Taxing Cory Booker's Patience

Episode of Pod Save America · April 5, 2026 · 1 h 17 min

Senator Cory Booker joins Jon Lovett to debate his $75,000 standard deduction tax plan, the Iran war, AIPAC, and Pam Bondi's firing.

Summary

Jon Lovett hosted Senator Cory Booker for an extended one-on-one conversation recorded shortly after Fox News reported and Donald Trump confirmed that Pam Bondi was out as attorney general, with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche taking over in the interim. Booker described the Justice Department as an agency that should be renamed the "Department of Injustice," citing investigations of the Fed chair and members of Congress, the reassignment of FBI agents to immigration enforcement, loosened merger review, and what he characterized as pardons for people who pay the president or his allies. He said he did not expect Trump ever to appoint an attorney general who would treat the department as something other than his personal law firm.

On Trump's unilaterally declared war with Iran, Booker argued the president had broken the "Pottery Barn rule," changed his stated goals repeatedly, and triggered a global oil shock via the Strait of Hormuz while claiming the country could not afford Medicaid or child care. He said he had joined a small group of Democratic senators forcing repeated War Powers Resolution votes and would view a $200 billion supplemental as retroactive approval of an unconstitutional war. Asked about AIPAC and Israel, Booker declined to adopt the "war criminal" framing as a litmus test while calling Benjamin Netanyahu a horrible person who enabled October 7 and should be held accountable, and argued the broader problem is money in politics across all PACs, not only AIPAC. He also said he had never heard of the streamer at the center of a recent Democratic controversy until days earlier, and offered his rule that "you do not have to attend every argument you're invited to."

The longest segment was a debate over Booker's Keeping Your Pay Act, which would raise the standard deduction to $75,000 and expand the child tax credit and EITC, paid for by raising corporate and top marginal rates, ending carried interest and stepped-up basis. Booker said the plan would cut child poverty in half and let a single mother earning $60,000 keep about $6,000 more. Lovett repeatedly pushed back, arguing that exempting most Americans from income tax would leave two anti-tax parties, would not help people whose main burden is regressive payroll taxes, and would signal that Democrats had given up on defending the value of government.

Booker responded that he is "not anti-tax" but "pro-working people keeping more of their money," and that Democrats need five big, fast-acting ideas — including banning issue-area PACs, overturning Citizens United, and ethics rules for the Supreme Court and members of Congress — to win a wave election and a generational renewal rather than another 49.7-to-49.3 result. He recounted his Senate experience working with Jim Inhofe and Chuck Grassley on a foster and homeless youth education amendment, and described witnessing a fatal shooting in Newark as a formative moment on gun violence.

Chapters

1:27
Marriage, age gaps and dad jokes
Booker and Lovett open by comparing notes on recent and upcoming marriages, generational music references, and Booker's reputation as an old soul.
4:31
Pam Bondi's firing and the Justice Department
Booker reacts to Trump replacing Attorney General Pam Bondi with Todd Blanche and describes the DOJ as one of the darkest corners of the administration.
8:56
Trump's war with Iran and congressional checks
Booker criticizes the unilaterally declared war, the oil shock, and Republican enablers, and explains the War Powers Resolution votes Democrats are forcing.
13:33
A war supplemental as retroactive approval
Booker says he would view a $200 billion supplemental as rewarding an unconstitutional war, and doubts Republicans will respect procedural rules.
19:30
AIPAC, Israel and Netanyahu
Lovett presses Booker on why he won't call Netanyahu a war criminal; Booker focuses on ending the conflict and warns about hardened tribalism and foreign bot campaigns.
29:38
Streamers, litmus tests and reaching across divides
Booker says he had never heard of the streamer at the center of a Democratic controversy and defends choosing which arguments to engage, recounting his Bible-study meeting with Jim Inhofe.
36:50
Gun violence and the collapsing American deal
Booker discusses universal background checks, community violence intervention funding, a shooting he witnessed in Newark, and the loss of American social mobility.
46:04
Money in politics and PACs
Booker argues the bigger issue is all PACs, not just AIPAC, and recounts a crypto industry call during his negotiations on market structure legislation.
48:37
The Keeping Your Pay Act debate
Lovett challenges Booker's proposal to exempt the first $75,000 of household income from federal income tax; Booker defends it as a poverty-cutting big idea.
1:02:06
Two anti-tax parties and the value of government
Lovett warns of a politics where both parties oppose taxes; Booker insists he believes in government and rejects the 'tyranny of the or.'
1:11:19
Five big ideas and a wave election
Booker lays out a first-100-days agenda of PAC bans, ethics reform and tax relief, arguing Democrats need a generational renewal rather than narrow wins.

Key points

What was said, by whom, with the exact words. Timestamps jump to the moment.

