“This Country Kicks My Ass All the Time”

You may recognize this voice, especially if you watch a lot of C-SPAN.

Cory BOOKER: I was on an airplane not too long ago, where I sat down next to this mother and daughter, 80 and 60. They wanted to know who I was. Why are people paying attention to me? Asked me if I was a professional athlete, which at my age is quite the compliment. 

That’s Cory Booker. He did play college football, at Stanford but that was a long time ago. He’s 56 now, and he’s a United States Senator from New Jersey.

BOOKER: And I said, No, I’m a United States Senator. And they suddenly did what most Americans would do when they meet a congressperson out in the wild and they don’t know what party they’re in. They want to know, Are you on my team or their team? They said, Republican or Democrat? And I said, “Ma’am, I’m a Democrat.” And she looked at me so angrily, crossed her arms and said, “Well, I should have brought my Trump hat,” and swiveled away from me. I go, “Ma’am, ma’am, Donald Trump — Oh my gosh, he signed two of the biggest bills I’ve ever written in my life into law.”

One of those bills promoted criminal-justice reform; the other one, which was tucked into Trump’s 2017 tax laws, boosted incentives for investing in low-income neighborhoods.

BOOKER: Let me tell you, by the time we landed, we were talking and laughing and sharing stories. And I was affirming to her the truth that we all in this nation have so much in common.

Americans may have a lot in common but: for a good while now, we’ve been living in a time of violent political attacks and outright assassinations. These days, the idea of talking politics with your seatmate on a plane just isn’t the norm anymore, if it ever really was. But Cory Booker seems to truly believe what he says about how much we have in common. I say “seems” to believe it because it can be hard to tell how real someone’s enthusiasm is. Booker’s enthusiasm certainly feels real, and it is definitely abundant. In Washington, he is widely thought of as a bridge-builder. On the other hand he recently gave the longest Senate speech in U.S. history, 25 straight hours, to warn about the “grave and urgent” danger posed by the second Trump administration. Here’s a bit from Hour One, right near the beginning:

BOOKER FLOOR SPEECH: I rise with the intention of disrupting the normal business of the United States Senate for as long as I am physically able.

The speech got Booker an enormous amount of attention, and this is someone who already draws plenty of attention in Washington. But what was that 25-hour speech, exactly? A heartfelt defense of the defenseless? A call to action for everyone who believes that U.S. democracy is in trouble? The unofficial launch of Cory Booker’s own presidential campaign? Yes, yes, and probably yes. Booker likes to cite a famous speech that Franklin Roosevelt gave in 1941, less than a year before the U.S. entered World War II. It’s come to be known as the “Four Freedoms” speech. Roosevelt said that people “everywhere in the world,” deserved freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. Cory Booker is one of the most prominent voices saying that a lot of Americans right now — a lot of different kinds of Americans — do not feel free from fear. Today on Freakonomics Radio: Cory Booker on the politics of fear, the politics of hope, and how to split the difference. Also: happy birthday, America, happy 249th birthday! Have you got it all figured out by now?

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Cory Booker was born in Washington, D.C.; his parents were executives at IBM. The family moved to New Jersey, and Cory went on to study political science and sociology at Stanford; American history at Oxford; and he got a law degree from Yale. Then he moved back to New Jersey; he lived for eight years in a public-housing project in Newark while working as a lawyer for low-income families. In 2006, he was elected mayor of Newark; he focused on education reform, economic development, and crime reduction. One local magazine called him “supermayor.” He was known to shovel people’s driveways during snowstorms; he once ran into a burning building to save someone trapped inside. In 2013, he was elected to the U.S. Senate, at age 44. He is still one of its younger members; the median age in the Senate is nearly 65. I spoke with Booker on June 23^rd, a couple months after his 25-hour speech.

BOOKER: Hello, check one, two. 

DUBNER: Hello, yeah, Senator Booker. 

BOOKER: It’s really good to hear your voice, Stephen. 

DUBNER: How’ve you been? 

BOOKER: Um, uh, it’s been — Why do I always feel like that’s a loaded question? 

On the day we spoke, the Senate was working over Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” — or at least the Republican senators were; Democrats like Booker had been pretty much locked out.

DUBNER: Do you have a favorite nickname for the Trump mega-bill — at least one you can say on the radio?

BOOKER: I have the same alliteration, but in negative terms, but let’s, let’s call it B3.

DUBNER: B3. What does B3 stand for in your mind, though? 

BOOKER: The Big Bad Betrayal of a bill.

Booker, like just about every prominent Democrat, is openly antagonistic towards Donald Trump; that is the flavor of the party. He also sees this disdain for Trump as a unifying force within a party that isn’t unified around much else.

BOOKER: Because of Donald Trump and his darkness and his crassness and his cruelty, I think he is making a way for people that are yearning for a different politics that reminds us that we belong to each other, that reminds us that we’re one nation, that we actually do better, we get richer, we are — as he would say — greater when we come together, not when we cut each other down. 

And how about the particulars of Trump’s big bill?

BOOKER: To know this bill is to hate this bill. When you tell Republicans, Independents, or Democrats what’s actually in the bill, the numbers drop dramatically. But there is no real public debate. There’s no real public forum where people are seeing folks stand by the various provisions. Unfortunately, we still see large percentages of Americans do not realize how profoundly this bill is going to affect their lives.

