33° and Overcast
Lisa McCormick says Booker's national tour promotes political fiction
U.S. Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey will soon embark on a national tour to promote a work of political fiction: a book chronicling his purported fight against an administration he has repeatedly accommodated.
The tour, for a volume titled “STAND,” promises stirring reflections on moral courage and reclaiming American ideals.
This performance arrives from a senator whose record reveals a different story, one written in the ink of calculated silence and strategic fundraising, including from the family of the very man he now claims to oppose.
The publisher, St. Martin’s Press, provides a fitting backdrop. Its catalog is a gallery of political artifice, having published volumes by figures such as former Trump press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and a roster of conservative polemicists.
The corporate lineage traces further back, to a German publishing empire founded in 1948 by Georg von Holtzbrinck, a former Nazi Party member, and now overseen by his billionaire son.
It is an uncomfortable pedigree for a book tour preaching shared national values, particularly as historians like Christopher Browning draw sobering parallels between America's current political corrosion and the fall of the Weimar Republic.
Booker’s narrative of resistance collapses under the weight of his own timeline.
In 2013, Donald Trump’s daughter and son-in-law hosted a fundraiser for his first Senate campaign. Last year, Booker was the only Senate Democrat who voted to confirm Charles Kushner, Trump’s in-law, to be the US ambassador to France.
Since taking office, Booker has been a spectator to a cascade of democratic erosions he now decries: the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, the end of constitutional abortion rights, a tripling of mass shootings, and the deployment of federal agents on American city streets under policies a federal judge has struggled to curb.
His proposed response to what critics call Gestapo-like immigration tactics has been to suggest more training and body cameras—a tepid technocratic fix met with derision by activists like his primary challenger, Lisa McCormick, who notes he has raised nearly $100 million from Wall Street billionaires and groups like AIPAC.
This tour is not an act of leadership but of literary vanity. It is a sequel to his 25-hour Senate floor speech—a performance of endurance that changed no votes, halted no policy, and served primarily as a fundraising mechanism.
While he speaks of collective responsibility, his party’s Senate leadership has, three times in a year, brokered spending deals that fund the enforcement machinery he rhetorically condemns, leaving most Democrats “feeling left out” and “grumbling.”
Representative Pramila Jayapal lamented about her colleagues being “so reluctant to be strong,” while McCormick lambasted "spineless Senate Democrats" who comprise "the Capitulation Caucus."
The duplicity is not merely in the contradiction between Booker’s words and his donors, but in the theatrical performance of opposition where substantive resistance is required.
As the child poverty rate doubled and a rigged economy shifted $37 trillion from workers to billionaires, Booker missed 413 votes. While atmospheric carbon dioxide climbed to lethal levels and North Korea attained nuclear weapons, his political capital was preserved.
The threat to American democracy, as historians warn, is not a sudden coup but a staircase, each step of normalized outrage propelling the next.
Booker’s career embodies the failure to block that ascent.
His book tour is an elaborate curtain, drawn across a stage where the scenes of capitulation have already been performed.
He is not sounding an alarm; he is providing a soundtrack for the decline he was funded to witness politely instead of making any real effort to stop the Trump train from trampling the rights for which Americans once fought.
"The question for New Jersey Democratic voters is whether they will buy Booker's BS or finally read the record," said McCormick, who earned 159,998 votes when she took on the lawmaker's ally, disgraced former US Senator Bob Menendez, in the 2018 Democratic primary election.
Booker has recently engaged in political outreach in South Carolina, New Hampshire, and early-voting states, signaling his likely candidacy in the 2028 presidential contest. McCormick argues that the nation needs better leaders, who articulate a sound agenda for progress instead of a showman who has collaborated with Republicans more than he has
Garden States Republicans are said to be having recruitment trouble beased on GOP pessimism that Booker in invulnerable, given that the celebrity Democratic senator has won all three of his elections by double digits and recently reported a staggering $22 million cash on hand in his campaign fund.
