The Daily Beast Podcast - Aug. 2 Member Bonus: Why Cory Booker Won't Punch Trump in the Face

Episode Date: October 14, 2020

This members-only episode was originally published on August 2, 2020 and moved to this feed for full member access. Turns out, Sen. Cory Booker is a bigger pacifist than we suspected. He joined Rick Wilson and Molly Jong-Fast on this members-only episode of The New Abnormal and told them about the time “a big guy” asked the New Jersey native to punch Trump in the face–and his response to that person. Booker also shared his thoughts on what may happen in the Senate thanks to Trump (“I think that what people are realizing is this could be the end for Republican party dominance”), how the president compared to Nixon, and the time one of his campaign staffers projectile vomited all over him and his partner Rosario Dawson. Plus! The trio imagine Putin staying in a Motel 6 and get Booker’s advice on how the Democratic Party can get out the vote: “If you’re not doing something about an issue that you care about, then you are complicit.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, and welcome to the new abnormal's first member exclusive episode. And we thank you so much for being here. Today we have a very special guest to start things off with the one and only senator from New Jersey, Cory Booker. I always start with this question. It's really bad. What broke Devin Nunes' brain? That's an interesting question. You always start with that question? She is the Ahab to Devin Nunes' brain's white whale. phenomenon that's happened with Republicans, where they go over to this weird world. It is difficult for me to see people who openly spoke about Donald Trump when he was running,

that this would cause sort of a cataclysmic breaking of the Republican Party. So people who predicted that. And now to watch them contort themselves to try to defend or obscure or ignore Donald Trump's sort of behavior that is indeed, I think, not just damaging America, but I really think hurting the Republican Party in significant ways. And so I try not to wrap my head around what people are thinking to get that done and just put myself in the space of every single day working to protect, resist, overcome the things that he's doing. So, Corey, what is it like in the Senate right now? Do you feel like a change in the chemistry in the Senate at all?

Well, I think that what people are realizing is this could be the end for Republican Party dominance for at least two years. but maybe longer. And that's pretty significant because, first of all, the Senate is not a democratic institution in terms of voting. I mean, we are only 47 senators, but we represent millions of more votes than the senators in the Republican Party. A clear example of that, obviously, is a California senator is a state that represents 40 plus million people, while a senator from a very low population state, Idaho or Wyoming. So the Senate is shifted because of that to being a more agrarian body. It's more of a lot of the interests of higher population areas of our country aren't as equally represented. And this gives the Republican Party a lot of advantages right now the way the demographics are.

But that could be coming to an end. This could really be a time where Donald Trump has signaled a new era of the Republican Party. And frankly, one of those new errors is very clearly what Nixon started, which was this great southern strategy, which was very much steeped in racial animus, very much steeped in fear-mongering and demagoguery. And Trump is trying to, in many ways, embody a far more extreme version that Richard Nixon was with his calls for quote unquote law and order, with his calling peaceful protesters thugs with him trying to make people afraid and use that as a political strategy as opposed to the higher virtues of our society. So it does seem like all that's running together at one time.

I love what you just said, but I have one question. Have you met America? I don't know if you guys heard, but I ran for president. So I traveled this nation in a way I've never traveled before and had incidences from really tense moments on airplanes where people came at me with vitriol just by seeing me, I triggered them to the larger groups of my own party. One of my favorite moments on the campaign was one of my first big town halls in Iowa. And I'm running towards a stage. And this is the energy of our party, which has faced a lot of trauma and has faced a lot of a hurt. and often our reactions to that is to meet that hurt by trying to hurt. And so I'm running to a stage and a big guy sees me and I'm a big guy myself.

And we have this moment at the side of the stage before I jump on where he goes, dude, I want you to punch Donald Trump in the face. And I look at him and I go, dude, that's a felony. That's not how we win. That's not how America wins by, you know, we didn't beat demagogues in our history. If you think of everybody from McCarthy to Bull Connor, I mean, we didn't beat Bull Connor. by bringing bigger dogs and bigger fire hoses. We beat them by taking that negative energy

and that darkness and out doing it with light and with positive energy. And so running around this country, I got a really good connection with the heart of our country. And when you challenge that spirit, I told the guy, like, let me show you why that's not the energy

with which we win from. We don't win by trying to out-trump or trying to match him on his turf and his terms. No, we win by calling to the greater moral imagination of this country. And for me, it was a very rewarding way to run a presidential campaign because often I'd have to make the case. I'd have to talk to people because a lot of the energy is let's do to them what they've been doing to us. But when you walk people through the case, I found, as one, a CNN reporter wrote in a sort of epitaph at the end of my campaign that like going to our

campaign events was, she said sort of snarky, like it was like going to an Oprah show because at the end, there were tears. There was this affirmation of the best of who we are. There was this sort of aspirational energy that really, I think people would actually come to hear me, take the time, would realize that this is actually who we want to be as a nation, not the kind of degrading, demeaning experiences we're having now with the current leadership. I love that. You have me totally, and I'm sure Rick is less on board. But not from a partisan way, just because I'm so cynical. He's very cynical.

