“When Are More Americans Going to Speak Up?”
Senator Cory Booker on the grave harm that Donald Trump has inflicted on American life in his first hundred days in office.
A few weeks ago, Senator Cory Booker, of New Jersey, rose on the floor of the Senate and said that he had the “intention of disrupting the normal business of the United States Senate for as long as I am physically able.” With that, he launched into a sprawling, heartfelt speech directed at the Presidency of Donald Trump. He came prepared with more than a thousand pages of written material, including testimony from hundreds of New Jerseyans and other Americans.
Twenty-five hours and five minutes later, Booker stopped talking. He had broken the record for a continuous speech in the chamber, set, in 1957, by the South Carolina segregationist Strom Thurmond, whose oratory was in the service of filibustering against a civil-rights bill. Not long after finishing his marathon, Booker said that he would “go deal with some of the biological urgencies I’m feeling.”
Since then, Booker, who served as mayor of Newark before winning his Senate seat in 2013, has kept up the volume of his critique of Trump. I spoke with him recently for The New Yorker Radio Hour about the impulse for his speech, the growing harms of the Trump Presidency, and what he sees as the dangerous failure of so many institutions and leaders to speak up. Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
We are coming up on Trump’s hundredth day in office, and I was just reading the slew of pieces that were written eight years ago—about the Muslim ban, Mike Flynn’s appointment and rapid dismissal, the crazy midnight tweeting, the flirtations with Moscow and Pyongyang, the atmosphere of general alarm. What is different now?
There is a deeper, more grave attack going on with our fundamental constitutional principles that I believe we all share. The Trump Administration seems resolute to tear down a century of traditions—or at least post-World War Two traditions—of world order. And Trump is effectively, thus far, doing it without Republican congressional leaders doing anything—not just to stop him, but even to offer up a strong rebuke or critique. And so I think that the danger signs this time are far greater.
I have been told by people doing scientific research, people doing international work to stop the spread of infectious diseases, people who are talking about agency investigations into horrific crimes, that a lot of the things that he’s doing are irreversible, or at least will take a generation to try to undo. And so the consequences every day that this Administration continues in this manner are grave and great.
What has been accomplished in a hundred days that you think is particularly grave and particularly irreversible?
There are many things to point to that are grave. I’ll start with one of them that I mentioned. A lot of people who are doing research are pointing to example after example of how Trump’s actions have stopped it—whether it’s actually taking scientists themselves through immigration action and bouncing them out of our country, or putting them in detention, or just cutting the funding.
Trump has taken a page out of China’s book and they have taken a page out of our book. China attacked their universities during the Cultural Revolution in a stunning way. They attacked élite institutions that were doing scientific research as well as culture. And then they realized, in our generation, how much that cost them. Now they’re seeing things like breakthroughs in A.I., robotics, autonomous vehicles, E.V.s. They understand that the future will be shaped fundamentally by those who are inventing it.
And what has Trump done in a hundred days? He’s declared a cultural revolution of his own, attacking universities, attacking folks that are on the frontiers of science and research, putting them on the defensive, cutting billions of dollars, creating a situation where they are stopping research or stopping an inflow of the world’s best researchers. This is not a loss we can just bounce back from.
What, if anything, about the first hundred days of this Administration has surprised you?
Trump is losing his ability to surprise me. When people ask me about his talking about a third term, or deporting American citizens to a gulag in El Salvador—I mean, these outrageous things he’s said, I’ve come to expect them, and believe him. So I don’t know if there’s surprise. There’s been a lot of profound disappointment.
I know my Republican colleagues in the Senate and some in the House. I know their core values. I listen to them—from the Signalgate and the problems with [Defense Secretary Pete] Hegseth, all the way to just cutting bipartisan-approved investments in things like science, in some of the bipartisan bills that we pass that deal with gun violence, bipartisan investments in health innovations—I know privately from conversations how much they object to these things. And right now where my heartbreak lies is that so far you’ve seen scant few people willing to step up and take risks because there is a reality—Jeff Flake, Bob Corker, Liz Cheney—that people who did stand up, did speak out, are no longer in Congress.
Are these jobs so great? Is being a senator so wildly awesome that one would not give it up in order to live by one’s principles? Lisa Murkowski whispers that people are frightened, but that’s about as much resistance as you hear or see among Republicans. Are the jobs that great?
I certainly don’t believe they are. I really don’t. I just know from psychology that we’re always the heroes in our own story. People think to themselves, I will make these compromises in order to be in a position to do this good, and they do this calculus in their head.
