Democrats can tackle affordability and confront the damage President Trump is doing to American democracy — but only if they get the leadership right, argues Senator Cory Booker, the New Jersey Democrat. Booker sat down with the Times Opinion editorial director David Leonhardt in late October to discuss his vision for the party, the stakes for the country and why he still believes in America — urging Americans to “hold tight” because, he says, “the best chapter in a century is upon us.”
Below is a transcript of an episode of “The Opinions.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYTimes app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
David Leonhardt: Senator Booker, thanks for joining me today.
Cory Booker: I’m grateful to be here. Thank you. I love this series, so I’m privileged and feel very blessed to be on it.
Leonhardt: Thank you. Since we last spoke, you’ve gotten engaged. Congratulations.
Booker: 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.
Leonhardt: Do you have a date?
Booker: We do. It’s a matter of weeks from now.
Leonhardt: Excellent.
Booker: Yes, so I’m very excited.
Leonhardt: My wife says an engagement is not real unless there’s a ring and a date. So it sounds like you qualify.
Booker: Yes, we want to do it really, really quickly. I have these great hopes for children.
Leonhardt: Great.
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?
Booker: 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. But 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 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 percent.
It speaks to a larger hurt that’s going on in our country, where the American dream has 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. But now people are living in a nation where there’s a deep economic insecurity. 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.
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 1, lower prescription drug prices, health care. I have some semblance of a plan — but you’ll be OK. Again, people feel like they are looking for whom to believe and in what to believe.
Leonhardt: That would make some sense to me. It would make more complete sense if Donald Trump hadn’t held office before.
Booker: Right.
Leonhardt: But he had. In fact, Kamala Harris hadn’t been president — and he had. 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.
Booker: Look, Trump may have done well in New Jersey, but — as happened in his first term — he has sunk in the polls in my state dramatically. There is a frustration. And even some of the counties that had high immigrant populations that seemed to support him have now gone in the exact opposite direction.
You have more people in those counties saying in interviews: I made a mistake. I 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 the 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’s 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 the 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. For me, that is, in this environment, actually 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 am looking for what, I think, America’s calling is and what, for my grandparents’ generation and my parents’ generation — despite all the challenges they grew up with in a country divided along racial lines — they were able to experience as human flourishing.
Leonhardt: 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.
Booker: Please.
Leonhardt: 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 do you think that nonwhite Americans, immigrant Americans — groups that are very large in New Jersey — looked at the Democratic Party in 2024 and said: Eh, no thanks?
Booker: When I sit in a barbershop — and I know you find that hard to believe, given my lack of hair. [Laughs.]
Leonhardt: I feel your pain. [Laughs.]
Booker: But when I sit in a Black barbershop in my neighborhood, you find people with the same frustration as if I went to a rural area and went to a diner: People just don’t believe American politics is serving Americans.
Leonhardt: Yes.
Booker: That frustration makes people think: OK, I’ve been riding this horse for a long time. It hasn’t gotten me where I want to go. Let me jump on this other horse. The second thing I want to say to you is 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 —
Leonhardt: Which job?
Booker: The job of trying to teach my caucus to use the platforms that most Americans get their news from now.
Leonhardt: You are saying Democrats have not been good enough in engaging with it?
Booker: I told my caucus if the majority of your young voters get their news on TikTok and you are not there — I said to a roomful of people once: 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.”
What Donald Trump did is he showed up on the gaming platforms. We weren’t there at all. I basically said to my team: My fellow Democrats, you guys are running to go do MSNBC — and I love my MSNBC — but that only got 100,000 views. I can show you on my platforms that one video of mine can get more than the top-rated views on MSNBC. So we’re in a different era. 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 — 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, for men coming out of poverty and hardship and who 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 he and my grandmother were able to become entrepreneurs, invest in a laundromat, invest in a gas station. They 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 through his organizing and working on elections, he got 14 districts in Detroit to shift over to the Democratic Party.
Leonhardt: What era was this?
Booker: This was the 1930s and ’40s — the F.D.R. era.
Leonhardt: The Roosevelt era.
Booker: And why was F.D.R. the guy who could get a union guy to shift over to that party? Because F.D.R. 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. And then he delivered on those things. That’s my grandfather’s Democratic Party.
My father came to this town — Washington, D.C. — out of a historically Black college and because of the civil rights movement. Blacks and whites, Christians and Jews in this town were forcing corporations to hire qualified Blacks. He became I.B.M.’s first Black salesman in the entire region and became one of the top 5 percent of their global salesmen. If you create a fair playing field, people get on that field and compete. And next thing you know, my father would look at my brother and me 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. You were born on third base. But that’s the dream for every generation. And the Democratic Party has failed in my generation.
Leonhardt: 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.
Booker: Yes.
Leonhardt: You set a record. I read that you didn’t drink water or eat food in advance to minimize the bathroom trips.
