Cory Booker on How to Defeat Donald Trump

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 27 September 2019

⏱️ 45 minutes

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Summary

Senator Cory Booker burst onto the national scene about a decade ago, after serving as the mayor of the notoriously impoverished and dangerous city of Newark, New Jersey. To get that job, Booker challenged an entrenched establishment. “My political training comes from the roughest of rough campaigns,” he tells David Remnick. “You just won’t think it’s America, the kind of stuff we had to go up against. And it [was] such a great way to learn [that campaigning] has to be retail—grassroots. And so much of this, in those early primary states, is about that.” Booker spoke with Remnick about growing up black in a largely white area of New Jersey, where his parents had to fight to be able to buy a home; about his long relationship with the Kushner family, which started back when Jared Kushner’s father, Charles, was a leading Democratic donor; and why he’s proud to collaborate with even his direst political opponents on issues such as criminal-justice reform. “Donald Trump signed my bill,” Booker states. “I worked with him and his White House to pass a bill that liberated thousands of black people from prison” by retroactively reducing unjustly high sentences related to crack cocaine. “Tell that liberated person that Cory Booker should not deal with somebody that he fundamentally disagrees with.” Note: In this interview, Senator Booker asserts, “We now have more African-Americans in this country under criminal supervision than all the slaves in 1850.” The historical accuracy of this comparison has been challenged. More accurately, the number of African-American men under criminal supervision today has been compared to the number of African-American men enslaved in 1850.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios.
0:10.6	Let me just put it my perspective on this, which is for me, this is a moment of constitutional vandalism like I've never seen in my lifetime.
0:19.2	I swore an oath to uphold the Constitution, and we have a
0:21.6	president that won't submit themselves to the checks and balances of our Constitution. He is
0:26.4	undermining the ability for Congress to do its job and investigate. That was the line that crossed for me.
0:31.3	I was not immediately calling for impeachment. I was saying, let's investigate after the Mueller report,
0:36.0	but Congress hasn't been able to do their job.
0:38.2	Last week, on Monday, Senator Cory Booker came to the studio and we talked about many things.
0:43.7	But top of our minds was, of course, the prospect of impeachment.
0:48.0	There will be a point in history where people look back on us and say, what did people do
0:51.9	when the Constitution was under assault and being
0:55.3	violated?
0:56.2	Just one day after we spoke, the political world changed completely.
1:00.9	The actions of the Trump presidency revealed a dishonorable fact of the president's betrayal
1:06.6	of his oath of office, betrayal of our national security, and betrayal of the integrity of our elections.
1:14.5	Therefore, today, I'm announcing the House of Representatives moving forward with an official impeachment inquiry.
1:21.5	Speaker Pelosi's reluctance up until that point had been frustrating to Booker and to many other Democrats.
1:29.1	But her motive was plain and may turn out to be extremely shrewd. Pelosi has felt all along that if the House began
1:34.6	impeachment too soon and with too little public support and it died in the Senate, as it still
1:40.7	likely might, then Democratic candidates would suffer badly in the 2020 elections.
1:47.2	Politics be damned. This is a moment, a moral moment that we should stand up and say,
1:52.8	because the precedent that it sets is whoever, Democrat, Republican, future presidents, yeah,
	...

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