DUBNER: Name three things in this bill that you think will most significantly have a negative effect.

BOOKER: One is the savage Medicaid cuts that will see millions of Americans losing their healthcare, and rural hospitals especially. Hospitals in general will face struggles with the Medicare cut, but we’ll see many, many hospital closures in areas that really can’t lose that. So that’s number one. Number two is our commitment to food assistance. Most families who end up on SNAP and rely on those programs to meet the hunger needs of their children, don’t stay on it for that long. But here is going to be cuts that are going to affect, again, millions of Americans losing food assistance when they need it the most. And then the final thing is just overall costs on American families will go up because of the attacks on the Affordable Care Act, people’s healthcare premiums will go up. Energy costs will go up because of its attacks on the clean energy programs that we did in the last Congress. It’s something that’s going to make life for the average American expensive, all while cutting taxes for billionaires and racking up trillions of dollars more for our deficit. 

DUBNER: The deficit is one of those things that everyone, nods toward and gnashes their teeth over. But there’s been very little movement toward actually addressing it. We’ve spoken on the show with — I don’t know if you know Jessica Riedl, she’s an independent tax and budget analyst — she makes the point that there are plenty of members of Congress who are truly concerned and there are even bipartisan groups who really want to address it, but they’re fearful of taking action or even speaking out much. Can you take us inside that a bit? 

BOOKER: As a former mayor, it’s appalling to me that while governors and mayors balance budgets and live within their means, we are a nation right now that the deficit is exploding in a profligate manner. While it is true that presidents of both parties have been adding to that debt since, you know, I’ve been an adult, the reality is Democrats have done a lot better at reining in those debts. Remember, Bill Clinton did not add to the overall deficit in our country. He balanced his budget.

DUBNER: This is the last balanced budget we had, under Clinton, wasn’t it? 

BOOKER: Exactly. Barack Obama lowered the deficit spending. He didn’t balance his budget, but dramatically lowered deficit spending. Unfortunately, the most profligate deficit creator in my lifetime has been Donald Trump, even though he promised that his first tax bill was going to create so much growth in our country that it would pay for itself, but it didn’t. What we ended up doing was digging ourselves deeper because of these massive tax cuts for the wealthiest and the biggest corporations. When I was mayor of the city of Newark, I did both. I cut the size of my government by 25 percent — deep, difficult cuts during a recession that I had to do. But I also found ways of increasing my revenue as a city. 

DUBNER: What’d you do? How’d you increase revenues? 

BOOKER: One, we did raise taxes, but number two, we created the right kind of tax breaks that would incentivize investment. And for the first time in over 50 years, Newark had a massive economic period of growth where we increased our overall tax revenues, cut our spending by 25 percent, and were able to grow our way out of the budget problems. But we had to increase revenue. And if we were smart about doing our cutting — like, I can’t believe we still have the same procurement laws in the federal government that are relics from a different era where you didn’t have the kind of technology you have that could help us get more for less. The last thing I’ll say, which is an area that stuns me that’s become so partisan, we don’t collect the taxes that we’re owed. The wealthiest amongst us have the worst rates for non-payment of taxes, but we don’t have an I.R.S. that can go after the big tax cheats in our country, that would also give us, over a 10-year period, hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue. 

DUBNER: Now, the Trump tax cuts of 2017 lowered the top personal rate from 39 and a half to 37. So, you know, that’s a drop, but not a huge drop. And this is a standard line of yours — talk about, the rich need to be taxed more — is it individuals you’re talking about, and is it avoidance that you’re talking about, or is it more corporate tax and strategy? Because those are really different universes. I know you understand that, but I see this in the campaigns in city elections in New York City, where I live, right now for mayor. It’s become a mantra: tax the rich, you know, until they bleed. And I’m guessing that’s not what you have in mind because you understand that people who make a lot of money are good to have around. So how do you think about splitting up the personal tax rates and the corporate? 

BOOKER: Well, first of all, I think it’s a mistake to use language that pits Americans against each other. I think it actually turns people off. As the only United States Senator that lives in a community technically that’s below the poverty line, I know that there is aspirational ideals that my community wants. They don’t vilify the wealthy. What is really needed is for all of us to understand we’re four percent of the globe’s population, the most privileged four percent in many ways, because we live in a country of such abundance. We could have a tax system that creates the outcomes that all of us should want. I think it is outrageous, for example, that your chances of plunging into poverty go up so dramatically in America if you choose to have a child. We have one of lowest child allowances. So I’m a big believer that we should take on the extra cost of massively increasing the Child Tax Credit. In fact, that cuts child poverty in half. That shows once and for all that child poverty in America, which we tolerate, I think it’s a moral obscenity, is not an inevitability, it’s a policy choice.

DUBNER: I was under the impression the Child Tax Credit does get an increase in the new Trump bill. 

BOOKER: It is not increased for the lowest-income people. In other words, it’s not made fully refundable, which is the element of the Child Tax Credit that cut the child poverty rate so dramatically. So what I’m saying to you, to go back to your original question about the wealthiest amongst us — if we went back to Reagan era or Clinton era or Obama era tax rates that were not onerous — the wealthy got wealthier during those periods — but we do need a tax system that allows working people not to have a poverty trap. We used to be one of the best countries in the world to move from the bottom quintile through grit, hard work, education. Now it’s better to be born in classist societies like England, because they are more economically mobile than we are. Other countries are out-American-ing us. 

