Cory Booker: “America Needs Moral Leadership, and Not Political Leadership”

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This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker.

Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour.

I'm David Remnick.

April 30th marks 100 days of Donald Trump's second term.

And in that short time, the administration has carried out an unprecedented series of attacks against legal immigrants, against civic institutions and universities, against the rule of law itself.

The president's tariff policy and all its chaos has absolutely tanked the global economy.

Many Americans who are anguished about the administration are looking for someone to lead the opposition because the Democratic Party has, with some exceptions, been very cautious.

And congressional Republicans, in the words of Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, are all afraid to stand up to Trump.

So in the face of this anguish, on March 31st, Corey Booker of New Jersey launched an epic protest on the floor of the Senate.

Maybe you're an immigrant that's never broken the law.

Maybe you're a citizen.

Even if you think the administration's immigration agenda doesn't apply to you, please know that the reckless behavior we're seeing erodes all of our rights.

And the American mother and the American child right now,

whose husband was unjustly and illegally deported and is right now in an El Salvadorian prison.

Booker spoke for more than a day.

He spoke for 25 hours, finishing in the evening of April 1st.

It was a Jimmy Stewart moment, an extended extended rallying cry for decency and the rule of law.

Would the senator yield for a question?

Chuck Schewer, it's the only time in my life I can tell you no.

I just want to tell you a question.

Do you know you have just broken the record?

Do you know how proud this caucus is of you?

Do you know how proud America is of you?

In fact, this wasn't Corey Booker's first piece of political theater.

Years ago, when he was on the city council in Newark, New Jersey, he once went on a hunger strike to call attention to open drug sales.

Booker became Newark's mayor, and he was elected a senator from New Jersey in 2013, and he ran for president in the 2020 election.

We spoke last week.

We are coming up on...

Trump's 100th 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 whole atmosphere of general alarm.

Why is now different?

There is a deeper, more grave attack going on on our fundamental constitutional principles that I believe we all share, a defiance amongst the Trump administration that seems resolute to tear down really a century of traditions, or at least post-World War II

traditions in world order.

And he 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.

And in less than 100 days, as I have been told from people doing scientific research, of people doing international work to stop the spread of infectious diseases, from people who are talking about agency investigations into horrific crimes, that a lot of the things that he's doing is irreversible.

and 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 100 days that you think is

particularly grave and particularly irreversible?

So

I'll start with one of them that I mentioned.

I'm having a lot of people who are doing a lot of research who point 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.

As someone was telling me, a university who's cut their postdoc programs, who's had to stop the number of people they're letting in that are doing fundamentally critical research, that you can't just turn those things on and off at a time that our competitors like China are doubling down and investing in their research and their science, understanding that the future will be shaped fundamentally by those who are discovering it, are inventing it, that this is not a loss that we can just bounce back from.

Trump has taken a page out of China's book.

I mean, they have taken a page out of our book.

And the best way to point that is that China attacked their universities and their cultural revolution in a stunning way.

They attacked these elite institutions that were doing science research as well as culture.

And then they realized in our generation how much that cost them a century of growth, a century of expanded potential and possibility.

And now they're seeing things like breakthroughs in AI, robotics, EVs.

They want to define the future.

They want to lead in the same way that we did in the 1980s, 90s, when I was coming out of college.

And what has Trump done in 100 days?

Is 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 their defensive, cutting them billions of dollars, making them in a situation where they are stopping research or stopping an inflow of the world's best researchers.

You had the first term as evidence.

You had a second campaign against Joe Biden that he lost as evidence.

And then a third campaign in Project 2025 as evidence of intent.

What, if anything, about the first hundred days of this administration has surprised you?

I

cannot say in the world of Trump, like he's losing his ability to surprise me.

When people ask me about his talking about a third term or deporting American citizens to a gulag, an El Salvador, I mean, these outrageous things he've said, I've come to expect them and believe him when he says these things.

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 as everything from the Signal Gate

and the problems with Heg Seth, 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 I guess right now where my heartbreak lies is that so far you've seen scant few people willing to step up and risk because there is a reality of people who did stand up,

did speak out, who are no longer in Congress.

Aaron Powell, well, 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, which is 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 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?

And we've seen this before in too many countries where there's been democratic backsliding.

And then worse cases from history of my grandparents' generation is that when good people are silent, that's when bad things and bad people flourish.

And Donald Trump is trying to intimidate people, 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.

And it frustrates me.