Booker: My biggest obstacle, I thought, was that I would need to go to the bathroom. So I did some things that you should not do — dehydrate myself for more than a day, and then I didn’t eat food for three days.
Leonhardt: And how many times did you actually have to leave the floor to go to the bathroom?
Booker: You can’t.
Leonhardt: You can’t? So zero?
Booker: Zero.
Leonhardt: You didn’t have anyone pinch-hit for you.
Booker: No, you’re not allowed to.
Leonhardt: Zero?
Booker: Zero. Yes.
Leonhardt: So you did 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 are 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: OK, that worked in this way, but it didn’t work in these other ways, and here’s what we have to do going forward? How do you grade your own 25-hour floor speech?
Booker: Well, the ambition was, at that point — I think 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 asking: Why didn’t we stand and fight?
Leonhardt: So, right after you hadn’t shut down the government — but before the government did shut down.
Booker: 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, and I felt like we just gave in to them. I was feeling defeated, and I was having Americans — Newarkers, in this case — stop me to say: Why aren’t you guys fighting for us?
And I said to a guy in the grocery store: Well, we don’t have the majority. Look, I’m as frustrated as you are, but we can’t call a committee. Finally, he said: You’re making all these excuses. Are you an American or American’t? I laughed at him, and he said: Where’s the guy I voted for in 1998? Back when I had hair.
Leonhardt: As a Newark city councilman.
Booker: He said: Where’s the Newark city councilman who went 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. Where’s the guy who, when our community wasn’t safe, you moved into a mobile home and lived there for six months on what people said was our worst drug corner?
He started marching through my career, talking about all the things that I did to not let the absurdities that people were living with be normalized. So I came back to Washington and I told my team that we needed to start finding ways to show that this is not a normal time — but more than that, shining a light on the very people who are in the struggle. And I very deliberately read Republican voices —
Audio clip of Cory Booker: I 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 as Republicans.
That was my attempt, and it succeeded in this sense. I remember listening to one of the major radio stations I listen to, interviewing people whose letters I read on the Senate floor. So TikTok reached out to us, and 340 million Americans pressed “Like” on it — these are people who actually engaged with the content in a significant way. It 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 in this most recent “No Kings” rally of people’s protest signs that had quotes from that speech. Because the biggest problem we have — and Martin Luther King Jr. said this — is 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.
Leonhardt: 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 health care, 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?
Booker: I 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 talk about how people’s prescription drug costs are high because pharmaceutical companies come to this town and drown it in money — that corruption has to be talked about.
Leonhardt: 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.
Booker: Yes. I think 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, so lofty and resonant that they themselves fell short of them: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
Do you know those words fueled every major movement in our country? They were 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 are 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. We’re exceptional especially because of Alice Paul. We’re exceptional because of the people who believed so much in this democracy — even when the democracy or the government didn’t believe in them. And they believed in something that we have lost now, that I’m going to do everything I can to rekindle in this country — which is a sense of common cause.
Leonhardt: 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. His dream, he said, 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.
Booker: Yes. 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 percent of Americans — I said this to Joe Biden when he was still a nominee, I joked with him: If you go out and tell America you’re only going to do the things that 70 percent or more of Americans agree with, you would get so many people behind you.
Leonhardt: That’s not what he did.
Booker: 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 — let’s use a controversial issue: abortion. I am watching these abortion rights 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 are not encouraging enough people who want to have kids to have them. That we’re creating an environment that’s too hard. And 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.
Leonhardt: There’s a tension here, which is: I understand the need 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.
Booker: Yes.
Leonhardt: And to me, in some ways, this tension is highlighted by this spicy debate you had with your colleagues Senators Klobuchar and Cortez Masto, where you felt like the Democratic Party wasn’t doing enough to stand up to Donald Trump.
Audio clip of Booker: What I’m 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.
Basically, what you were criticizing them for doing was supporting an issue that actually is one of those 70 percent issues, which is cracking down on crime. There is a tension between: Let’s do the stuff that 70 percent agree on — and let’s make clear how abnormal Donald Trump is. I’m curious: When is it that the Democratic Party today should be part of making progress on the 70 percent? And when should it say: No, no, no. We have to grind everything to a halt. Which is basically what you were arguing in that moment in order to make people sit up and see that we’re sliding toward autocracy.
Booker: Well, no. I’m sorry, you misinterpreted what I was doing there. These were bills, it was a grant program for local police departments, but Donald Trump had said those grants would not go to New York, New Jersey, Illinois.
And I was 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. So that, to me, was a fundamental assault on the separation of powers that we should not be participating in.
Leonhardt: OK.
Booker: If Donald Trump right now says to me: Hey, Cory, I want to fund health care. I want to fund local police departments. I want to fund infrastructure so the commuters in my state —
Leonhardt: You’re on board with that.
