America's Next Story: Senator Cory Booker

0:01This is The Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times Opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it.

0:14I'm David Leonhardt, an editorial director in New York Times Opinion. And this is America's Next Story, a series about the ideas that once held our country together and those that might do so again. We the people, in order to form a more perfect union. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. America is too great for small dreams. Change is what's happening in America. And we will make America great again. God bless you and good night. I love you. Today I'm talking with Senator Cory Booker from New Jersey. Last spring, Booker gave a record-breaking speech on the Senate floor.

1:00I rise with the intention of disrupting the normal business of the United States Senate for as long as I am physically able. He spent more than 25 hours speaking out about President Trump. Unnecessary hardships are being borne by Americans of all backgrounds. And institutions which are special in America are being recklessly, and I would say even unconstitutionally affected, attacked, even shattered. With that speech, Senator Booker pushed back against the conventional wisdom. He didn't just talk about kitchen table issues that polls suggest are Americans' main focus. He instead talked squarely about the ways that President Trump is undermining our democracy.

1:48And he captured people's attention when he did. So I wanted to ask Senator Booker, how can the country turn the page on Trumpism to a new American story?

2:03Senator Booker, thanks for joining me today. I'm grateful to be here. Thank you. And I love this series. So I'm privileged and feel very blessed to be on it. Thank you. Since we last spoken, you've gotten engaged. Congratulations. Thank you very much. It's a whole new world for me. I'm just more excited than I've been about anything, I think. Do you have a date? We do. It's a matter of weeks from now. Excellent. Yes, I'm very excited. My wife says an engagement is not real unless there's a ring and a date. So it sounds like you qualify. Yeah, we want to do it really, really quick. I have these great hopes for children.

2:33Great. Yeah. Let's go back to 2024. Your state, New Jersey, shifted more to President Trump than almost any other state. And that got a little bit lost because it didn't flip. Kamala Harris still won the state. Why do you think that is? When you talk to people in New Jersey, what did you hear about why Donald Trump, who was a familiar character, was more appealing to them in 2024 than he had been the previous two times he ran. So I don't want Donald Trump to be the main character in our narrative of where we are in America right now. Look, there are existential urgencies about him right now and what he's doing to hurt people.

3:19But I think we make a big mistake if we center him as the main character in the narrative. And in my state, I think the reason why you see this shifting is because New Jerseyans, like Americans, are really fed up with our politics and have lost faith in both parties. Remember, in this presidential election, the majority of Americans rejected both candidates. Neither of them got over 50%. And it speaks to a larger hurt that's going on in our country where the American dream, which delivered in measurable ways for generations, from my great-grandparents to my grandparents to my parents, every generation was doing better than the one before, more economically secure.

4:07But now people are living in a nation where there's a deep economic insecurity. And so here you have a nation and a state where you don't know who can deliver on that redeeming of the American dream for them. And I think that frustration is playing out in our politics. It's playing out especially when you see demagogues and carnival barkers who are trying to exploit that pain or lie to Americans about what they are going to do. Lower grocery prices on day one. I'm going to lower prescription drug prices. Healthcare, I have some semblance of a plan, but you'll be okay. Again, people feel like they are looking for who to believe in and what to believe.

4:52And that makes some sense to me. It would make more complete sense if Donald Trump hadn't held office before. But he had. And so in a way, we were – in fact, Kamala Harris hadn't been president, and he had. And so I get the frustration. I'm also curious why you think Trump was a more appealing alternative to these frustrated people than the Democratic Party and Kamala Harris. So look, I mean, Trump may have done well in New Jersey, but like happened in his first term, he has sunk in the polls in my state dramatically. And there is a frustration. And even some of the counties that had high immigrant populations that seem to support him, it's now going the exact opposite direction where you have more people in those counties literally saying in interviews, I made a mistake.