DUBNER: You brought up the economic instability of having a kid. I wonder, when you look at the fertility rate in the U.S. now — which has gotten quite low, well below the replacement rate, — what are some other forces that are pushing against it? And I wonder about you. You’re one of the few childless Senators — how do you think about whether you want to have children? I hope you don’t think that’s an invasion of privacy, but I’m curious if you think about having children yourself, what are some of the factors that go through your mind? 

BOOKER: I have a strong suspicion that my mother put you up to that question, and my significant other maybe, too. These are conversations that are being had in my home. But let’s be really blunt and look at the data. I once asked my staff, like, What are the reasons why people have abortions? My staff rightfully said to me, It’s none of our damn business why somebody chooses to make decisions about their own body. But I pushed them and they did some research and found out the number one presented reason for people that have abortions is that they cannot afford to have children. Because indeed it does massively increase your economic instability because we are one of the worst-developed countries for not just child allowances or we might call it the Child Tax Credit, but we have the most unaffordable childcare. To get quality childcare in America, in most states it costs more than tuition at the local college. We are a nation that says, We don’t give you paid family leave, we don’t give you maternity leave. We make it so difficult on families. And here’s the thing that I think is an opportunity. I think there’s a chance for us to have a radical pro-family agenda because now I’m reading, pro-life groups, who I fundamentally disagree with, many of them are saying things that I strongly believe in. That we need to have more pro-family, pro-children legislation like paid family leave, maternal leave, higher child allowances or Child Tax Credit. I think it should be one of the fundamental pillars of us reuniting and healing these partisan rifts to say we are going to be the most pro-family nation again.

DUBNER: What you just said about family leave being an issue in the pro-life camp makes me think about all the issues that have been historically associated with Democrats, many of which seem to have been quite successfully co-opted by Republicans over the past few years. There’s lowering prescription drug prices, paid family leave and other pro-family policies, as you mentioned, expanding the Child Tax Credit. Even addressing the affordability crisis. Can you talk to me for just a moment about this notion of Republicans co-opting these Democratic planks? And I know that there have been plenty of times where Republican planks become Democrat and vice versa. But I want you to speak to that, especially if you don’t mind carrying it into the question about what the heck has happened to the Democratic Party? In other words, if you had all these positions that so many people — including a lot of Republicans — are now in favor of, what happened? 

BOOKER: Yeah, well look, if you look at the data, every poll I looked at, when you took the names away — Republican, Democrat, Trump, Harris — get all those names and just poll the policies of the candidates, you saw that the policies of the Democratic Party were winning in a much more significant way than the general policies of the Republicans. People ask me all the time, well, what’s the Democratic party going to do to save the Democratic Party? I say if the Democratic Party is more concerned about saving the Democratic Party than serving the American people, then the Democratic party doesn’t deserve to be around. This is a moment that we are about to see a generation of leaders step off the stage, the last baby boomer president, the last baby boomer head of the Senate for us Democrats. And this is a time, I believe, that we need to redeem the American dream. This idea that anybody born in any circumstances can make it in America. The very idea of America, we need to make real again.

DUBNER: There’s another Democratic position — yours, actually, promoting what you call Baby Bonds — that’s included in Trump’s bill, but with a new name, now it’s called Trump Accounts. What do you think of that? 

BOOKER: Yes, God bless the idea behind it, that I have been trumpeting for about 10 years. The idea that every kid in America could have an individual investment account that they could watch on their phone. The power of that is transformative. The way they have written it right now benefits the wealthy and hurts the poor. 

DUBNER: How so? 

BOOKER: There are asset limits to qualify for food stamps. There are asset limits to qualify for Medicaid. A poor family who has $1,000 or more in the individual investment account can make them ineligible for those important benefits. 

DUBNER: You’re saying the money from the baby bond or whatever you want to call it would make them ineligible for certain benefits that they’d otherwise receive?

BOOKER: Yes. And then another part of it that they don’t correct for — because our bill was written in a way that was progressive, that the lowest-income kids would see some of the greatest benefits — the way they’ve written it actually is the reverse of that. Right now it says that a family could put up to $5,000 into those accounts and enjoy the tax benefits. Well, working families, low-income families are not going be able to do that. And I’m fine with that, but maybe we should be doing some things to address that the benefit could be going upwards. And I think there’s some design elements that could get something like this back on track. If only Donald Trump and others would listen to me in their design, we could correct for some of these failings. 

DUBNER: I know you’ve talked a lot about housing affordability, or the lack thereof which is, you know, a big and complicated problem that involves government in many ways. I know there’s something in this bill about, I think Mike Lee is most involved in this, from Utah — has to do with them selling off public lands, some of which might be for oil and gas drilling, but some of which might be for development, including housing. Now I don’t think Utah has any scarcity of land for housing. I don’t know, I’m a New Yorker. Everything seems wide open to me by comparison. But is that a viable way to make more land available for housing and will that actually trigger more housing, by selling off more public land? 

