Democratic New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker said Sunday on CNN that the Democratic Party’s plan to beat President Donald Trump “is working.”
Democrats have struggled to settle on a message that will win over voters in the upcoming midterms, after Trump won both the Electoral College and the popular vote in November. On “State of the Union,” CNN host Dana Bash asked Booker point-blank why the party “didn’t have a better plan,” after highlighting that the Trump administration’s current strategy to “do as much at once” to “overwhelm the system” had been previously “laid out in Project 2025.”
“Well, again, I think the plan right now is working in four parts. One is a legal strategy to stop him from violating the separation of powers, from violating our civil service laws, civil rights laws and we’re winning. We see 41 cases being taken, 10 of them last week, 12 of them, excuse me, were successful in stopping some of his illegal actions,” Booker said. “The next is a legislative and oversight effort to really try to expose it, not to treat this as Democrat versus Republican, right or left, but really right or wrong and continue to try to use our positions procedurally as well as legislatively to stop what he’s doing.”
“Then finally, perhaps most importantly, because all of us have to have a role, from the media to everyday citizens, which is shining a light on the dark corners of what they’re doing and how it is actually endangering Americans’ lives, is threatening to raise the cost of people’s everyday goods and inflation and more,” Booker added.
In their most recent attempt to push back against Republicans, Democrats have been seen protesting with supporters against the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE) Elon Musk and his involvement in the Trump administration.
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The heavy criticism of Musk came after he and the president upended the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) after Musk and the DOGE team discovered billions of taxpayer dollars wasted, with some reports revealing that money allocated to international programs had a high risk of ending up in the Taliban’s hands and also aiding an organization linked to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
However, despite Booker’s response, Bash pushed back against the lawmaker and called out how Mother Jones reporter David Corn described their strategy of using social media against Republicans “as bringing a teaspoon to a gunfight.”
“Again, I’ve been blown away by what I’m seeing, by everyday citizens joining together and beginning to shine a much better light on what’s happening,” Booker continued. “Take USAID and the efforts last week to show that what the Trump administration has done is make Americans less safe from diseases like Ebola or treatment-resistant tuberculosis, taking away scientists on the front line of fighting these infectious diseases because we know infectious diseases anywhere are a threat to human safety everywhere.”
“So a lot of the things that Trump is doing, that some of the biggest officials in our state, like, remember, Secretary Mattis, his defense secretary, saying very bluntly, ‘If you cut these kind of programs in the State Department, buy me more bullets, because it’s going to mean that we’re going to use military more.’ By shining a light on these things, by elevating, as we’ve seen online this past week, literally hundreds of millions of shares and likes, exposing what’s going on, this is giving us more strength in actually stopping him from doing what he’s doing,” Booker said.
While Democrats have attempted to determine why they lost in November, some leaders, like Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and newly-elected Democratic National Committee Chairman Ken Martin, have stated that the party’s policies weren’t to blame. Instead, they pointed to voters’ understanding and a messaging issue.
Post election polls show that former Vice President Kamala Harris had not only earned 7 million fewer votes than Biden in the 2020 race, but Trump gained 2.5 million more votes than in 2020 but also eroded Democrats’ hold on certain segments of the electorate.
Featured Image Credit: Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America