5:41I did not think he would have masked, unidentified people jumping out of unmarked cars, going into our courts, our churches, our hospitals, and dragging people to God knows where. I think the centering of Donald Trump and trying to figure out that psychology of that person is important. But what is a bigger challenge for me as an American right now is trying to figure out how do we as a country deal with what I think is an even greater threat, the one that he exploited, because he is a symptom, I think, of a deeper problem. And that deeper problem lies in how tribal we've become as a country, how we are being told on all of our major platforms that are competing for our attention that we should hate each other, that we are so different, that we are existentially a threat to one another.

6:35And for me, that is in this environment, it actually is working to undermine our ability to meet our common pain. Because I go around this country and I see that we have a deep common pain, but we do not have a sense of deep common purpose. I'm looking for what I think America's calling is and what was for my grandparents' generation, my parents' generation, despite all the challenges that they grew up with in a divided along racial lines country. What they were able to experience was human flourishing. I want to ask you one more question about 2024. And honestly, it's trying to help me figure out what is the most befuddling aspect of American politics.

7:19Please. I take your point that Donald Trump is less popular with immigrants and with many of these groups than he was before he took office. But as you said, this isn't just about Trump. Why is it do you think that non-white Americans, immigrant Americans, groups that are very large in New Jersey, have looked at the Democratic Party in 2024 and said, no thanks? Look, when I sit in a barbershop, and I know you find that hard to believe given my lack of hair. But when I sit in a barbershop in my neighborhood, a black barbershop, you find people with the same frustration as if I went to a rural area and went to a diner, is that people just don't believe American politics is serving Americans.

8:03Yep. And that frustration makes people look like, okay, I've been riding this horse for a long time. It hasn't gotten to me where I want to go. Let me jump on this other horse. The second thing I want to say to you is a far more parochial in terms of what the Democratic problem was in this election when you talk about young people. But I was astonished. In fact, I went to the Democratic leadership in the Senate and I said, give me this job, please, because you have senators. Which job? The job of trying to teach my caucus to use the platforms that most Americans get their news from now. You were saying Democrats have not been good enough in engaging with them.

8:43If your young voters get their news on TikTok and you are not there. I made a room full of people once. I said, everybody born in March, chant truth. Now everybody born in the other months, chant lie. I had them all scream as loud as you can. And then I stopped and said, what did you hear? Even the people who were chanting truth could only hear lie. And what Donald Trump did is he showed up on the gaming platforms. We weren't there at all. And I basically said to my team, my fellow Democrats, you guys are running to go do an MSNBC. And I love my MSNBC, but that only got 100 ,000 views. And I can show you on my platforms that one video of mine can get more than the top rated views on MSNBC.

9:27MSNBC. And so we're in a different era. And that's an important point. But the bigger point I want to really drive with you right now is we need to redeem the dream of America. And the dream I described to you that my grandfather believed in, the dream that my father believed in, and the dream that was real for them, men coming out of poverty and hardship and suffered the scars of racism. This was a country that was closing the black-white wealth gap that offered my grandfather, who worked on an assembly line, not only enough money to provide for his family, but him and my grandmother were able to be entrepreneurs, invest in a laundromat, invest in a gas station.

10:08They were the Jeffersons. They moved on up. What happened to that dream? Now, my grandfather was a Democrat. Why? Because when he was coming up, most blacks were Republicans. and they switched. My grandfather bragged to the day he died that he converted through his organizing and working on elections that he got 14 districts in Detroit to shift over to the Democratic Party. What era was this? This was the 1930s and 40s, the FDR era. And why was FDR the guy that could get a union guy to shift over to that party? Because FDR did two things. He had a clear vision that this was going to be the nation where working people would have dignity at work, would be able to afford a home, would be able to afford to raise their children and give them a better life.

10:59And then he delivered on those things. That's my grandfather's Democratic Party. My father came to this town, Washington, D.C., out of an HBCU. And because of the civil rights movement, that blacks and whites, Christians and Jews in this town were forcing corporations to hire qualified blacks. He became IBM's first black salesman in this entire region and became one of their top 5 % of their global salesmen. Because if you give creative fair playing field, people get on that field and compete. And next thing you know, my father would look at my brother and I growing up in a suburban home in New Jersey and say, boy, don't you dare walk around this house like you hit a triple.

