Cory Booker on How to Defeat Donald Trump
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.3 • 3.9K Ratings
🗓️ 30 September 2019
⏱️ 46 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.
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| 1:17.3 | I'm Dorothy Wickenden On today's politics and more podcast, David Remnick talks with New Jersey Senator and Democratic presidential hopeful Cory Booker. Booker discusses how his |
| 1:23.1 | political upbringing in Newark prepared him for an electoral battle with Donald Trump. |
| 1:30.8 | Let me just put it my perspective on this, which is for me, this is a moment of constitutional |
| 1:36.7 | vandalism like I've never seen in my lifetime. I swore an oath to uphold the Constitution, |
| 1:41.5 | and we have a president that won't submit themselves to the checks and balances of our Constitution. He is undermining the ability for Congress to do |
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