BOOKER: No, God, no. It’s disastrous. I mean, this is one of the most outrageously unpopular parts, taking our most precious shared resource, public lands across America, and selling them to the highest bidder so that very wealthy people can find ways to exploit that land for greater wealth, not for the country, but greater wealth for themselves. If you want to deal with housing — as a guy who doubled the production of affordable housing in his city during the great housing bubble burst, use the bill that I already passed with Tim Scott, and we can make it more attuned to housing, called opportunity zones. There is so much capital sitting on the sidelines right now that we can incentivize into the investment of affordable housing if you create the right kind of tax incentives. I’m more than happy to give people bigger margins on their profits by creating a tax treatment for people that are investing in affordable housing. 

DUBNER: If you had to bet, do you think that the selling of private lands will get through in the reconciliation, or no? 

BOOKER: There are so many people speaking about how bad this bill is. The more the word gets out, the more the backlash is going to be. And the more likely Republicans are going to say, Nope, get rid of this section. We’re already hearing it. Josh Hawley is now screaming about what this could do to rural hospitals. I’m hearing others talk about Medicaid. And the selling off of Americans’ public lands is wildly unpopular.

That plan to sell federal lands did indeed get killed off last week, during the reconciliation process, and there were many other changes. But as of this recording, Trump’s megabill is set to become law — with zero Democratic votes in either the House or the Senate. Before the final House vote, Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries spoke in protest for nearly nine hours; he called the bill “unconscionable, unacceptable and un-American.” What was Cory Booker trying to accomplish with his marathon speech from the Senate floor back in April?

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The record that Cory Booker broke for the longest Senate speech was set in 1957 by Strom Thurmond, a Republican Senator from South Carolina who was an avowed segregationist. It was a filibuster against the Civil Rights Act. Cory Booker, by the way, is Black. Here’s a portion of his speech, from near the end:

BOOKER FLOOR SPEECH: There is a room here in the Senate named after Strom Thurmond. To hate him is wrong, and maybe my ego got too caught up, that if I stood here maybe, maybe, just maybe I could break this record of the man who tried to stop the rights upon which I stand. I am not here though because of his speech. I am here despite his speech. I am here because as powerful as he was, the people were more powerful.

Along the way, he read some correspondence he’d received from his constituents in New Jersey:

BOOKER FLOOR SPEECH: This is a small postcard, handwritten from somebody from Hamilton Square, New Jersey. Dear Senator Booker, I am writing to ask you if my Social Security is now in danger.

He cited reports from government agencies and from think tanks, including conservative think tanks:

BOOKER FLOOR SPEECH: Michael Strain, an economist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute — I know A.E.I. well — said Trump’s policies on trade and immigration, and his slash-and-burn approach to federal job cuts, would have a damaging effect. This is a conservative think tank. ‘‘What President Trump has proposed will not cause a recession,’’ he continued, ‘‘but it will slow economic growth. It will take money out of people’s pockets. It will increase the unemployment rate. It will cost people jobs. It will make American businesses less competitive.’’ That is A.E.I., folks.

Booker gave the speech as a sort of tribute to his late friend and mentor John Lewis, a civil rights activist and Congressman who liked to talk about the need to “make good trouble.”

BOOKER FLOOR SPEECH: This is a moral moment. It is not left or right, it is right or wrong. Let’s get in good trouble. My friend, Madam President, I yield the floor.

DUBNER: So, I want to come clean. I did not watch all 25 hours of your speech on the Senate floor. I watched a lot. It was a moment that kind of stopped the country, at least for a lot of people. Can you just give me a little bit of behind-the-scenes? I’m really curious to know how much planning and preparation went into it? 

BOOKER: Everywhere I was going, people were saying to me, “You’re not doing enough.” I remember being in the supermarket in Newark, and these are folks that have known me since the 90s. And these are people who still roll up to me in their car when I’m jogging and say things like, “You’re gaining weight, Mayor! “And I’m like, “I am not your mayor. I am your senator.”

DUBNER: But are you gaining weight? 

BOOKER: Yes, I am — Ben and Jerry are my best friends. I was in the supermarket and somebody was saying to me, Why don’t you Democrats do this? And I was like, we only have 47 votes. Well, why don’t you do this? I said, you need the majority. And they’re like, Cory, we voted for you because you were that guy that did a hunger strike in the project for 10 days. Why are you telling us what you can’t do when you used to find a way out of no way? And it was like the straw that broke the back for me because I was like, I have no response other than, You’re right. I began pulling my team together to throw around ideas about how we could cause good trouble. And this was one of the ideas we came up with. We’ve got more in our pocket to try to do what we wanted to do. The goals were really to draw attention to the people who were going to be suffering because of what Donald Trump was doing. And the prep was a lot. I mean, over 1,000 pages. We didn’t want to read Green Eggs and Ham. I challenged my team, get me conservative think tanks. We quoted the Cato Institute and A.E.I., get me Republicans’ voices from business leaders to political leaders. Let’s just do this in a way that if you were a moderate in America, this would be compelling to you. And then I had to physically prepare, to be honest with you. Like I was terrified about how would I get through all these hours without having to go to the bathroom. So I just figured out how to hack that.

DUBNER: You went astronaut diaper?