11:41You were born on third base. But that's the dream for every generation. And the Democratic Party has failed in my generation. Let's use that to come to this moment, to what Donald Trump is doing now. Back in March, actually, I think it went on so long that it extended into April. you gave a 25-hour speech on the Senate floor. Yes. You set a record. I read that you didn't drink water or eat food in advance to minimize the bathroom trips. It definitely was. That was my biggest obstacle, I thought, was that I would need to go to the bathroom. So I did something that you should not do, dehydrated yourself for more than a day, and then I didn't eat food for three days.

12:20And how many times did you actually have to leave the floor to go to the bathroom? You can't. You can't. So zero. Zero. You didn't have anyone pinch hit for you. No, you're not allowed to. Zero. Zero, yes. So you do that clearly to try to bring a new level of attention to the ways in which Donald Trump is undermining our democracy. And I'm curious now that we're several months out from that. When you look back on it, in what ways do you think you succeeded in bringing more attention? And in what ways do you think, okay, that worked in this way, but it didn't work in these other ways, and here's what we have to do going forward?

12:56How do you grade your own 25-hour floor speech? Well, the ambition was at that point, especially when I think we were – a lot of people in America were feeling deflated and defeated by all that was going on. Remember, it was right after we had given the Republicans a continuing resolution for six months, and a lot of people were saying, why didn't we stand and fight? Right after you hadn't shut down the government before the government did shut down. Again, we don't shut down the government. They control the House, the Senate, and the White House. They wouldn't come to the table to negotiate with us.

13:29And I felt like we just gave in to them. And I was feeling defeated. And I was having Americans, new workers in this case, stop me and say, why aren't you guys fighting for us? And I said to a guy in the grocery store, and I said to him, well, we don't have the majority. And look, I'm as frustrated as you are, but we can't call committee. And finally, I was just – he said, you're making all these excuses. Are you an American or American't? And I laughed at him. And he says, where is the guy, he said to me, that I voted for in 1998, back when I had hair, he said. As a Newark City counselor. As a Newark City councilman who then against this oppressive machine that you were fighting at that time, you went out and did a 10-day hunger strike and rallied thousands to address the problems in a place that had been forgotten.

14:16Where's the guy that when our community wasn't safe, you moved into a mobile home and lived there on what people said were our worst drug corner? And he started marching through my career about all the things that I did to not let the absurdities that people were living with be normalized. And so I came back to Washington and I told my team, we need to start finding ways to show that this is not a normal time. But more than that, shining the light on the very people that are in the struggle. And I very deliberately read Republican voices. Donald Trump is benefiting from our tribal divide, from the lie, the destructive lie, that we don't have common pain and common purpose in this.

15:05I rise tonight because I believe sincerely that our country is in crisis. And I believe that not in a partisan sense because so many of the people that have been reaching out to my office in pain, in fear, having their lives upended, So many of them identify themselves as Republicans. That was my attempt. And it succeeded in this sense. I remember listening. I think it was one of the major radio stations I listened to interviewing people whose letters I read on the Senate floor. And so TikTok reached out to us at 340 million Americans pressed like on it. These are people that actually engage with the content in a significant way.

15:48it began to elevate it, but it cannot be a one-time thing. That's why I was happy days later to go out to the No Kings rally. That's why many months later, my friends were sending me pictures of people's protest signs that had quotes from that speech in this most recent No Kings rally, because the biggest problem we have, and King said this, that what we have to repent for is not just the vitriolic words and violent actions of the bad people, but the appalling silence and inaction of the good people. How do you think about the fact, I'm sure you've heard this from people inside the Democratic Party, from pollsters, that Americans just care much more about the first set of issues we were talking about, their own weekly budget, paying for healthcare, getting their kids to a good school, and that they just don't have time or energy to think about these so-called democracy issues.

