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Inside Politics

Trump Says War is Won as U.S. Readies to Deploy More Troops; Sources Say White House Working to Arrange Weekend Negotiations With Iran in Pakistan, With VP Vance Leading U.S. Delegation; Cory Booker's New Memoir, "Stand" is on the Stands Now Where He Details 10 Civic Virtues to Embrace. Aired 12:30-1p ET

Aired March 25, 2026 - 12:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

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SEN. MARKWAYNE MULLIN, HOMELAND SECURITY SECRETARY NOMINEE: -- there was a specific threat for them to be there, not for intimidation.

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GABE COHEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: And Mullin's predecessor, Kristi Noem, also in recent weeks, said, again, there is no plan for this. And she repeated this Republican attack line that we have heard again and again, which is why are Democrats so concerned about ICE being at the polls if non-citizens don't really vote? Then there's no issue. What's the problem?

First off, I would say it's not just Democrats who are worried about that. But beyond that, beyond the federal law issues here, there are also concerns that this could be seen as voter suppression or voter intimidation.

Just look at what happened in Minneapolis, when officers were clashing with not just undocumented migrants, but also U.S. citizens who were out in the streets, where some U.S. citizens were detained, some were injured, a couple were even killed. And so, even though most of the state officials I've talked to or voting rights attorneys I've talked to had said, this feels unlikely, they're still preparing.

They're preparing swift legal arguments in case there is a deployment and they need an emergency order. They're preparing local law enforcement to -- how to address potential federal overreach. And then, of course, preparing poll workers for de-escalation if officers do show up.

DANA BASH, CNN CHIEF POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT AND ANCHOR OF 'INSIDE POLITICS': Yeah. And at the core of this is President Trump's unfounded claim, which he repeats constantly, that undocumented immigrants vote illegally. And even conservative think tanks have done studies to show that that is minimal. The number is minuscule where that happens.

It is illegal for that to happen, obviously. Gabe, thank you so much for going through that. We really appreciate it.

COHEN: Thank you.

BASH: And coming up, Senator Cory Booker will be here. We're going to talk about the war in Iran, including the news today that the administration may deploy 1,000 Army soldiers to the Middle East.

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[12:36:15]

BASH: New today on the war in Iran. The Trump administration is preparing to deploy 1,000 soldiers in the Army's 82nd Airborne Division to the Middle East in the coming days. They're going to join two Marine Expeditionary Units and amphibious ready groups already there.

At the same time that the U.S. military is clearly expanding its presence, CNN is learning the White House is seeking meetings in Pakistan as early as this weekend to discuss off-ramps to this war. Vice President Vance could be sent to lead the U.S. delegation.

Joining me now is U.S. Senator, Cory Booker of the great state of New Jersey, who serves on the Foreign Relations Committee.

SEN. CORY BOOKER, (D-NJ) FOREIGN RELATIONS COMMITTEE: Yeah. I need to apologize to you right away.

BASH: Why?

BOOKER: Because I'm mad at CNN. You were inducted into the New Jersey --

BASH: Oh God.

BOOKER: -- Hall of Fame with Bruce Bon Jovi, even Danny DeVito. You're one of our legends. Me and Andy Kim, the two Senators not in the Hall of Fame. You are.

BASH: This interview is going off the rails.

(LAUGH)

BOOKER: I just wanted to make sure that the public knew --

BASH: Oh God.

BOOKER: -- that of the greatest states in America --

BASH: I'm still going to ask you hard questions.

BOOKER: Ask me hard questions. This is not trying to butter you up.

(LAUGH)

BOOKER: But honestly, it's a huge achievement, and -- BASH: Thank you.

BOOKER: We in Jersey are really proud of you.

BASH: Thank you, Senator. Back to the war.

BOOKER: Yes.

BASH: You heard, and I'm sure you know about the beefing up that the military is doing. What do you make of that?

BOOKER: So I went to the floor yesterday, again, with a group of six of us that have been calling these war power resolutions to the Senate floor because the Senate has surrendered its duty to provide any oversight, any accountability, any checks and balances of a president who is out of control.

This is not just any military engagement. It has created the biggest oil shock in history, more than the 1970 oil shocks combined. And on top of that, you see more and more soldiers being moved into that area.

We've already lost 13, 200-plus injured. This is a really outrageous move he's making with no clear plan in terms of what we're trying to get out of this. And he changes his story every interview about what the objective is.