And now at a moment where you have to choose between the kind of gains that you've had, the financial comfort and security, or are you going to choose the well-being of your economy?

are you going to choose to stand up for those vulnerable people who are right now in the crosshairs the sick who are going to be losing medicaid the hungry that are going to be losing food stamps the disabled who are going to be losing the support they get from programs like medicaid at the time when this country's very constitutional principles are being eroded where supreme court decisions 9-0 supreme court decisions are being violated where a president is not asking what your country can do for you, what you can do for your country, is asking very pointedly, ask what you can do for me.

What have you done for Donald Trump?

Is that he's succeeded in doing these things so quickly and in such profusion that Congress and the public can't keep up with it?

Look, I've served in this institution now for 12 plus years.

The fact that we're not holding oversight hearings, not even questioning what Elon Musk is doing when he was under investigation by multiple government agencies and has eviscerated those investigations.

He is scraping Americans' data, social security data, with no accountability, no questioning, not one hearing where there was a violation of all of our ideals of what should be national security protocols by using signal.

We're just finding out about another set of violations that this might be a pattern in practice.

And again, not one oversight hearing.

Congress has laid down and violated what our founders wanted to do, which was to check the power of the executive.

And now we have an executive that's operating with impunity in a way that dictators and kings that our founders wanted to prevent.

This is a crisis in our country.

And it will continue, as Frederick Douglass says.

The limits of tyranny are prescribed by the endurance of those who are oppressed.

How much will we endure until we say enough is enough?

Do you see signs of that?

Yes.

Where?

Harvard University.

Of course, God bless America, if the richest university on the planet could not find the moral conviction to stand up and do what's right.

A number of law firms who do have MA practices that might be decimated have stepped up and are doing the right thing and saying this is wrong.

Now it's still limited, but it's a start.

My understanding

is that you are hearing silence in your own party leadership.

And the occasion for your 25-hour speech on the floor of the Senate was because you were hearing from a lot of your constituents.

What were they saying and in what volume?

So I was encountering a lot of anger towards 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.

And we decided after I had a disagreement with my leader, Chuck Schumer, over the continuing resolution and what tactic we should take, what larger strategy we should pursue.

I decided that I had to shift my own way of working now.

And I felt like my constituents were demanding from me that I take risks, that I think outside of the box.

And we are hearing letters that literally would render my staff into 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 just were wrenching the guts of my staff.

And they said that we've got to find a way to make those stories break through.

And so that was 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?

And obviously in the back of my mind, I knew that the same year that John Lewis wrote a letter to Martin Luther King, and King then sent him a bus ticket, and it began that 1957, that year, was the same year that Strom Thurman 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 that body, in fact, I'm the fourth black person ever popularly elected to that body after Barack Obama, who was the third.

We knew that there was a,

if I could last 24 hours and 18 minutes,

that we could potentially command some attention from the public, never imagining that we would get on TikTok alone

over 300 million people liking the live stream.

We never thought that it would be as successful as it was.

And so that's the key here, which is 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 that fundamentally implicates me and endangers me.

I'm speaking with Corey Booker, who's been a senator from New Jersey since 2013, and we'll continue in a moment.

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I'm David Revnick, and I've been speaking with Senator Corey Booker of my home state of New Jersey.

Booker became active in local politics in the city of Newark, which had been long plagued by political corruption, poverty, and neglect.

He was elected to the Senate in 2013, and I spoke with Booker on this program in 2019 when he ran in the Democratic presidential primary.

We'll continue our conversation.

You've 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.

In the budget negotiator.

But anybody who looks at the Senate in the last three or four years would have to say

this guy, this tactician behind the scenes has racked up one hell of a record.

I mean, the bipartisan bills that I watched in a front row seat, often being asked for assistance to get through bipartisan gun bill, bipartisan Chips Act, bipartisan infrastructure bill.

This is Chuck Schumer's leadership.

And then he pulled something off in the last election that rarely has happened.

I think only once before in my time in the Senate where a senator won re-election in a state where the president of the opposite party won.

Well, 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 I can't.

So you don't think Chuck Schumer's time has come?

No.

You think that's the case indefinitely for a while?

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.

I hear you may go to El Salvador yourself to look into the case of Kilmar Brejo Garcia.

Is that going to happen?

I'm going to evaluate it.

We have an inquiry out to the committee for permission to go on a formal Code L, but I'm watching the whole sort of immigration field and finding out where my presence, where me physically visiting and going

is most important.

And whether it's Seacot or some of the detention facilities here in our state or with some of the people.

I was in touch with some Afghans that are here on, that just got word, in fact, that they no longer have temporary protective status and they're to leave within the week.

These are Afghan Christians.

who are being told to go back to a country run by the Taliban.

So wherever I can help bring attention, I think that

I would say it was nothing short of heroic, what my friend

Chris Van Hollen

did.

I know a bunch of House members are in El Salvador now.