16:45I think then that is a failure to tell the story so we all understand. Politics has to still be about not just the prose, but the poetry. It's why Martin Luther King could stand up on the March on Washington, not about his 10-point policy plan, but to call to the moral imagination of a nation and say, we're all in this together. we all have common yearnings for our children. Why democracy? If you can't tell people that the corruption of oil companies and what they do and the money they drown this place with is connected to your high energy costs, then you're not telling the story. If you can't tell about why people's high prescription drug costs are because pharmaceutical companies come to this and drown it in money.

17:38That's what corruption has to be talked about. So you're saying it has to be about democracy because that's what's happening. And you have to connect it to the ways in which people experience it in their daily lives. I think one of the greatest stories in our nation are the stories where people fought and bled and died for those incredible ideals that our founders put forward that were so radical that they themselves, so lofty and resonant that they themselves fell short of them. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men, all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

18:25Do you know those words fueled every major movement in our country? They were literally quoted by everybody from Susan B. Anthony to Harvey Milk to Martin Luther King. God, I want people to feel the magnitude of who we are as a people that this country did break with the course of human events to create something that's so special. There's all these fights about American exceptionalism. I'm on the side that we are exceptional. And that we're exceptional especially because of Frederick Douglass. were exceptional, especially because of Alice Paul. Were exceptional because of the people who believed so much in this democracy, even when the democracy or the government didn't believe in them.

19:10And they believe something that we have lost now, that I'm gonna do everything I can to rekindle in this country, which is a sense of common cause. I hadn't thought about this in exactly these terms until you just made that point. But Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech is a speech that ties together these lofty democratic principles with material day-to-day living standards. I mean, his dream, he says, is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. And so he's doing the, I want to make your lives good, while he's also appealing, as you just noted, to the highest principles of America.

19:43Yes, and the unifying principles. I believe we are still a nation. And as soon as we can let folks understand that, when we start recognizing that we have a shared devotion to an ideal that's being lost, the American ideal, and stop letting people think it's an ideal that belongs to one party or the other, that's when we start breaking through and doing the things that 70 % of Americans. I said this to Joe Biden when he was still a nominee. I joked with him. I said, if you go out and tell America you're only going to do the things that 70 % or more of Americans agree with, you would get so many people behind you.

20:20That's not what he did. No, it's not what he did. But I watch and listen to the other side of the aisle all the time. And I'm seeing these horseshoe moments where people I disagree with fundamentally, like let's use a controversial issue, abortion. I am watching these activists suddenly start saying, if we are for children, if we want more children born, we need to start dealing with child care, paid family leave, affordable health care, maternal care. And I'm like, wait a minute, that's an opportunity. We may not agree on a woman controlling her body, but we can find some common ground because I, too, agree that we're not encouraging enough people who want to have kids to have them, that we're creating an environment that's too hard.

21:06And if we can start speaking specifically to how we're going to do that better, I would think that more Republicans and Democrats would join that fight. There's a tension here, which is I understand the need to talk about to stop hating the other side. Right. That's vital. We're all fellow citizens. but there's also this question of what to do in the moment. Yes. And to me, in some ways, this tension is highlighted by this spicy debate you had with your colleagues, Senator Klobuchar and Senator Cortez Mastro, where you felt like the Democratic Party wasn't doing enough to stand up to Donald Trump.

21:36What I am tired of is when the president of the United States of America violates the Constitution, trashes our norms and traditions. And what does the Democratic Party do? comply? Allow him? Beg for scraps? No, I demand justice. And basically what you were criticizing them for doing was supporting an issue that actually is one of those 70 % issues, which is cracking down on crime. There is a tension between let's do the stuff that 70 % agree on and let's make clear how abnormal Donald Trump is. And I'm curious how you think about when is it that the Democratic Party today should be part of the making progress on the 70 percent?

