C ory Booker had been railing against Donald Trump’s agenda from the floor of the Senate for three hours when his feet started to go numb. On the lectern he had his cellphone out (against Senate rules), with his family group chat pulled up. Every now and then it pinged with a message of encouragement, or a photo of an absurdly shredded bald dude — the motivational speaker, ultramarathoner, and former Navy SEAL David Goggins — instructing him to “STAY HARD.”
Booker’s family read Goggins’ book together back in 2021, his cousin Pam tells me. “We developed our own internal language, like: ‘Stop feeling sorry for yourself. Stop acting like you’re doing something hard. Let’s Goggins it out.’… Anytime we thought we were suffering, we’d say, ‘Well, have you broken both of your legs and taped them up with duct tape and cardboard and gone and run 10 miles like David Goggins did?’”
Booker started shifting from one foot to another as he spoke, rocking back and forth, trying to regain sensation in his lower extremities. By the time he finished speaking, 22 hours later, pillowy puffs of synthetic fiber had gathered in piles around his feet. He’d worn holes in the Senate floor’s royal-blue carpet, but he had Goggins’d it out, surpassing the record set by the South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond, who filibustered, but failed to stop, the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957.
By the next Saturday, after shaking each hand and grinning obligingly in every selfie following a town hall in Paramus, New Jersey, Booker sinks into the back of a black SUV, exhausted. “I had food delivered to my house this morning — fruit and stuff like that, for energy — Amazon says it was delivered, but there was nothing on my doorstep, so I have no food at home,” he says, mournfully. “I just wanted some fruit to wake up to.” For Booker, a vegan for more than a decade, there will be no pit stop for Jersey’s famous Taylor Ham, but we’re just about to pass one of Newark’s handful of vegan restaurants, and it’s still open. He bounds through the door triumphantly — only to be told they’ve just sold clean out, so he heads to the ice cream shop (also vegan) next door.
You might think by this point in the week, Booker would be tired of talking, but in case you failed to grasp this watching his 25-hour speech, this is a guy who loves to yap. Within a few minutes, he’s learned every detail of the ice cream shop owner’s backstory, persuaded her to make him his own cookie-dough-filled ice cream flavor (he already had a name in mind: Dough Unto Others), and he’s recorded a video message to her husband, telling him, “We both know you married up!” Booker himself has never been married. A relationship with the actress Rosario Dawson ended in 2022, but the pair remain friendly. After his speech, Dawson posted on Instagram, “We’re so proud of you. Go sleep now.” (Booker ate a banana and went straight into making a live appearance on The Rachel Maddow Show instead.)
At 56, Booker still retains the boyish pluck from back when he was elected the youngest councilman in Newark’s history at the time. There, Booker quickly figured out that harnessing the attention of the media was the best option he had to effect change in the city. His first year in office, he set up a tent outside of Garden Spires, a notorious drug- and crime-plagued housing project, where he slept for 10 days, refusing food, and successfully shamed the mayor and landlord into improving conditions.
Booker keeps a map of Newark’s Central Ward on the wall of his Senate office in Washington, D.C., beside bookshelves festooned with pop-culture memorabilia. Back in his office at the Capitol a few days after our drive through Newark, he shows off his boxed, mint-condition Lt. Nyota Uhura Star Trek figurine, his Broadway-cast recording of The Wiz (“I was crying, watching the stage in ’74. I was only five years old, and they took me back to see it three times”), and The Wall Street Journal’s original pointillist portrait of Martin Luther King Jr.
Booker offers me water in a Batman-branded pint glass, and sips from his own Green Lantern one. He talks like a pinball machine, a dizzying, discursive style that ricochets from one point of reference to the next. One question might elicit a 16-minute soliloquy that begins with the birth of his father, weaves through the long arc of American history, and the shorter arc of his own life and political career, name-checking the New York Times writer Ezra Klein, Oprah Winfrey, Tyler Perry, the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, and half a dozen of his congressional colleagues along the way. Printing that answer alone, in full, would take up more than double the amount of space allotted for this interview. So here, edited for length and clarity, are the best bits of Booker’s two-part conversation with Rolling Stone.
What was the moment you committed to a marathon speech on the Senate floor?
The fight over the continuing (budget) resolution (and whether Senate Democrats should give Republicans the votes needed). We had three heated caucus meetings in a row, and the yelling inside got so bad the reporters on the outside were hearing (us), and staff on the outside would be texting: “You guys need to quiet down.”
When we made that decision (to give Republicans enough votes to pass the budget), I felt so deflated — and then heard from my constituents this eruption of frustration. I went back to my staff, and I said that we need to take some individual action. I’d been hearing that challenge from constituents: “Take risks! Do something! We don’t feel like you’re doing enough.”
