“When Are More Americans Going to Speak Up?”

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A few weeks ago, Senator Cory Booker, of New Jersey, rose on the floor of the Senate and said that he had the “intention of disrupting the normal business of the United States Senate for as long as I am physically able.” With that, he launched into a sprawling, heartfelt speech directed at the Presidency of Donald Trump. He came prepared with more than a thousand pages of written material, including testimony from hundreds of New Jerseyans and other Americans.

Twenty-five hours and five minutes later, Booker stopped talking. He had broken the record for a continuous speech in the chamber, set, in 1957, by the South Carolina segregationist Strom Thurmond, whose oratory was in the service of filibustering against a civil-rights bill. Not long after finishing his marathon, Booker said that he would “go deal with some of the biological urgencies I’m feeling.”

Since then, Booker, who served as mayor of Newark before winning his Senate seat in 2src13, has kept up the volume of his critique of Trump. I spoke with him recently for The New Yorker Radio Hour about the impulse for his speech, the growing harms of the Trump Presidency, and what he sees as the dangerous failure of so many institutions and leaders to speak up. Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

We are coming up on Trump’s hundredth day in office, and I was just reading the slew of pieces that were written eight years ago—about the Muslim ban, Mike Flynn’s appointment and rapid dismissal, the crazy midnight tweeting, the flirtations with Moscow and Pyongyang, the atmosphere of general alarm. What is different now?

There is a deeper, more grave attack going on with our fundamental constitutional principles that I believe we all share. The Trump Administration seems resolute to tear down a century of traditions—or at least post-World War Two traditions—of world order. And Trump is effectively, thus far, doing it without Republican congressional leaders doing anything—not just to stop him, but even to offer up a strong rebuke or critique. And so I think that the danger signs this time are far greater.

I have been told by people doing scientific research, people doing international work to stop the spread of infectious diseases, people who are talking about agency investigations into horrific crimes, that a lot of the things that he’s doing are irreversible, or at least will take a generation to try to undo. And so the consequences every day that this Administration continues in this manner are grave and great.

What has been accomplished in a hundred days that you think is particularly grave and particularly irreversible?

There are many things to point to that are grave. I’ll start with one of them that I mentioned. A lot of people who are doing research are pointing to example after example of how Trump’s actions have stopped it—whether it’s actually taking scientists themselves through immigration action and bouncing them out of our country, or putting them in detention, or just cutting the funding.

Trump has taken a page out of China’s book and they have taken a page out of our book. China attacked their universities during the Cultural Revolution in a stunning way. They attacked élite institutions that were doing scientific research as well as culture. And then they realized, in our generation, how much that cost them. Now they’re seeing things like breakthroughs in A.I., robotics, autonomous vehicles, E.V.s. They understand that the future will be shaped fundamentally by those who are inventing it.

And what has Trump done in a hundred days? He’s declared a cultural revolution of his own, attacking universities, attacking folks that are on the frontiers of science and research, putting them on the defensive, cutting billions of dollars, creating a situation where they are stopping research or stopping an inflow of the world’s best researchers. This is not a loss we can just bounce back from.

What, if anything, about the first hundred days of this Administration has surprised you?

Trump is losing his ability to surprise me. When people ask me about his talking about a third term, or deporting American citizens to a gulag in El Salvador—I mean, these outrageous things he’s said, I’ve come to expect them, and believe him. So I don’t know if there’s surprise. There’s been a lot of profound disappointment.

I know my Republican colleagues in the Senate and some in the House. I know their core values. I listen to them—from the Signalgate and the problems with [Defense Secretary Pete] Hegseth, all the way to just cutting bipartisan-approved investments in things like science, in some of the bipartisan bills that we pass that deal with gun violence, bipartisan investments in health innovations—I know privately from conversations how much they object to these things. And right now where my heartbreak lies is that so far you’ve seen scant few people willing to step up and take risks because there is a reality—Jeff Flake, Bob Corker, Liz Cheney—that people who did stand up, did speak out, are no longer in Congress.

Are these jobs so great? Is being a senator so wildly awesome that one would not give it up in order to live by one’s principles? Lisa Murkowski whispers that people are frightened, but that’s about as much resistance as you hear or see among Republicans. Are the jobs that great?

I certainly don’t believe they are. I really don’t. I just know from psychology that we’re always the heroes in our own story. People think to themselves, I will make these compromises in order to be in a position to do this good, and they do this calculus in their head.

But there is a truth that I always joke about, which is that “Profiles in Courage” is a very thin volume. We’ve seen, though, Margaret Chase Smith, at a time where she took great political risk in a fierce speech she gave in criticism of her own party during the McCarthy era. We’ve seen demagogues rise before, to positions of great power and influence, from Father [Charles] Coughlin to [Joseph] McCarthy. Usually you see people who have the courage to step up and say, “Sir, do you have no shame?”

At this point, we have not gotten there yet. My father has this old story about a hound dog howling next to a man in a rocking chair, and a guy walks on the country road and asks him, “Why is your hound dog howling so much?” And he goes, “Well, he’s sitting on a nail.” And he goes, “Well, why doesn’t the hound dog just get up off the nail?” And the man on the rocking chair says, “Well, he’s not hurting bad enough yet.”