BOOKER: No, I decided to do what my emergency room doctor cousin thought was really reckless as a middle-aged African-American man. I thoroughly dehydrated myself and didn’t drink liquid for a long time and didn’t eat for a few days. And that’s why she parked herself in the gallery for the entire 25 hours, because she thought I was a stroke risk.

DUBNER: You probably lost a few pounds though. 

BOOKER: I lost a lot of weight and tore up the carpet beneath me because my feet started getting numb in the third hour because your blood doesn’t circulate that well. 

DUBNER: I’d like to know what you heard, especially from Republican colleagues, afterwards. You’ve spoken about the “appalling silence and inaction of the good people” on that side of the aisle and elsewhere. So do you think your performance moved the needle in any significant way?

BOOKER: We did in the sense that the stories we centered elevated the voices of Americans and broke through in a way that we never imagined. Just on TikTok alone, 340 million likes. It ignited a lot of people to fight harder. We are all part of something. What you do, no matter how small you think it is, when you stand up for what’s righteous, you send out ripples.

DUBNER: So, you and I have spoken a few times before. I believe the first was in 2016, several months before Trump was elected the first time. You’d been in the Senate a few years. You were still relatively junior. I went back and I listened to that interview, and it’s a bit of a time capsule. It’s just remarkable how the tone of politics has changed. You talked about how much bipartisanship there was. You talked about the quote, “incredible allies across the aisle,” that you’re “working closely with the Koch brothers team, with Newt Gingrich, even Grover Norquist.” Considering where partisanship is now, considering what’s coming up the next couple months and years of this Trump 2 administration, which is probably just going to produce more partisanship, can you talk about anything actionable to roll that back to some degree? 

BOOKER: Look, I think Donald Trump is a colossal threat. His leadership is a colossal threat, and I’m not saying that myself. I could quote Republican leader after Republican leader, Republican senators who have even said that publicly and still say that to me privately. This is a corrupt president, with corruption like we’ve never seen before. He is a president of sheer chaos and unfortunately, he’s a president of real cruelty. 

DUBNER: Let me just take that statement, which is powerful, and respond to it by saying even so, you know, half the country voted for him. And if he were to run again in a few years — which would not be allowed, but he might — it’s not hard to imagine half the people wouldn’t vote for him again. How can you explain that level of corruption, chaos, and cruelty, as you just said, how can you explain that despite all that, he gets the votes and he has an iron grip on the party?

BOOKER: Well, I’m going to say two things. One is, I fundamentally disagree that he’s got the ability to be re-elected again. In fact, if the Constitution allowed it, I would love for him to be the candidate, because he is again back at spiraling down polling numbers. Independents are leaving him in droves, and even within his own party, he’s been taking a knock. So this idea that people haven’t woken up and re-understood why we rejected him resoundingly in 2020, they’re seeing that again. In the Hindu faith, Shiva is the god of destruction and also the god of renewal and new possibilities. I think we are in a period of Shiva right now, where you’re seeing this extreme cruelty. Political assassinations, erosions of constitutional norms, separation of families, attacks on universities, attacks on law firms, attacks on judges, all of things that are actually shaking America to the realization of how precious not just our democracy is, but how precious this idea that we are a nation that is indivisible, that has more in common than divides us. I think it’s setting us up for a period of possibility. We need to fight against chaos, corruption, and cruelty. But more importantly, if the Democratic Party or if leaders define themselves only by what we’re against and not what we are for, we will be lost as a nation. And I do not want to center Donald Trump as the main character of America’s story right now. He is not. He wants to be the main character. But we need to get back to shining the light on each other, and we will see a way forward together. 

DUBNER: If you’re invoking Shiva, I gather you have some thoughts that go beyond legislation. The older I get, the more I realize that there are certain things you really can’t legislate. Like, if there are two parties trying to come up with a deal, the more you try to write into the contract, the more you kind of remove trust from the equation, right? 

BOOKER: Well, that’s why we need two types of revolution in this country. As Jefferson said, we need a revolution all the time. The first one is Martin Luther King, in that civil rights revolution that we had, he said, I can’t legislate you to love me. But I can pass legislation to stop you from lynching me. Ultimately, change doesn’t come from Washington. We didn’t get the suffrage bill passed on the Senate floor because a bunch of men put their hands in and said, Hey, fellas, let’s give women the right to vote. It happened because incredible activists like Alice Paul from New Jersey and others created the consciousness of others that they eventually demanded it. The second revolution we need involves all of us, but also the leaders. I’m doing a lot of reading right now about the tradition of leadership that we had that elevated the best of our virtues, from humility to kindness to understanding that we are a nation that needs each other and belongs to each other. Even when we passionately disagree, like Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln did, they understood that they needed each other, that together they didn’t have a moral absolutism when they disagreed, but they were committed in the public’s face to working together because they knew that this country depended on those values. 

DUBNER: So, Senator, I’m very receptive to that message that you just communicated. But I also wonder, maybe if any of your Republican friends — and I know you have a lot — I wonder if they ever say to you, you know, “Cory, you are one of the smartest, most humane, most energetic members of Congress, but you’re hopelessly naive. You are hoping and wishing for something. The ship has sailed. People don’t behave like that anymore. The world has changed. The standards have changed. Society has changed.” If they say that to you, do you think they’re right, that that time is gone and you’re flailing at an imagined past? 