I’m here because we did unorthodox protests when I was coming up in Newark. When you are technically powerless — when I was a city councilperson, they had all the votes, and (Mayor) Sharpe James was a very powerful person — it forced me to think out of the box.
The speech reminded me of your Garden Spires demonstration in that way.
That was the moment that’s most parallel in terms of: I was ready to quit. There was a woman who walked me up and down Garden Spires to get me elected, saying to people, “This kid just got here, you don’t know him, but you know me, this is who we’re gonna support.” I wouldn’t be here today without her — I think we got into the runoff by just 12 votes.
A year later, she’s calling me for help, and I’m telling her I can’t help her. (Right now,) a lot of Democrats are saying, “We don’t have the votes, we can’t help.”
When I got out to Garden Spires, (that woman), Elaine Sewell, came over to me, and I thought she was going to get mad at me — because we had literally yelled at each other on the phone, and I hung up on her — but she saw me and treated me like the prodigal son, and I realized: I was yelling at her, telling her I couldn’t do it, and I didn’t even go there. I didn’t even show up. That, really, was what she wanted. She just wanted me to show that I cared enough to come out and stand with her, or listen to her, you know? I think people understand that their politicians aren’t going to wave a wand (and fix everything). They want to know you give a shit.
How did you prepare, physically?
I had the benefit of Chris Murphy’s 2016 stand. (Booker stood alongside the Connecticut senator as he held the floor for 14 hours and 50 minutes in protest of the government’s inaction on gun control.) I got a lot of data from what I was really facing. I realized the going-to-the-bathroom thing, which was the biggest thing I was obsessed with, was not as hard as being on your feet for 15 hours. It gave me a lot of data to think about: OK, how am I gonna biologically hack myself to make it through? I said, I’m gonna fast until I get to ketosis, because I know that when my liver has burned through all the glycogen, then you shift to burning ketones, you get very focused and a lot of energy — I learned that from my intermittent-fasting days.
I stopped drinking water the night before, and 24 hours of not drinking was too much. I didn’t need to do it. By the end, as I felt my hands and leg muscles cramping up, I realized I was definitely dehydrated, and I just started shooting water in the last five hours, saying, “Screw it about the bathroom thing.” I knew if I made it past the 20th hour, I could go for the record, and that adrenaline would probably pull me through.
Why not filibuster an actual piece of legislation?
The way the modern Senate works is they often will use procedural tactics to never give the opposition a chance to come in, so doing a real filibuster is very, very hard. In the modern Senate, it’s very hard to even get control of the floor. I said to my team, “How did Ted Cruz get control of the floor? How did Rand Paul? Figure out how they got control.” The person in the cloakroom told me, very annoyingly, “We let (Rand Paul take the floor) because he promised it was only going to be a couple minutes — and he lied through his teeth.… Are you willing to lie to (Senate Majority Leader John) Thune?” I said, “That’s not the way I roll. I’m not going to lie, so let’s just let them know that I’m going to take control of the floor and hold it for as long as I possibly can.”
There was this powerful moment where you shouted out Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley, and it almost felt like you were trying to resurrect the spirit of bipartisanship from the energy you’d created in the room. Do you have any hope for bipartisanship at this point?
I definitely do. I have enough conversations with Republicans now who will tell me things privately that many won’t say publicly. There are people that don’t agree with some things that the president’s doing, and that shows me that there’s potential to stop those things from happening. The only hope we have of stopping some of the big things that I think are most menacing about the Trump administration is to get votes from the other side. You can’t get that if you are demeaning and degrading and don’t give anybody a pathway for them to do the right thing — a pathway for them to act out of conscience and not necessarily their politics.
“If anything, this last election shows us that who the candidate is matters.”
When you were a member of the Newark City Council, an executive from your own party, Mayor James, threatened and bullied you. Can you relate to your Republican colleagues, those who feel threatened by Trump, on that level?
No. I mean, look: There were definitely really scary times in Newark when cops would warn me, “We’re following you.” My father was always flipped out about, would somebody try to set me up? Like plant drugs in my (car or) whatever. There’s a lot of physical fear or worry that I had in my early career — I still remember, when Faith Hochberg, this federal judge, was warning me, “You are not safe.” She made me connect her with my mother because she just didn’t think I was taking the threat seriously enough. One of my supporters hired a former Mossad agent to assess my security. He basically tells him: This guy is screwed. He is being followed. He lives in these projects that don’t have any security.
How did Democrats end up in the position they’re in today? And how do they get out of it?