But there is a truth that I always joke about, which is that “Profiles in Courage” is a very thin volume. We’ve seen, though, Margaret Chase Smith, at a time where she took great political risk in a fierce speech she gave in criticism of her own party during the McCarthy era. We’ve seen demagogues rise before, to positions of great power and influence, from Father [Charles] Coughlin to [Joseph] McCarthy. Usually you see people who have the courage to step up and say, “Sir, do you have no shame?”
At this point, we have not gotten there yet. My father has this old story about a hound dog howling next to a man in a rocking chair, and a guy walks on the country road and asks him, “Why is your hound dog howling so much?” And he goes, “Well, he’s sitting on a nail.” And he goes, “Well, why doesn’t the hound dog just get up off the nail?” And the man on the rocking chair says, “Well, he’s not hurting bad enough yet.”
I’ve heard a lot of howling from people across the political spectrum, but the question is: When is the pain going to be enough? When he brings private businesses to heel for private political purposes, like law firms? When he attacks centers of excellence on planet Earth—our universities? Is that enough? Is it going to be enough when he violates due process and disappears people off of our streets? Is that going to be enough for you? When he brings about a tariff regime that’s so chaotic, that’s so unplanned, that’s so unstrategic, that he throws our economy into peril—is that enough? When is it enough for you to speak up? And when I ask that question, it’s not just for the Republicans that are elected. It’s for all of us.
Bring me into the cloakroom. You’re having a conversation with a Republican colleague, and you’re discussing the situation in these terms. What is the ensuing dialogue like?
One of the reasons why politicians don’t act is because the demand from the people is not enough yet. And so as much as we want to point a finger at people who are elected to positions, which is justified, I also want to ask a lot of other powerful people in this country who are remaining silent. We’ve seen what many corporate leaders are doing right now—instead of speaking up and speaking truth, they’re kowtowing for their own private deals. In a tariff regime, do you go and say, “Hey, please exclude electronics.” Or do you go and say, “This is fundamentally wrong. You are hurting the economy. And I may face some backlash for this, but, when they look back at this moment in history, I’m going to be one of those leaders in our country.” Whatever the sector is—from the faith community to the business community, to the nonprofit community, to the foundation community—when are more Americans going to speak up?
My community, too. We’re talking an hour after the news came down that the executive producer of “60 Minutes” quit, which can only tell you that CBS [which is owned by Paramount] is ready to make a deal with Donald Trump and his lawsuit against them.
And we’ve seen this before in too many countries where there’s been democratic backsliding. When good people are silent, that’s when bad things and bad people flourish. Donald Trump is trying to intimidate people. He’s trying to threaten people. And too many people are allowing him to continue because they’re thinking of what is in their own personal, financial well-being, and not what is in the well-being of our democracy. It frustrates me. We are now at a moment where you have to choose—between financial comfort and security, or the well-being of your economy and vulnerable people who are right now in the crosshairs.
Senator, you’ve portrayed Donald Trump in pretty dark terms, and yet you’re a person who prizes empathy and tries to figure out what’s in the head of the other, even if it’s a political opponent as stark as Donald Trump. Trump doesn’t go to bed at night thinking he’s awful or pernicious or selfish. How do you imagine that he sees himself?
I just recently read the actual judge’s decision from the E. Jean Carroll case, and I was stunned. I don’t know why I hadn’t looked at it until now, with such credible allegations of rape that the judge, in no flourish of politics at all, but focussing on the facts before him, cast this picture of such a despicable act by Donald Trump. I see the crass way he talks about veterans or other marginalized groups. I’ve sat with him, up close and personal—one of my first meetings in his first term, I still remember this moment, seeing his lack of curiosity, or even the most basic understanding—but more than that, how easily he was distracted, how his top aides treated him like a child, almost like they were jangling their keys for a child to keep him focussed. I remember walking out of that meeting and turning to my colleague from New York, just despondent, and saying, “World leaders are going to see what I just saw. World leaders are going to see that kind of reckless arrogance and almost conscientious ignorance about details.”
So I have stopped concerning myself with Donald Trump’s motivations and thought processes. I need to deal with him, with what he is doing to people that I care about and love in this country. You can’t lead the people if you don’t love the people. I love my state—I love Jersey. But my bigger concern and anger right now is what is taking so long for many people to say that this is too far? Why are so many good people with power and privilege remaining so silent, keeping their frustration and outrage to quiet conversations with their friends? When is it enough? That is the moral crisis of this moment. We know who Donald Trump is. But the question is: Who are we?
My understanding is that you were hearing silence in your own party leadership, and the occasion for your twenty-five hour speech on the floor of the Senate was your hearing from a lot of your constituents. What were they saying, and at what volume?