He lies to the American people, saying we've obliterated their nuclear weapons. Or now we -- they're imminent now. Saying we want regime change, now saying we don't. This is a president that is chaotic, who is corrupt, and unfortunately, he's causing Americans deep harm.

BASH: And what about the idea of engaging in talks with Pakistan as the leader or at least the host?

BOOKER: Well, we need to end this conflict. We need to de-conflict. But this is a situation, unfortunately, like we've seen in the past, of a president with bluster and bravado, unilaterally taking us into a war and actually making things worse.

Let's be clear. The regime is more radical than it was before. Let's be clear. They are perfecting. We may have had near-term degrading of their combat readiness, but what they're doing with drones and in the Straits of Hormuz are showing us that they have other abilities to cause pain, not just to the American people, but to the world at large. And he hasn't stopped that. Things are worse now than when he began.

BASH: Devil's advocate has given what they have shown that they are willing to do with some rudimentary military assets, never mind the big ones that the U.S. says that it's getting rid of. Isn't that a reason to continue and to try to render the regime inept?

BOOKER: Well, this is the angel's advocate, which is saying we should have had a plan to go in if we had a real provocation. And he lied about the provocation, literally contradicting himself about why we went in there. And now, he's articulated no plan on what we should do. So the reality is, is this president has brought chaos into everything he's doing.

And look around the United States right now. People who are saying to the president, we need costs going down, but you raised our health care costs.

[12:40:00]

Millions losing health care. Our energy costs in the state of New Jersey were already up 20 percent before this conflict. Now you're embroiling our airlines, they're passing on those costs to us. You're causing chaos at our airports. Everything he does, as we've seen in New Jersey, what he did to the casinos, bankrupting them there, everything he touches, unfortunately, turns dark and disastrous for the people of the state of New Jersey and America.

BASH: You touched on affordability and economics, so I do want to ask about a new tax proposal that you unveiled. You want to cut taxes for families making less than $75,000 a year, plus expand the child tax credit and earned income tax credit. The Yale Budget Lab looked at your proposal and said, even when factoring in raising taxes on wealthier Americans, your plan would cost $5.4 trillion. And at the same time, you want to undo Republican cuts to Medicaid and food stamps, and you of course want to restore the benefits to the ACA. How do you do that all?

BOOKER: So this is -- that's a complicated way of saying something a lot more simple. In America, especially the Democratic Party needs big, bold ideas. This is not for lower income Americans or upper income Americans, for all Americans, no taxes on your first $75,000 of household earnings.

And the way you pay for that is by unrigging our tax system. We ridiculously live in a country right now where the wealthiest of the wealthy, corporations and individuals, pay a lower effective tax rate than the firefighter or the nurse or the soldier that's over right now in Iran. This is insane.

So what we're saying is something really big, and then we pay for it. By unrigging our tax system at the top, you can get that $5 trillion of savings and then give every American, almost 90 percent of Americans would get a tax break. That means that single mom with a small child who makes $60,000 a year, she would be able to keep $6,000 more of her hard-earned money.

The family making $150,000 a year with two kids who is still treading water right now would keep over $10,000 more of their own money.

BASH: I appreciate the way that you're describing it, makes sense in the idea of kind of trying to even out the playing field. But some people who have looked at it say your math doesn't math.

Just one example.

BOOKER: Give me an example, please. BASH: OK, here's an example. Ben Ritz, he's a fiscal policy expert at the Progressive Policy Institute. He wrote in The Atlantic, there's a mathematical limit on how much additional revenue can be generated from raising taxes on high-income households. If the entire universe of plausible tax hikes on the top two percent is spent cutting taxes for the other 98 percent, no money will be left to pursue other goals.

BOOKER: So that's why I love it. He's absolutely wrong. We're not just raising taxes on the highest of high tax breaks. If that was it, his math is right. We're getting rid of the tax avoidance things that they're doing. Carried interest, something called stepped-up basis, which means I buy a stock when it's really low and avoid ever paying taxes on it when I'm transferring to my kids.

These are the games that make people in the highest tax bracket pay 10 percent or 15 percent. Warren Buffett admitted it. He goes, why is my tax rate lower than others? It's not because his effective tax rate needs to be changed. It's because he has all of these ways to avoid paying taxes.

BASH: So you get rid of all of that?

BOOKER: So you get rid of all of that and you dial up a little bit the tax rate on corporations and the highest income. That together does math, does arithmetic out. And I invite anybody to go to our website, put your income and the number of children you have into the calculator. We did this with a group of New Jerseyans around a kitchen table and they were shocked.