There’s lots of good autopsies that have talked about a generation of Democrats that have lost their connection to farmers, or certain unions, and the working class. Yet you still had an Obama wave, for example, and then you saw the famous Obama-to-Trump voters. I think that speaks to what is really important, which is: Are we, as a party or as individuals who are running for office, finding ways to make voters believe that we have a vision for them, that we see them and we are standing for them? You have to remember, there are multiple states where Trump won (in November) and the Democratic senator won, so clearly Democratic senators who overcame all of that, their message was: “Hey, I see you. I’m going to fight for you,” so much so that people ticket-split. If anything, this last election shows us that who the candidate is matters. Clearly, we had great messengers in our party who overcame pretty tough obstacles.
I want to get back to being a party — or at least I want to be a leader that doesn’t just talk about what I’m against, but what I’m for. To inspire people about the possibilities for themselves, their families, and our nation. Like, “Hey, yes, things are really bad right now. I’m going to stand up and do everything I can to stop him from hurting you or violating the democratic principles and ideals that we all should be affirming and fighting for.”
But, even in this period, I think it’s important that we center people and stand up for them and let them know that my focus isn’t Donald Trump. My focus is you, and that’s why I’m fighting. But it is important we’re providing a compelling vision for America that gets people to believe, again, in us. Forget Democrats, when I say “us,” I mean believe in America. Believe that the American dream has meaning.
What does that vision look like to you? Can you be specific?
There’s a lot of cynicism now that’s growing with Americans feeling like they can’t live a better life than their parents, and there’s a lot of unfortunate data that backs that up. From 1940 to 1980, there was this massive explosion in the middle class. Social mobility in our country was pretty extraordinary. Now, we’re more of a classist, more of a static society than even England. But the technological frontiers of this generation create radical possibilities that our parents couldn’t even conceive of.
What do you mean by that?
I believe in the democratizing force of technology — that gaps that we have right now, where education is still so dependent upon what ZIP code you’re born in, where access to capital, whether you’re an artist or an entrepreneur, is still very based upon “Do you have the privilege to have a social network?” Our generation has an opportunity to get away from the binary tribalism and get back to the renewal of the American idea, to make it real to people — and more than anything, accessible to people. This is why people like Ezra Klein fire me up, because he’s absolutely right in his book Abundance — don’t tell me the United States of America is a nation of scarcity! We have the most abundant society on the planet Earth. The issue is not having enough resources. It’s allocating them efficiently and effectively.
Abundance has sparked a debate about whether things like zoning regulations and environmental lawsuits — features of Democratic-governed states — hamper American progress. Do you agree with the thesis?
I think it is right on the major thematic conclusions, but, obviously, I read it in a much more sophisticated way from my own experience. (When I was mayor of Newark,) we were in a recession and I’ve got to grow our economy, I’ve got to create jobs because the unemployment rate is 20-plus percent, and one of the things I saw as an easy answer was the port area.
In Newark, kids have asthma rates four times higher because the port, the highways, the airport are all there. They breathe in horrible toxins, and around the port, I have all these brownfields, all this fallow land. If we could build acres and acres of warehouses right here, those trucks don’t have to idle and drive, you can get (that container-ship cargo) right into the warehouses, it’s a win-win. EPA, all of these regulators, were trying to stop me from doing something that would clean up my environment. I still remember having this big fight because they wanted the groundwater standards at my port area to be the same as residential. I’m like, “That is utterly stupid. We’re gonna cap the land, there’s no hazard to people working there.” I was furious at the red tape and how much they were trying to slow my sprint. I had to beg, borrow, and threaten, often, to get people to move a lot quicker. So that experience supports the book’s conclusion.
Happy birthday, by the way. How did you celebrate?
I sat on the Capitol steps for about 12 and a half hours (with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, to protest the GOP budget and its proposed cuts to Medicaid).
I saw that, and it made me wonder if you have any downtime, or have you largely had to sacrifice a personal life for your career?
Especially in my early years, I lived a more one-dimensional life. I have a richer life now than I did as mayor. I didn’t understand then that having an enriching personal life makes you better in your service and grounds you more in joy and happiness. Out there on the steps of the Capitol, I had a lot of family members and people close to me. Afterwards, we went back to Hakeem’s office, and he generously had a birthday cake for me, and I had some of the people I’m closest to there to tease me, and make me laugh at myself, and love on me.
But I have diverse interests. I love reading. I’m a movie addict.
What was the last thing you saw in theaters?
God, has it been so long that it was Wicked? I’m a huge sci-fi fan and superhero fan, and just a movie fan in general. I came of age in the time of Star Wars, Rocky, E.T. It was my dad who made me such a crazy Star Trek fan. He loved this bold, optimistic view of the future: They banish poverty, they have created a unified Earth, and they’re vegetarians. On the bridge of the Enterprise, you’ve got Asian Americans, African Americans, aliens, and white folks.