I was encountering a lot of anger toward me, because when I would explain to people that we don’t have the votes as Democrats, we don’t have the ability to stop this spending bill or stop this confirmation—that was wholly unsatisfying to people who were afraid, who were themselves angry, who couldn’t imagine these things happening in their country, and expected more from me and more from the Democratic Party. We decided, after I had a disagreement with my leader, Chuck Schumer, over the continuing resolution [on the budget]—I decided that I had to shift my own way of working now. I felt like my constituents were demanding from me that I take risks, that I think outside of the box.
Why did you decide that a day-long speech from the well of the Senate was the political theatre that would be most effective?
We were getting letters that would literally render my staff in tears. We had people coming to our office, not even from our state, because they saw this as an outpost, to tell us that they were going to lose their farm because Donald Trump had cut contracts. Stories that were just gut-wrenching to my staff. And they said, “We’ve got to find a way to make those stories break through.” And so part of our strategy was: How do you get the nation to listen a little bit more? In this terribly competitive attention economy that we have, what could break through?
The same year that John Lewis wrote a letter to Martin Luther King, and King then sent him a bus ticket—that was the same year that Strom Thurmond gave the longest speech in Senate history, trying to stop what Martin Luther King and John Lewis were doing in that letter exchange. And so as a Black man who was not envisioned by Strom Thurmond ever serving in [the Senate]—in fact, I’m the fourth Black person ever popularly elected to that body, after Barack Obama, who was the third—we knew that if I could last twenty-four hours and eighteen minutes, that we could potentially command some attention from the public. We never imagined that we would get, on TikTok alone, over three hundred million people liking the live stream. We never thought that it would be as successful as it was. That’s the key here—to deal with the poverty of empathy we have in our nation right now. The poverty of realizing that this is happening to my neighbor, that this fundamentally implicates me and endangers me.
You mentioned Senator Schumer earlier. You’ve said that you would not want the job of Minority Leader in the Senate. Why not?
Well, let me first say that I may have disagreed with Senator Schumer vehemently in this instance, but anybody who looks at the Senate in the last three or four years would have to say that this guy, this tactician behind the scenes, has racked up one hell of a record. I mean, the bipartisan bills that I watched from a front-row seat: a bipartisan gun bill, the bipartisan CHIPS act, a bipartisan infrastructure bill. This is Chuck Schumer’s leadership. Chuck pulled the trifecta off. He won in Wisconsin, he won in Michigan, he won in Arizona—seats that by all intents and purposes we should have lost. And we obviously had great candidates, but Chuck was doing it.
So you don’t think Chuck Schumer’s time has come?
No.
You think that’s the case indefinitely?
No, I wouldn’t say indefinitely. Look, the last baby boomers are leaving power in American politics. This is the last baby-boomer President, Chuck is the last baby-boomer leader of the Senate. A new generation is dawning, and my critique thus far of my generation and millennials is that we have failed to step up and say, like generations before us, that it’s time to dream America anew.
When Nayib Bukele, the Salvadoran President, visited the White House earlier this month, he paraded as a kind of fellow-autocrat with the President. Trump said that he’d like to include “homegrown criminals that push people into subways” in the “group of people to get ’em out of the country.” I don’t think he was kidding around. You’ve got a President who believes he can even send American citizens to foreign prisons. Are Democrats working on anything preëmptively to protect American citizens?
You ask whether the Democrats are working on anything. I’m trying to broaden this to say that all Americans—the responsibility falls on all of us.
That’s totally fair. But you’ve got a job. And I do, too—
But New Jersey did not send me to Washington to be a great Democratic senator. They sent me to be a great New Jersey senator, and a great fighter for America. And this is why during the twenty-five hour [speech in the Senate] we brought in the CATO Institute, the Heritage Foundation‚ Republican gubernatorial voices—all to make the point, from their own words, why this President is so dangerous and why this is a time of moral urgency. Right now, one of my biggest areas of focus is stopping this bill that will gut Medicaid and health care for eighty, ninety million people and endanger hospitals. We need Republicans of good conscience, like we did in 2017 with the Affordable Care Act, to vote with us. And so playing this as a partisan game—
Fair enough.
—cheapens the larger cause of the country. This is a time when America needs moral leadership, and not political leadership. And that’s what I’m standing up and saying. I’m accepting responsibility for my own leadership failings. And I want to appeal to the soul, the heart, the conscience of our country—it’s not just important for leaders now to speak against Trump, but also to capture the imagination of people for how we can rise above this moment.
Senator Booker, over the years, you have been a really clear opponent of antisemitism, over and over again. But would you agree that antisemitism, to some extent, is being exploited in a political way by the Trump Administration? How do you see that very complicated piece of business?