My soul is so dead from 30 years of Republican politics. It's very charred. There are a lot of young Republican senators who used to be the future of the Republican Party and who were sort of more centrist. Have you had any of those guys come to you and say like, oh my God? Yeah, the conversations I've had over the last three years with my Republican colleagues, which I often wish the public could hear. And there is a level of frustration when you hear people complaining about Trump in private, but praising him in public. And so there definitely is angst amongst that party for having to defend things they personally find so morally objective.

And I think that they know that who he is. I mean, he has demonstrated himself to be a person of such profound weakness and toxicity of spirit. And I think that they know that that is an affront to what they aspire for at their best as well. Because, look, we're in a partisan fever. But what could Biden do to move criminal justice reform ahead? Well, I think that a lot is going to determine is a guy who I'm stunned that calls himself the grim reaper. Is he in a charge of the Senate or not because there is enough of a bipartisan coalition around criminal justice reform to move even further towards ending what is a nightmare that we call ourselves the land of the free. We hold the ideals of liberty so precious, but yet we incarcerate 25% of the planet's incarcerated people, even though we're only 5% of the low's population. One out of three women who are incarcerated in humanity are incarcerated in the United States of America. And so there's still so much important work that we have to do that I think you suddenly have an alignment of 50 plus senators that are in the Democratic Party, that they're going

to work with Republicans to get over that 60 vote threshold to pass even more landmark legislation around criminal justice reform, policing reform, and then expand the lens even more to deal with savage cruelties that we still have around race issues in America that extend to every area from environmental injustice to health care disparities to educational disparities that I know that there are Republican allies who believe that this has to stop as well. I think we're all looking right now at an election that is beginning to lean Biden's direction. A lot of work between here and there. If you got a phone call on November 4th, Joe Biden, he said, what do you want to do in the administration?

You know, that's a provocative question. I am a provocative guy. Sincerely, what has me and my senior team most excited is to be a senator who has sort of staked out a space, even though I'm a junior senator, I haven't even finished a first full term, to be leading on key spaces that are really important to me. That should Biden be president and should Chuck Schumer be in charge of the Senate, my productivity, even though under Trump I've passed major legislation, I wrote with Tim Scott, the Opportunity Zone legislation. I helped co-author the major criminal justice reform bill. But now suddenly with that lineup, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi,

and Joe Biden, I frankly will have a dream job. terms of being able to deliver real change to this country. And so I'd be happy where I am, frankly. Who should Biden pick as his VP? The person who best helps him win. There it is. Who's your secret first choice? We won't tell anyone. You know that I serve with a number of people under consideration and would like to preserve my relationships with them. Well put, Senator, well put. What's the weirdest thing that happened to you on the campaign trail running for president? It really is a weird experience. in the best of ideals of that word.

In other words, it takes you out of the norm and into just experiences that are new and different. And look, for me, there was so many moments where I just thought were beautiful. But if you must admit weirdness... We're here for the weird. I will tell you one of my favorite moments,

which sounds awful now that I've said that. It's a favorite moment. But it is a memory that I will always love is we were driving through Iowa and Rosario had come on the campaign trail. And I'm sitting in the front seat. Rosario is sitting in the middle seat behind me with two staffers on either side of hers. And it's a long trip and she says that she's feeling nauseous and for some water. And so I hand her some water and she's starting to feel better. But then I see the

staffer's face next to her. And the staffer next to her seems like they're getting nauseous. And now I can see from the expressions that it's going to blow. I tell my long time, a professor from Stanford, actually. He was volunteering that day and he was driving. I'm like, pull over. He's like, what? I'm like, pull over. And he still, I'm like, pull over. And just as he starts to pull over, I have seen projectile vomiting. Oh, no. There should be some kind of Guinness record.

Because she made an attempt to roll down the window. Oh, no. So it hit the window, splattered back all over her, and onto Rosario. And it was just like an eruption of vomit that was incredible. And so then we pull over. I jump out of the car and just try to find napkins everywhere from and run over and start. She is like the most embarrassed person in the world, keeping her off. Rosario is cleaning her off. So now she has, at this point, potential president and first lady, God willing, cleaning vomit off of her. And she is just like,

oh my God, oh my God, I might have just thrown up on the next president of the United States and his significant other. So that is one of those moments that you just will never forget. You know, don't let anybody ever say that campaigning isn't very glamorous. No, it's the most un-glamorous, humbling experience. And it is the beauty of a democracy is that whoever, I mean, imagine if Putin or Erdogan would have to go to the people in the way that we make our president to and travel in all kind of third-class ways and stay in, not Motel 6,000 and 772. So I have a lot of those great experiences that just show you humanity at its best. even when we're at our worst. So a lot of us, Dems, this is like we're going back to Democrat questions here.