Booker: I’m on board with that. That doesn’t mean that I’m somehow weaker in my stand against the 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. A bipartisan bill that he signed —
Leonhardt: In his first term.
Booker: 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 are an American and you have an idea that we can work on together. It’s how I was as a mayor, when I worked with the Manhattan Institute and other conservatives to deliver for my community.
Leonhardt: 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.
Booker: I think this is an existential moment when it comes to what Donald Trump is doing to our country. And there are definitely times where the way he has 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 have caused whole scale resignations in those departments.
So, again, the bigger point is how you fight. 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: 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. What an exciting time to redeem the dream.
And in the Democratic Party, I want to have a very tough conversation. I want it to be a competition of ideas about what our party is going to look like. I’m one of those people who’s saying our party has failed. They’ve made terrible mistakes. 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 for the night, but joy cometh in the morning.”
I am telling you right now, as heartbroken as so many of us feel — and if America hasn’t broken your heart, you don’t love her enough. So all those people who love this country and are in deep pain and wounded by what they see happening right now: Hold tight. The best chapter in a century, I think, is upon us — if we can get the leadership right.
Leonhardt: What do you say to someone who says: 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.
Booker: Well, as I said to you, these are heartbreaking times. But that is a sign of great love. You cannot have great courage unless you face great fear, and you cannot have great hope unless you face great despair.
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, Ala.; 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.
Leonhardt: Well, one of my heroes is A. Philip Randolph. I would guess he’s one of yours.
Booker: Yes.
Leonhardt: He tried to start a union in the United States when it was essentially impossible to try to start a labor union. And he tried to start it among Black low-income workers, who had no union. If I were sitting here with A. Philip Randolph more than a hundred years ago and saying: Give me bullet points of reasons 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.
Booker: Yes. Right now, every American has a choice: to surrender the idea of America, to surrender to cynicism, to delve into despair — or to fight like hell. And we’re here because of people who faced more improbable and impossible odds. And again, that is the very origin story of this country. I think this is a time to renew the deal of America. I think that’s the moment we’re in.
Leonhardt: The stories you tell about America are so deeply patriotic. You’ve done it multiple times today: You call back to the 1700s, you call back to the 1960s. Often today, patriotism has this real right-wing code, right? That if you see someone with an American flag on their truck or their car, the natural thing might be to assume they’re a Republican.
Can you sketch out for us, as we think about what America’s next story should be, a story of progressive patriotism that embraces both of those words yet doesn’t focus on what the United States has done wrong — and the United States has done and continues to do a lot of things wrong — a version of patriotism that isn’t jingoistic but that also embraces what is good and distinct about this country?
Booker: So, just to affirm what you said, a friend of mine said that they hung a flag, or maybe it was her friend who hung a flag, and their teenage son said: When did we become Republicans?
Leonhardt: That’s a problem for Democrats.
Booker: I don’t think it’s a problem for Democrats. I think it’s a problem for America.
Leonhardt: It’s a problem for both. Fair.
Booker: If I’m going to try to do anything in the coming years, it is to reclaim a deeper, more meaningful patriotism that’s not symbols and slogans — it’s shared devotion to shared ideals. For those people who know this country has done wrong and want to use that as an excuse not to love America, they’re making a tragic mistake that belies the people who fought to make this country as special as it is. When our imperfect founders debated slavery, they came down on the wrong side of history. And yet there are these Black people who loved America — even when it didn’t love them back — who fought to make America real and to uphold the founders’ ideals, despite the founders’ shortcomings.
It’s not a patriotism that mistakes protests for being unpatriotic. It realizes that, actually, protest is very much an American ideal, whether it’s a Tea Party protest or a “No Kings” protest. That’s the patriotism that I want. And where do I see that patriotism today? I see it in a public-school teacher who has kids now showing up who no longer get the food program because of Donald Trump, and they reach into their own pocket even though they don’t know how they’re going to provide for their family.
You know what patriotism is? It’s that cop who I know in Newark who works all day protecting people and then runs the Little League program. It’s the people in our country who, despite all of the divides, all of the hurt, still do quiet acts of shared devotion to people around them — no matter what. I’m telling you that patriotism is infectious.
My mission here is not to be a great Democrat. My mission here is to heal this country so that we can together redeem the dream. And those are not lofty words, that is pragmatic — because Americans have stopped believing that this country works for them and their families. That’s what the world needs from us again: to be the nation that elevates its people to do things that other people said couldn’t be done. And the world will follow us.
Leonhardt: Senator Cory Booker, thank you very much.
Booker: Thank you.
Thoughts? Email us at [email protected].
This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Jillian Weinberger. It was edited by Alison Bruzek and Kaari Pitkin. Mixing by Pat McCusker. Original music by Carole Sabouraud. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. The director of Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
The post Cory Booker on What It Takes to Believe in America Again appeared first on New York Times.