The question is, is how do we highlight and bring attention to the horrible immigration policies of Donald Trump?

There was a lot of attention paid to Naeb Bukele, the El Salvadoran president, his trip to the Oval Office, and the way he paraded as a kind of fellow autocrat with the president.

And when Bukeley visited the White House earlier this month, Trump said this.

Let's listen.

We also have homegrown criminals that push people into subways,

that

hit elderly ladies on the back of the head with a baseball bat when they're not looking, that are absolute monsters.

I'd like to include them in the group of people to get them out of the country.

I don't think he was kidding around there.

You've got the president believes he can send American citizens, forget lawful immigrants, to foreign prisons.

Are Democrats working on anything preemptively to protect American citizens?

I know

you ask questions as are the Democrats.

I'm trying to broaden this to say are 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 sent me to be a great New Jersey senator and a great fighter for America.

And I am trying to talk.

And this is why during the 25 hours 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 these are a time of moral urgency.

And right now,

one of my biggest areas of focus

is stopping this bill that will gut Medicaid and health care for 80, 90 million people and endanger hospitals.

And we need Republicans of good conscience, like we did in the 2017 with the Affordable Care Act, to vote with us.

And so playing this as a partisan game

cheapens the larger cause of the country.

And so this is the time that 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'm telling people right now, I want to appeal to the soul, the heart, the conscience of our country.

And it's not just as important for leaders now to speak against Trump, but also to capture the imagination of people for how we can rise above this moment.

The world is calling to us right now.

I sit with world leader after world leader in my office and hear, please do something to stop this deterioration of the post-World War II order.

Ambassadors and ministers from other countries will come in my office right here and sit down and basically give a WTF, sometimes quite literally.

I remember after Trump sided with China and Russia against European allies on Ukraine,

it was such a stunning blow to people that work in diplomacy on a regular basis to see America turn their back like this.

People now who don't understand at a time where Europeans, the EU, England are suffering from Chinese bad practices on stealing intellectual property, currency manipulation, hey, why aren't we all working together to ratchet up pressure on the Chinese?

Instead, he puts 10% tariffs on everybody across the board and then his 100 plus percent tariffs on China.

It makes no sense to them the way America's working.

How dare Donald Donald Trump treat dictators and authoritarian leaders like pals and friends and allies and treat allies, literally calling them dictators, and treat them in this way?

This is despicable behavior from the highest office in the land.

Aaron Powell, Senator Booker, over the years you have been a

really clear opponent, as maybe understates it, of anti-Semitism over and over again.

But would you

agree that anti-Semitism to some extent is being exploited in a political way by the Trump administration?

How do you see that very complicated piece of business?

I see it very clearly.

Were there things happening on campuses that were dead wrong in my book?

Absolutely.

But yes, Donald Trump is exploiting anti-Semitism in order to pursue a 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 anti-Semitism 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 25-hour 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, I think is the name of it.

They talk about the different signs.

One is signs I started seeing when Obama was president, where the letter of the law is followed, but the spirit of the Constitution isn't, when they wouldn't give Myrick Garland even 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.

But one of the other signs they talked about was the heightening and the raising of political violence and threats of violence.

We're seeing chilling things.

Esther Salis, who's 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 was up about 400%.

But to see how they're skyrocketing even more now under Donald Trump

and what I think is some of his incendiary language, and there's been incendiary language across the board on federal judges.

And now you're seeing, I saw her interviewed,

shaken because people are sending pizzas to federal judges who are deciding against Donald Trump from her son's name, Daniel Anderal.

They're using

her murdered son's name to send pizzas to the homes of federal judges, almost to say, we know where you live.

And so, yeah, I'm definitely facing a whole new order of security concerns in my own life as senators on both sides of the aisle.

When 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.

And this is something that has to stop in our country.

Do you think that played a role in her in the end supporting Hexeth?

I will make no

sort of

guesses as to what her internal deliberations were.

But it must be scary.

Look, even the...

Most senators and congresspeople on both sides who I've talked to know that we are living in a scary environment.

I find

that the conversation that we're having sounds like a conversation that would be born of 10 years of experience rather than 100 days.

100 days?

And there are 1,300 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, 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.

And I have never in my life been as worried about our country, about our democracy, about our traditions as I have 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 is 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.

In fact, I think the best way to answer despair is to not let it have the last word.

That's what hope is.

And so 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 visit itself upon our nation.

But it's often been from those times, from those ashes, has 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.

Senator Booker, thank you.

Thank you.

Corey Booker is a Democrat and a senator from New Jersey.

I'm David Remnick, and that's our program for this week.

Thanks for joining us.

See you next time.

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