BOOKER: I am sure when the Nazis filled Madison Square Garden and fascism was on a rise here, that people thought that those days of decency had sailed. I am sure when there was a level of terrorism in our country like we have never seen before, where entire communities were being burned to the ground in the post-Reconstruction period, that people thought that decency was gone in America. I’m sure people believed when we had the Red Scare going on and we were deporting people unjustifiably and ending people’s careers and lives, that they thought that decency was gone. But I am telling you right now, there has been more and more periods in our country that in the darkest times and the wretchedness of our past, that there was a revival of light workers and a reigniting energy in this country that helped us to heal and redeem the very best of our ideals. I do not believe that they are a losing political strategy.

DUBNER: It does make me wonder how much you feel the media, and all the things that are included in what we call media today, have contributed to the partisanship. A lot of people argue that it has contributed a lot. Others argue it’s more just like a symptom of it. Do you believe some new type of regulation is in order? President Obama has talked about some kind of regulation as a means to fight disinformation and what he’s called the internet’s “demand for crazy.” President Trump has come at the media from a totally different angle — with lawsuits for starters, but a variety of efforts to curtail and undo what he calls the anti-conservative bias in mainstream media. What do you think should be done, if anything, about the way the media operates here? 

BOOKER: Well, the media is in a fierce competition for our eyes. In the fierce competition for our eyes, outrage sells, moral indignation sells, telling how much you are good and the other side is evil sells. That is a major problem. And yes, we need to step in and do some really strong regulations, again, that I think most of America would applaud. We should be treating social media like cigarette smoking. We have our children doing things — teenagers, 13-, 14-, 15-year-olds, whose brains are still developing, we have these platforms, who are not trying to sell them things, they are the product. We know this from Meta’s own information, that these things are toxic to their development, to their self-esteem, that it’s increasing their suicidal rates. I am confident that 25-plus years from now, people will look back and say, How could you let your children on these platforms? 

DUBNER: That’s kids. I mean, the political violence we’ve been seeing, the anti-Semitic assassinations we’ve been seeing, these are all adults, and you could argue that, you know, they’ve gone over the edge, these individuals, but —

BOOKER: Well, you have accountability for what you say on this show. Newspapers have accountability for what they put on newspapers. But yet, the biggest media platforms in our country now — I just saw an article about social media replacing TV as the number-one source of news and information for people. They don’t have the same accountability that you have, that radio has, that TV has, and that newspapers have. That is wrong. 

DUBNER: Let’s talk for a minute about Joe Biden and really the debacle of his last year in office, his physical and/or cognitive decline, his decision to not drop out of the reelection campaign until late. The elevation of Kamala Harris as a Democratic nominee without any votes being cast. And then of course, Harris losing the election. I’m sure this is not your favorite, favorite topic. Joe Biden, final year in the White House, open thread, have at it.

BOOKER: Look, there’s been books written and there will be more books written about all the mistakes that were made during that period. I know people want to focus in on whether he was 100 percent compos mentis or not. I don’t think that’s the important question. I think that there was a missed opportunity by him and his team to be that bridge to the next generation of leadership. 

DUBNER: Missed opportunity and a broken promise, we should say — it was explicit, yes? 

BOOKER: It would have been liberating for him to stand before the American people and say, I’m going to be not only the bridge to the next generation of leadership, but the bridge between the divides of our country. And so much of that is framing and marketing. He was this extraordinarily successful president. If you just look at the legislation that he got into law, if you look at what he did inheriting a country coming out of a pandemic, there’s just so many things that were triumphant about him. And that final year that you point to, unfortunately, is going to be a year so harshly judged that it could undermine his legacy. But I just want you to know, as somebody who knew Joe Biden, knows him, some of the more beautiful moments I’ve had as a leader were in my back-and-forths with him. During the presidential debates, my mom was not happy with me. Joe Biden and I were trading barbs on the stage, talking about marijuana policy. 

DUBNER: This is 2020, the first time and so far only time you’ve run for president, correct? 

BOOKER: Yes, yes, yes, I said, “I looked at your marijuana policy and I think were high when you wrote it.” the crowd laughed. I felt so good about myself. My mom, she said —

DUBNER: “Why are you being mean to that man, Cory?” 

BOOKER: Yeah, don’t be petty like that to the Vice President of the United States. But I loved the debates because I loved the watching the other debaters when nobody else was watching them. It’s a high-stress, high-pressure environment, and you see the best and the worst of people coming out amongst all that stress and strain. I saw grumpy behavior, mean behavior. But the one person that was a prince of a human being was always Joe Biden. I still remember, after that jab, that I got lots of applause at his expense, it’s a commercial break and we’re all standing backstage, people grabbing water. And Joe Biden comes over to me and I go, Oh, he’s going to give it to me. And he looks at me and he goes, “Baby Bonds! Oh my God, Cory. That is an incredible policy. Will you tell me about it more?” I’m surprised that he knows what Baby Bonds are. And we get into this intense discussion about the merits of this policy idea. He’s laughing, patting me on the back, telling me how smart I am. And I suddenly realized I was just glad-handed in expert style by a genius politician.

Is Cory Booker a genius politician?