And I love music. I wake up and listen to podcasts that give me the news of the day, and then by the time I’m working out, it’s whatever music can get me most pumped up.
Like what?
I can pull up my Spotify Wrapped from last year. I think I should give you the honest facts. My top 2024 songs: On top is Beyoncé — “Texas Hold ’Em,” which I think I played way too much. Bruce Springsteen. Stevie Wonder. Lots of gospel music. Oh, Bon Jovi’s “You Give Love a Bad Name” made it into the top 20. “The Color Purple,” Cynthia Erivo’s song, I played a lot last year.
“When you are technically powerless, you think outside the box.”
You governed Newark through the last economic downturn. What are your fears for similar communities around the country if we do dip into another recession?
It was economic carnage in Newark. We had foreclosures that were epidemic throughout every neighborhood in Newark. We were seeing people losing their homes, losing their jobs. We had to cut our workforce by 25 percent — one out of every four workers in City Hall — because we couldn’t print money. We had to live within the budget that we had. For me, as a leader during that period, every day you’re just choosing from bad or worse. And you’re seeing, everywhere you go, levels of hardship and suffering and struggle. You have people from food banks complaining to you that they’re running out of resources.
Right now, there’s a lot of talk about tariffs, talk about people’s 401(k)’s losing value — we’ve heard from people who are putting off retirement. It could put people into a financial free fall, pushing them further into relying on payday lenders and other ways to get access to resources, which again just puts people into a debt spiral, causes bad, bad outcomes — from losing housing for children to, frankly, other measures that are painful to think about, or relive.
How did being in Israel on Oct. 7 influence your view on the war in Gaza, and your support for arms sales to Israel?
We were going over to meet with Palestinian leaders in the West Bank, because the Saudis were really close to normalizing (relations). The irony of it — and this is probably pride coming before the fall — but we were talking with this real sense of joy that, for the first time in our lives, we saw a real pathway to a two-state solution. (Benjamin) Netanyahu, we really believed, was going to be boxed in because he desperately wanted normalization with the Saudis — which was the big win — but the only pathway was to commit to an irrevocable path to a two-state solution. That’s what we went over there feeling really excited about.
When I left, after the horrors of that day — basically, the State Department surrounded us with security folks and we were in and out of the bomb shelter, and they said, “We need to get out.” Since then, it’s nothing short of a painful reality for my office and myself, seeing the ways Hamas is getting exactly what they want, which is the focus being on Israel as the villain, and not the focus on Hamas and what they’re doing, even today, to quell people that are trying to protest against them.
Now, Bernie (Sanders) has brought these resolutions of disapproval (for arms sales to Israel to the Senate floor). I respect his right to do that. They have no chance of passing in the Senate or the House of Representatives. If anything, they create more division amongst Democrats who, if you polled us, all want a ceasefire and the return of hostages. All of us do. We want a cessation of these hostilities, and we want a pathway back to a two-state solution. I think what he’s doing is symbolic, not substantive. We’re looking to make a substantive change, and we’re going to continue to advocate for that.
Are you going to run for president in 2028?
It would be the biggest malpractice of my life if I didn’t tell you I am running for reelection two years before that election. I want to be reelected as a New Jersey senator, and my focus is to let my state know I am 100 percent focused.
What draws you to work in the Senate right now? It can seem like a pretty frustrating and thankless job, especially as a Democrat.
Coming here 13 years ago, I was the only Black person in the caucus, and this was the least diverse place I had ever worked. At the Judiciary Committee, every senator was white, and every staffer behind them was white. But when you leave here, and the night shift is coming in to do the work of keeping up the Capitol were predominantly people of color. As a guy who came out of Newark, I saw how the decisions they were making — like the Crime Bill of ’94 — disproportionately impacted communities of color. I was stunned at how little diversity this place had. Being the only senator who lives in a community below the poverty line, I know I’ve been able to champion issues and causes that weren’t being picked up at the time, like founding the Environmental Justice Caucus. Why? Because I know what lead does to children. I know what Superfund sites do.
Why do I love being here? It’s as hard as hell. It’s frustrating as hell. But I tell my team to always look for singles and doubles — and we get a lot — especially when we are advocating for a constituent that did not get the veterans’ benefits they deserve, or what have you. But sometimes you hit home runs — like the child tax credit.
As a mayor, I could show you some of the proudest things that I’ve accomplished in my life, but that city is 300,000 people. In this job, I can do things that affect the whole state of New Jersey — 9 million-plus — and the nation as a whole. I love this job. I feel like I’m making a big difference, and sometimes the difference you make is just standing up and advocating for issues that not enough people are standing up for.