros, the son of billionaire George Soros.
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