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DUBNER: I see that just before you walked into this interview, you voted no on the nomination of Daniel Zimmerman, Assistant Secretary of Defense.

BOOKER: I’m impressed with your knowledge of —

DUBNER: Hey, I have the internet. 

BOOKER: Well, I have this high bar for Trump nominees right now because of the totality of what they’re doing, especially in the Department of Defense with Hegseth. So there are some people I’ve known personally and know their values — the handful that I voted for. But in general I’m voting no across the board on Trump nominees. 

DUBNER: Name for me what you think are the three worst things that the current Trump administration has done in your view, and then I want you to try to find three good things.

BOOKER: Oh, that’s great. I appreciate that. I think the worst thing is they are hurting Americans who are struggling the most. That includes everybody from people who rely on Medicaid or Meals on Wheels, people who rely on, frankly, the hope of America, who have American children, are here undocumented, but do everything by the rules and are now being not just deported, some of them are being sent to the worst conditions imaginable and endanger their lives. So, hurting vulnerable people. Number two, I just think that they are trashing our Constitution in very dangerous ways, eroding the separations of powers, violating principles of due process and more. And then the final thing is his foreign policy, and tariff policy is part of that. I hear from people all over the globe about the damage they’re doing, whether it’s the thousands who have died in places like D.R.C. or Sudan because this country is no longer standing in the breach. 

DUBNER: Can you name three things that the Trump Administration has done in the second term that you’re pretty happy about? 

BOOKER: The first thing is they are trying to build upon the Abraham Accords, that was their foreign policy win from the last election, I’ve been talking to leaders from Saudi Arabia, there’s a lot of us that want to see, including in the Trump administration, that expanded, which I think is really important. Number two, I think they did this through failure, but I do believe that our government needs to go through a 21st century reimagining so it is more efficient and more effective. And then the third thing I will say is that they as an organizing principle have yet again through their darkness ignited some of the best light I’ve seen out there. And I’ll give you an example. They are about to get rid of a whole bunch of trans American soldiers. And I have seen now more Americans discovering that for years and years we’ve had brave patriotic Americans who are transgender serving in our military. That helps to educate folks, de-stigmatize those who are trying to cast stigma, and make folks realize that people from all different kinds of backgrounds, from all different types of life experiences, have served in our military with distinction. 

DUBNER: We’re talking on the day that Iran retaliated by sending some missiles to the U.S. base in Doha, in Qatar, but warning the U.S. first apparently, from what I’ve been hearing. Please tell me if you know something different. So there was literally zero human damage, at least. But this follows the U.S. bombing these three Iranian nuclear facilities, which is a big step in this long-running drama between Iran and the U.S. So, you’re on Senate Foreign Relations. I know you know an awful lot that most of us don’t know. Tell us your thinking about this mission and what you think is going to maybe happen next. 

BOOKER: Well, I’m just being told by my staff that during the time of this interview, an Israel-Iran ceasefire has been announced. This is a moving situation, but if we have right now peace in that region between those two countries, if we have an Iran nuclear program that has been set back, then looking forward, there’s a lot of positive things we can say. However, we still have crises in that region, from terrorist proxies like Hamas and the Houthis. We have urgent needs for humanitarian aid and stability in Gaza, as well as a return of hostages.

DUBNER: I assume you were not consulted — very few people, it seems, were consulted — before the mission. But had you been, what would your feeling have been about that mission? 

BOOKER: I will start by telling anybody who will listen how horrific the Iranian regime is. They’re the global state sponsor of terrorism. They have killed many, many Americans. They suppress their own people. They cannot be allowed to have a nuclear weapon. If I was sitting in that chair, as the President of the United States or advising the president, all options would be on the table. Now, this president tore up a deal we had with our allied European countries and others to have a lot of transparency into their nuclear program. 

DUBNER: Which to be fair, critics said was not very much transparency, and that Iran has found a lot of good ways to get around it. 

BOOKER: Right, and we had this president saying that I can make a better deal, bragging that he was going to bring about a better deal without military action. So again, there has got to be governing principles in which our country operates. This lack of consultation, as you said, is really problematic. Our founders never thought that a president should be allowed to initiate such use of military force without any —

DUBNER: Although Obama did something similar-ish in Libya and elsewhere.

BOOKER: And I criticized Obama, and I’ve criticized Biden. Ever since 9/11, in times of fear, our country often has shown a willingness to sacrifice out of fear a lot of the constitutional principles that we have, and that’s really unfortunate. 

DUBNER: It’s a really interesting point you raise about fear. You know, psychologists and others know that we make bad decisions under uncertainty and under fear, and this is a time of really high fear. I think back to something that someone once told me that was in the Talmud, that they asked, What does God pray for? And the answer was that his mercy will be greater than his anger. The implication was that even God, when he gets fearful for his people, responds with anger instead of mercy. And I’m curious where you think this fear has come from. Because if you look at the numbers, if you look at the prosperity in the world and in the U.S., if you look even at the economy — the vibecession was no recession at all, it was mostly bad feelings about the economy. And this, I’m guessing, goes to your discussion about social media and other media engendering fear, and it is profitable. But we also know if we’re parents or siblings and someone we love is scared, we know that it’s our job to try to alleviate that fear rather than ramp it up and exploit it. 