Cory Booker
Booker argues the Justice Department under Trump has become destructive and should be renamed.
“they renamed the Department of Defense to Department of War. They should rename this to the Department of Injustice”
Listen from 4:52 · United States Department of Justice
Cory Booker
Booker criticizes Trump for spending tens of billions on the war while saying the country cannot afford Medicaid and child care.
“he has the flagrant, morally bankrupt statement of saying, oh, we can't afford Medicare and Medicaid. This is his speech last night, that I'm spending tens of billions of dollars, but we can't afford affordable childcare in America”
Listen from 9:27 · United States war with Iran
Cory Booker
Booker says Trump unilaterally declared war and broke the Pottery Barn rule, causing the worst global oil shock.
“He's broken what Colin Powell would say, the pottery barn rule. If you break it, you buy it or you fix it”
Listen from 9:56 · United States war with Iran
Cory Booker
Booker says he has joined a group of Democratic senators forcing repeated war powers votes to keep the Senate from ignoring the war.
“what we're doing right now is forcing world powers resolution votes. It's one of the privileged votes that an individual senator can force to the Senate floor”
Listen from 10:34 · War Powers Resolution
Cory Booker
Booker says enablers in Congress and the Justice Department offend him more than Trump himself.
“all the people who are enabling this man to do what he is doing and the harms he's doing offend me worse than even Donald Trump does”
Listen from 10:34 · United States war with Iran
Cory Booker
Booker says he would view a war supplemental as retroactive reward for an unconstitutional unilateral war and does not expect the conflict to end in two or three weeks.
“I do not see it ending in two or three weeks, but maybe they, uh, end combat operations there. It doesn't mean that the fallout of that is going to be, uh, is going to end”
Listen from 14:17 · United States war with Iran
Cory Booker
Booker argues Palestinian justice and Israeli security are mutually dependent and must be pursued together.
“we will never be able to achieve justice and independence for Palestinians without Israeli security. And there'll never be Israeli security until there's justice and independence for Palestinians”
Listen from 20:26 · Israeli–Palestinian conflict
Cory Booker
Booker calls Netanyahu a horrible person who enabled October 7 and says he hopes Israelis vote him out and jail him.
“Benjamin Netanyahu is a horrible person who enabled October 7th and has failed to take accountability”
Listen from 21:46 · Israeli–Palestinian conflict
Cory Booker
Booker says classified briefings show adversaries running large operations to inflame American social media divisions, including within the Democratic Party.
“I see our adversaries who have warehouses full of people who just go on to our social media and try to whip up the conflicts that we have between us”
Listen from 27:12 · Israeli–Palestinian conflict
Cory Booker
Booker says only one shooting during his time as Newark mayor involved a legally purchased gun, and that most gun owners support universal background checks.
“only one shooting in my city in all the years I was mayor was done by somebody who bought a gun legally”
Listen from 36:50 · Gun violence in the United States
Cory Booker
Booker says the United States is no longer the best country in which to be born poor, citing England's greater mobility out of the bottom quintile.
“We're no longer the best country to be born poor. Classist England, it's better to be born there if your sole goal is to make it into out of the bottom quintile”
Listen from 43:43 · Stand (book)
Cory Booker
Booker says he has stopped taking corporate PAC money and, as of the end of last year, issue-area PAC money as well.
“I was one of the first people in Congress to say no corporate PAC money. At the end of last year, I said, enough”
Listen from 46:04 · Campaign finance in the United States
Cory Booker
Booker argues Democrats should be focused on all PAC money in politics, not just AIPAC.
“People are talking about APAC, but why aren't we talking about all PACs?”
Listen from 47:06 · American Israel Public Affairs Committee
Cory Booker
Booker recounts a crypto industry representative calling to apologize for a large PAC during his negotiations on market structure legislation.
“somebody from that industry tried to apologize. What was the exact words? Yeah, we don't want you to think this is a threat”
Listen from 47:11 · Campaign finance in the United States
Jon Lovett
Lovett argues that citizens benefit from government services and should collectively pay into the tax system.
“don't we want to live in a society where everyone says, you know what? No, nobody likes taxes. Everyone would like their taxes to be lower, but I benefit from the highways”
Listen from 49:36 · Standard deduction
Cory Booker
Booker argues the plan lets ordinary earners enjoy the kind of tax avoidance long available to the wealthiest.
“they pay an effective tax rate lower than a teacher or a firefighter or the people that are soldiers who are fighting right now in Iran”
Listen from 50:47 · Standard deduction
Cory Booker
Booker says his plan would cut child poverty in half and give a single mother earning $60,000 nearly $6,000 more.
“So this cuts child poverty in half. This cuts the overall poverty rate, and I've seen different estimates by people who've run the numbers from 10% to greater”
Listen from 50:53 · Keeping Your Pay Act
Jon Lovett
Lovett argues zeroing out income tax fails to address the underlying economic problem that wages are too low.
“it doesn't address the underlying problem, which we've built an economy in which it's there that people are not making enough to get by”
Listen from 53:39 · Keeping Your Pay Act
Cory Booker
Booker says the plan costs nothing because it is funded by eliminating corporate tax avoidance schemes.
“it doesn't cost anything if you are taking away all of these uh tax avoidance schemes of the largest corporations and you use it to fund this, then it costs nothing”
Listen from 1:01:21 · Keeping Your Pay Act
Cory Booker
Booker calls for federal marijuana legalization with heavy taxation as a new revenue stream.
“when are we gonna finally federally legalize marijuana and tax the shit out of it so that we can create more revenue streams?”
Listen from 1:08:42 · Cannabis legalization in California
Jon Lovett
Lovett worries that both parties becoming anti-tax will eliminate space for conversations about trade-offs.
“I worry about what happens when we have two anti-tax parties, because I worry about living in a society in which We don't allow conversations about trade-offs”
Listen from 1:10:49 · Standard deduction
Cory Booker
Booker proposes banning PACs, overturning Citizens United, and barring presidential crypto coins and senator stock trading as part of a first-100-days agenda.
“We kill Citizens United and that's the worst decision. Maybe that's another one of our bold ideas. We make everybody from a president won't be able to have crypto coins, a senator won't be able to trade stocks”
Listen from 1:11:34 · Campaign finance in the United States
Linked moment · 1:11:44Skip to 1:11:44 using a listen link in the info box.
Cory Booker
Booker rejects the anti-tax label, saying he is instead opposed to working-class people being financially squeezed.
“I am not anti-tax. I am pro-working people keeping more of their money”
Listen from 1:11:44 · Keeping Your Pay Act
Cory Booker
Booker argues Democrats need five big ideas delivered within the first three months of power so voters feel immediate change.
“Five big ideas. that we in the first three months do and everybody feels a real change in their lives”
Listen from 1:12:05 · Keeping Your Pay Act
Cory Booker
Booker says Democrats need a wave election and generational renewal rather than narrow victories.
“What I want for the Democratic Party is no more damn elections where one person gets 49.7 and the other person gets 49.3. We need a wave election”
Listen from 1:14:36 · 2026 United States midterm elections