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I see it very clearly. Were there things happening on college campuses that were dead wrong in my book? Absolutely. College campuses, college presidents and leadership, made mistakes. And they should be owning up to them and taking corrective action. But, yes, Donald Trump is exploiting antisemitism in order to pursue an agenda that is far greater and far more authoritarian. We know that people preyed upon Jewish populations during the Red Scare, and used hate and antisemitism in a different way then, as a tool to pursue what I consider a dark chapter in American history. Political opportunists will exploit fear, hate, and division for their larger authoritarian aims. And that’s exactly what Donald Trump is doing.
Now I know you got a lot of positive reaction to your twenty-five-hour-long speech. I wonder if you got the other thing, too. Lisa Murkowski has talked about threats that have come her way. Do they come your way as well?
Yeah. Look, there’s a great book—“How Democracies Die” [by Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky]. They talk about the different signs. One sign I started seeing when Obama was President, where the letter of the law was followed, but the spirit of the Constitution wasn’t, was when they wouldn’t give [Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court] Merrick Garland a hearing. That was a slow unwinding of the spirit of bipartisanship, or the spirit of democratic norms and traditions. And I’ve seen that erode even more quickly, obviously, under this current President, in a disastrous way.
One of the other signs they talked about was the heightening of political violence and threats of violence. We are seeing chilling things. Esther Salas is a federal judge in my state. A murderer went to her house and murdered her child and shot and severely wounded her husband. That was bad enough. Threats at that point on federal judges were up about four hundred per cent. But to see how they’re skyrocketing even more now under Donald Trump—there’s been incendiary language across the board on federal judges.
I saw [Esther Salas] interviewed. She was shaken, because people are sending pizzas to federal judges who are deciding against Donald Trump from her son’s name, Daniel Anderl. They’re using her murdered son’s name to send pizzas to the homes of a federal judge, almost to say: we know where you live. I’m definitely facing a whole new order of security concerns in my own life, as are senators on both sides of the aisle. When [Iowa Senator] Joni Ernst dared to question the qualifications of Pete Hegseth, what she endured online—the vicious things that were being said about her, the political threats, and more, in my opinion, were vile. And we’re just seeing it go up more and more. This is something that has to stop in our country.
Do you think that played a role in her, in the end, supporting Hegseth?
I will make no guesses as to what her internal deliberations were.
But it must be scary.
Most senators and congresspeople, on both sides whom I’ve talked to, know that we are living in a scary environment. We are seeing the largest level of antisemitic hate in my lifetime. We’re seeing threats on Muslim Americans, Sikh Americans—every religious group is seeing a rise in threats of violence and hate crimes. Blacks and Latinos—what’s happening to the Latino community at this time is chilling.
Your Latino constituents must be watching what’s happening with extraordinary alarm.
Let me be clear. Even ones who voted for Trump never imagined this and have expressed regret that they voted for Donald Trump. People in my neighborhood are afraid to walk their children to work, are afraid to go out to restaurants. Restaurants are seeing a plunge in attendance because of the fear within the immigrant communities here, and these are people who are doing jobs that—just a few years ago, we were calling them “essential workers.” These are people who have contributed to our economy, who have paid taxes—many of them run businesses that pay taxes and employ people. So we are in crisis right now. There is a presumption of criminality that puts communities at risk, and puts their families at risk, and undermines, again, the strength of our economy.
I find that the conversation that we’re having sounds like a conversation that would be born of ten years of experience rather than a hundred days. A hundred days! Wednesday is the one hundredth day of Trump’s second term, and there are thirteen hundred days remaining, or thereabouts. What do you expect to see happen?
Well, first of all, I hope it’s chilling to some to understand that it takes years—years—to establish democratic norms and traditions. Decades to strengthen democratic principles and ideals. Generations to instill them within the hearts and minds of a people. But it could take days to unravel them—days to tear them down.
I have never in my life been as worried about our country, about our democracy, about our traditions, as I am now. But I will say this: Shiva, in the Hindu faith, is the god of destruction. And I know Donald Trump would get glee from me comparing him to any kind of god. But Shiva’s also a valued god because you can’t have renewal and rebirth without facing destruction.
I am a prisoner of hope. I always will be. I think the best way to answer despair is to not let it have the last word. That’s what hope is. I will always counter despairing times with telling what I think is the truth of our country’s history. It has often been out of the darkest times, where we’ve seen the infernos of Hell, where we’ve seen destruction, where we’ve seen Shiva—from those ashes has often risen the best of who we are. And that’s really what I’m working for right now. Not just to stop the destruction coming from the White House but to usher in the next generation of leadership in this country to help us to dream America anew and redeem the dream for so many who’ve given up on the very dream of America.