22:25And when should it say, no, no, no, we got to grind everything to a halt, which is basically what you were arguing that moment in order to make people sit up and see that we're sliding toward autocracy? Well, no, I and I'm sorry you misinterpreted what I was doing there. These were bills that would allow Donald Trump to – it was a grant program for local police departments, but he had said he would – those grants would not go to New York, New Jersey, Illinois. And I'm like, wait a minute. Let's support these grant programs but put my amendment in that says that the executive can't undermine the congressional intent and every state can equally apply this.

23:02So that to me was a fundamental assault on the separation of powers that we should not be participating in. Okay. Yeah. God, if Donald Trump right now says to me, hey, Corey, I want to fund healthcare. I want to fund local police departments. I want to fund infrastructure. So the commuters in my state. You're on board with that. I'm on board with that. That doesn't mean that I still I'm somehow weaker in my stand up against his massive crypto corruption that he's doing right now. I can call that out and still get things done. Remember, two of my favorite bills I've ever passed, one was criminal justice reform that liberated thousands of people from unjust incarceration, bipartisan bill that he signed.

23:41In his first term. Including another one that got billions of dollars invested in the lowest income rural and urban places. Proud of that bill, he signed it. I don't care who you are. If you're an American and you have an idea that we can work on together, it's how I was as a mayor. But I work with the Manhattan Institute and other conservatives to deliver for my community. Draw a firm line on anything that is anti-democratic, including bills that help red America but not blue America, and then work together on the issues that actually help. Look, I think this is an existential moment when it comes to what Donald Trump is doing to our country.

24:15And there are definitely times where the way he's twisted the Justice Department, I'm not voting anymore for Justice Department nominees when they are weaponizing the entire Justice Department and making people do things that has caused whole-scale resignations in those departments. So, again, the bigger point is how you fight. And I'm going to have disagreements with other Democrats, and that is healthy because we're about to turn a page. It is an exciting page to me that the generation that is my parents' generation is leaving the stage. The torch is being passed before our eyes. A new generation of American leadership is coming up.

25:03what an exciting time to redeem the dream. In the Democratic Party, I want to have a very tough conversation. And I want it to be a competition of ideas about what our party's going to look like. I'm one of those people that's saying is our party has failed. They've made terrible mistakes. And I want us to emerge in this moment, not focusing on party, but refocusing on people. And I'm so excited about that because this dark time and forgive me, but this is my faith tradition now. Weeping may endure through the night, but joy cometh in the morning. I am telling you right now, as heartbroken as so many of us feel, and I'm telling you in this moment, if America hasn't broken your heart, you don't love her enough.

25:49And so all those people who love this country and are in deep pain and wounded by what they see is happening right now, hold tight. the best chapter in a century, I think, is upon us if we can get the leadership right. What do you say to someone who says, yeah, I'd love to believe that, and certainly we've overcome darkness in the past, but why should I have any hope now that we're going to overcome it? We've talked a lot about optimism in this series, and I just think a lot of people struggle to summon optimism today. Well, as I said to you, these are heartbreaking times. But that is a sign of great love.

26:33You cannot have great courage unless you face great fear. And you cannot have great hope unless you face great despair. And so right now, for us to give up on the American idea, on the American dream when they didn't give up after four girls died in a bombing in Birmingham, They didn't give up at Stonewall when they were beaten down. They didn't give up after the Edmund Pettus Bridge when they were beaten back. There's nothing we're experiencing now that our ancestors didn't experience worse. And they fought through it and they brought about a new day. Well, one of my heroes is A. Philip Randolph.

27:07I would guess he's one of yours. And he tried to start a union in the United States when it was essentially impossible to try to start a labor union. Oh, and he tried to start it among black, low-income workers who had no union. And if I were sitting here with A. Philip Randolph more than 100 years ago and saying, give me bullet points of reason for your optimism, he wouldn't be able to do so, really. And yet, he kept faith and he kept doing works, to your point, and there are no guarantees, but he prevailed. Yes. And so, right now, every American has a choice, is to surrender the idea of America, to surrender to cynicism, to delve into despair, or to fight like hell.