We're all really concerned about the get at the vote in the fall. And for any number of reasons, I mean, as we know, Trump is a big cheater. He sees what's going on. We have a lot of listeners who are just, like, want to stop Trump at any cost. What would you say? Like, what can you guys do to protect elections? What can voters do? First of all, I love the spirit of your question, because I always tell people,

if you agree with me that this is the most important election of our lifetimes, then let's act like it with a sense of urgency and importance that most of us are not putting on it every day. And I would start looking at my sort of energy time and resources window and saying, okay, first, which candidates am I going to support? Do I want Mitch McConnell to be in the back? And therefore, am I supporting those 10 races we just mentioned, even if it's a dollar to each? Do I want Nancy Pelosi to stay there? Remember, there's a lot of really competitive house seats. I've got a number of them in New Jersey that were flipped in 2018 that need to stay. Obviously, we would do something in presidential race. But then I would say to your question, who are the best people right now out there protecting the ballot? And there are organizations. Stacey Abrams has an amazing one called Fair Fight that is a nonprofit. You can give resources to that to help us protect in swing states she's working, protect ballot access there. And there are other groups that are doing it. The DNC has an operation that's doing that. So I really just believe that that is the truth of life. If you are not doing something, something about an issue that you care about, then you are complicit in the very problem that

you've identified. And this is a problem. We have to turn our worry into work, our anxiety, into action. And that's really one of these moments. And you should never, and I learned this early in my life, allow your inability to do everything to undermine your determination to do something about a problem. I'm literally here having this conversation with you is because there was a white guy on a couch in New Jersey watching TV on March 6th. 17th, 1965, where most of America, we only have three channels, was watching a movie called Judgment at Nuremberg. And if you guys know this fateful date, they moved away from an ongoing movie. They cut away because of breaking news. And suddenly he is watching a bridge in Alabama.

And these marchers, led by a guy named John Lewis, get viciously beaten and gassed by Alabama state troopers. And this guy who was struggling to make a business, keep his business afloat at the beginning of his career just said his first instinct is, I got to go to Alabama, I got to help these people and join this effort. And then he realized he couldn't close his business. He couldn't even afford a plane ticket. And he had responsibilities with his families. But the great thing in that moment is he had said, you know what, I'm not going to let my inability to do everything, undermine my determination to do something. And he did an internal calculation and realized that he could afford just one hour a week of pro bono work, called around, found a small group of activists

that were trying to figure out a way to break racial housing segregation. in New Jersey in 1965, and he joined them and helped them come up with a sting operation where they would find white couples to follow around black couples when black couples were turned away from homes because the house was quote-unquote sold. The white couple would find out what was really going on. And he said four years later, he gets a case file of this family. He's coming up from the south to New Jersey. And they get turned away from home after home. They said a white couple behind them, found out a house was for sale. The white couple put a bid on the house because the black couple loved it so much. The bid was accepted. On the day of the closing, white couple didn't show up. The lawyer did and the black man, the husband. They were attacked by the real estate agent, punched in the face, dog sicked on them, a whole bunch of legal rigmarole, but eventually the black family moved in. And as he said to me, do you know the names on that case file? Do you know the name of that couple?

And the name of that couple was Carrie and Carolyn Booker, my parents. And so I'm literally sitting here in a time of moral crisis where there were uprisings all around the country, a white guy who was busy starting his business, who went from doing nothing to an hour a week. And that chain of events, courageous people on a street in Selma, changing the spirit of a guy a thousand miles away who gave an hour a week and joined with that, all that conspiracy of love, that channel of love, those dominoes of love and action that changed my life. And so that's the power we have every day. And so many of us surrender that power because we underestimate what one action can do, what one level of commitment can make.

But on that note, we'll wrap up this episode of the new abnormal from The Daily Beast. In future episodes, we'll be talking with smart folks from The Daily Beast and beyond from media, culture, politics, and science. Who will help us understand what's happening to our country and the world. We hope you'll subscribe to us on your favorite podcast app and share the show on social media. We're just getting started and don't want you to miss an episode. If you'd like to follow us on Twitter, I'm Molly Jongfest, and he's the Rick Wilson. Thanks so much for listening. and we'll see you again on the next episode.

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