New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker said he’s exhausted by President Trump’s rhetoric on race.
The longest-tenured black Democrat currently in the Senate, who ran an unsuccessful campaign for the party’s 2020 presidential nomination, took issue with comments Trump made during a campaign rally in Ohio on Monday. There, the president repeated a claim that Booker, who made affordable housing a central tenet of his campaign, would destroy the suburbs across the country if he worked with a President Joe Biden on housing policies.
“It is so insulting to the struggles of many people, like my family, who overcame this same kind of rank racism that he’s spouting that way,” Booker told MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell on Tuesday.
The New Jersey Democrat and former mayor of Newark also referred to the story of his parents, who faced racial discrimination trying to move into a white neighborhood in New Jersey, saying his family history shows why Trump’s comments are “deeper” than insults.
“I grew up in the northern Bergen County suburbs, an incredible community, highest-ranked public schools, beautiful suburbs that frankly my family was kept out of,” Booker said. “My mom and dad were denied the ability to buy a house in those suburbs.”
Trump’s pitch to suburban voters has been a growing presence in his campaign, and he has been outspoken about his criticism about implementing low-income housing in suburban neighborhoods.
Last month, Trump touted his dismantling of the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule and its components implemented under the Obama administration that requires communities to proactively work toward desegregation and fair housing in order to receive federal funding, according to Mediaite.
Trump said minorities who live in suburbs, in particular, don’t want that program, which he believes is detrimental to the American dream.
“They don’t want it. That’s not part of the deal, and I terminated that,” Trump said, adding that forced low-income housing is “very unfair to suburbia.”
Booker said Trump’s attacks on him are just another divisive tactic, which he accused the president of engaging in since 2016.
“I’m tired, I really am exhausted at the end of this man’s time as president,” Booker said. “He has pushed every racially divisive nerve possible in this country. He has tried to pit people against each other, whipping up fear, making American afraid of American, that kind of demagoguery has got to go.”