People

In the conversation

Jon LovettCo-host of Pod Save America; diarization split of the same speaker during the economics segment
Cory BookerDemocratic senator from New Jersey

Discussed

Pam BondiU.S. Attorney General reported fired during the episode
Todd BlancheDeputy Attorney General named acting Attorney General
Donald TrumpPresident of the United States whose conduct of the Iran war is the episode's main subject
Kash PatelDirector of the Federal Bureau of Investigation
Kristi NoemU.S. Secretary of Homeland Security discussed in connection with a DHS contract scandal
Benjamin NetanyahuPrime Minister of Israel
Jim InhofeLate Republican senator from Oklahoma who co-sponsored Booker's education amendment
Chuck GrassleyRepublican senator from Iowa
Lamar AlexanderFormer Republican senator from Tennessee who managed the education bill
Bill BradleyFormer New Jersey senator who advised Booker on Senate relationships
Frederick DouglassAmerican abolitionist who commemorated British emancipation and met Thomas Clarkson
Abraham LincolnU.S. president cited for suspending habeas corpus during the Civil War
Franklin D. RooseveltU.S. president cited for wartime internment and four election wins
Thom TillisRepublican senator Booker praised for questioning Kristi Noem
Mark KellyArizona senator cited as affected by gun violence
John BarrassoRepublican senator negotiating crypto market structure legislation with Booker
Joe BidenFormer president whose economic approval is compared to Trump's
Hasan PikerLeft-wing streamer at the center of a Democratic Party controversy
George W. BushPresident criticized for cutting taxes while going to war
Upton SinclairAuthor of The Jungle, cited on meatpacking industry concentration

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From the publisher

Senator Cory Booker stops by the studio to talk to Lovett about his bold tax proposal that would see the majority of Americans pay no federal income tax. Jon and the senator debate what it means when both political parties become anti-tax and discuss Trump's war with Iran, AIPAC's role in the Democratic Party, and the president's sudden firing of Attorney General Pam Bondi. You can check out Senator Booker's new book, "Stand," wherever you shop for books. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here . For a transcript of this episode, please email transcripts@crooked.com and include the name of the podcast.

Summary, chapters and key points were generated from the episode transcript on September 27, 2026. Quotes are checked word for word against the transcript.

Categories: Politics·News Commentary·Government