BOOKER: That’s exactly the difference between great presidents we’ve had and this one. He tries to insinuate fear. We see this in his immigration policies. Fear is a tool, unlike F.D.R.’s greatness was, we have nothing to fear, but fear itself. I’m going to be an agent to conquer your fear. This may be the most shocking part of the interview to you: I belong to a Baptist Church, I’m a Christian, but I study Torah every Friday with an orthodox rabbi, and have for years and years and years, almost 30 years. 

DUBNER: There’s some good stuff in there. 

BOOKER: Well, the reason why this conversation about fear really is important because this past week’s Torah portion was all about fear. And this was the moment that Moses gets the people, you know, through the desert to the Promised Land. They send 12 scouts in, 10 of them come back and say, We can’t take it. They’re afraid of the opposition. And two dissent, Caleb and Joshua. They are praised by God, but this is considered the first Tisha B’av, the ninth of the month of Av, which is when Kristallnacht happened, when the Temple fell, it’s considered one of the worst days. The Jewish people were punished for this, sent back into the desert for 40 years because of that governing fear. And so for me, I pull from this parshah and I celebrate what many will call the Joshua generation, this next generation of people, where our courage must be greater than our fear. And that if we are not governed by fear, maybe we will stop turning against each other and can turn to each other and recognize the power that we have together. America together can beat the Nazis, can defy gravity and go to the moon. America, when we’re united, we could show the greatest prosperity humanity’s ever seen, shared prosperity, shared wealth, America together working against fear and towards a more courageous view of what humanity can be, that kind of courage we need to get back to, that kind of unifying rallying vision, which is the antithesis to fear. 

DUBNER: Is this the way you really are? Like, do you have this much hope in your heart, or is this a position that you need to kind of talk yourself into a little bit?

BOOKER: No, God, this country kicks my ass all the time. I’m sorry, right now, I am watching U.S.A.I.D. workers with tears in their eyes who have come from the front lines of the fights for the worst infectious diseases that threaten our country tell me in detail how many people are dying because of what Donald Trump did. People who tell me that their children have been warned in college not to post things on social media because the government can come after you. We are now in a nation where we teach our children through these active shooter drills how to shelter, hide, run into closets. This is heartbreaking stuff. If you are not broken by the state of America right now, I question your humanity. What I’m saying is that what hope is — it’s not a nice Pollyannish feeling, it’s not some cool breeze that blows. Hope is rugged, hope is wounded, hope has had to be resurrected time and time again. Hope ultimately is a determination to say that no matter how bad it is, despair is not going to have the last word. 

DUBNER: I assume you’re going to think hard about running for president again in 2028? 

BOOKER: Yes. 

DUBNER: What would you do differently this time? You ran what looked like a really good early campaign. You’re a good presenter. You have good ideas. You have good experience. You have a lot of energy. But you went nowhere. Was it just not your time? Was the field too crowded? What happened? 

BOOKER: Yeah, everybody from me to Kamala Harris couldn’t even make it to the first primary because we ran out of money. I still remember my campaign manager — it was one of the funnier conversations I’ve had in my life — where he comes up to me and goes, Let me give you the good news and the bad news. He goes, well, the good news is, You have the best campaign in Iowa. Don’t take my word for it. Take the Des Moines Register. You have more endorsements from state legislators and he goes, Now let me give you the bad news. The bad news is we’ll be out of the race in five or six months because we don’t have any money and you’re living from hand to mouth. So, you know, we have, fortunately, a lot more small-dollar donors that are building up. But so much of our politics, unfortunately, is tied up in money. I took a pledge — the fourth Senator ever to do it — that I wouldn’t take corporate PAC money. I wouldn’t take pharma exec money. Because I just believe we have a broken campaign system. If you think it’s broken, then live that change. Be the change you want to see. 

“Be the change you want to see.” This is one of those ideas that people love when they first hear it, and they keep repeating it to themselves, but it tends to wear out over time. It becomes just another slogan, more than a call to action. With Cory Booker, I don’t think it’s just a slogan. One reason he draws a lot of attention is because he deserves it. Whether or not your politics line up with his, whether you think he’s a bit of a grandstander — the fact is that Booker consistently directs his abundant energy toward what he sees as righteous causes. One such cause — maybe not surprising from a disciple of John Lewis and Martin Luther King — is non-violence, Cory Booker-style.

BOOKER: I remember running for a town hall stage when I was running for president in 2020. I’m about to jump up and a big guy steps in front of me and says, “Dude, I want you to punch Donald Trump in the face.” And I looked at him and I said, “Dude, that’s a felony.”

You can let us know what you thought of this episode, or any of our episodes, by writing to radio@freakonomics.com. Until then, take care of yourself and, if you can, someone else too.

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Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. This episode was produced by Zack Lapinski, with help from Dalvin Aboagye; it was mixed by Eleanor Osborne, with help from Jeremy Johnston. The Freakonomics Radio Network staff also includes Alina Kulman, Augusta Chapman, Ellen Frankman, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Greg Rippin, Morgan Levey, Jasmin Klinger, Sarah Lilley, and Theo Jacobs. Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune,” by the Hitchhikers; and our composer is Luis Guerra. As always, thanks for listening.