And they told me, God, keeping more of my money, $6,000 more, I'd get eight, I'd get 10. It would be transformative at a time that all Americans, most Americans are struggling to pay for their prescription drugs and their rent, to pay for their health insurance and their childcare. We've got to have big ideas.

And this one, to me, is one of the best ones that is out there.

BASH: Stick around because I want to have you back in the next segment. You did write a book. It's out. It was out yesterday, I believe.

BOOKER: Yes.

BASH: "Stand," as you see there, is the title. We're going to talk about this and the Senator's message to Democrats going into 2026, nevermind 2028.

BOOKER: Two New Jerseyans will be back very soon.

(LAUGH)

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[12:48:47]

BASH: Senator Cory Booker is still with me. He has a new book out. It's called "Stand." In it, he details ten virtues he wants to embrace in America. And you can see them here. The book tells the story of Americans throughout history, famous and not, who embodied these ten virtues.

Senator, thank you so much for being here. I want to start with a chapter that you wrote on grace. And I think it sort of encapsulates your message and the crossroads that we are all at right now, particularly your party.

You say, "Now is not the time to meet cruelty with careless outrage. It is time to act like what we say to each other or post on social media or say in front of our children matters, because it does. Embracing and extending grace to each other and to ourselves is not easy, but it is the only path to transformation and redemption for ourselves, our politics, and our country."

I know that this was the message that you put out there in 2020 when you ran for president, but now, the country is even more divided than it was back then. Do you really think the trend that society and politics and culture is on can be reversed?

[12:50:00]

BOOKER: It's the only thing that's going to save us. The tribalism in our country, the doubling down on hatred and division, I think the call of our country every generation is to find that common ground to put more indivisible into this one nation.

And I will tell you that I now believe factually, I mean, Frank Luntz, who's a Republican pollster on the other side of the aisle, came to me a little while ago and said, your message is more urgent now and more embraced now because people are fed up with the fighting. They feel like both parties are failing this moment. And that's why I wanted to write a book that this is not just nice.

In fact, it's not nice. Standing up is hard, difficult, but it's strategy. It's how we not just save our country, but it's how we overcome the darkness that seems to be infecting our politics.

BASH: The Democrat that arguably got the most attention in the past year since Donald Trump has been back in office is California Governor, Gavin Newsom. And in many ways, he's doing the opposite of what you are saying. He is on social media mimicking President Trump's style. He is trying to fight President Trump the way President Trump fights Democrats.

BOOKER: So Gavin and I are longtime friends when we were both at mayoral level. And I told him, I said, brother, we got a bromance because when you stood up for gay and lesbian couples and married them against the law, and the whole Democratic Party was saying you're ruining our coming election because that was when Bush was trying to put it on ballots everywhere.

BASH: Dianne Feinstein blamed him for John Kerry losing.

BOOKER: Yes, but yet he stood up for what we now know, looking back, was right. That was an act of courage. It was an act of grace. It was an act of vulnerability because he put himself out there. He is my brother because of moments like that and a guy who will often text me, not snark, but encouragement.

And so, that's what we need to see more of in our politics. And a lot of the things I've been able to get done, and you and I talked about this off camera, as much as Chris Christie disagreed with each other, we forged a friendship in a great recession, and Newark had a massive transformation.

In the Senate, the stories where we don't capture headlines are those moments of grace were reached across the aisle. But even more so is for us in our individual communities, sometimes even in our divided families to understand, stand on your principles, but you can find common ground and still stand your ground at the same time.

BASH: Senator, what you just described, the way that Gavin Newsom fought against the party to do -- to perform same-sex marriages before it was legal in San Francisco, that was then. And the question now is, how you act and react in today's politics, in the Trump era. And he's decided to act like Trump mostly because that's what the base wants him to do. They want to fight.

BOOKER: First of all, I'm not going to define Gavin Newsom by his Twitter feed.

BASH: Yeah, but my question isn't so much about him. It's about your prescription or whether that's really where your party is.

BOOKER: No, I think -- first of all, I'm going to say this, but screw the Democrat and Republican parties for a second, because I think if you ask most Americans, they're mad at them both. And I understand that anger. And I understand where the Democratic Party has come up short.

This is why we need big, bold ideas and visionary leadership, not from people in office, but from Americans writ large, because this old, tired left/right divide, it doesn't serve this moment. It's time for a renewal of American politics, is what I'm calling for, is for a larger vision of who we are and who we must be to each other. And that isn't, again, nice rhetoric.

It is how in every dark period of our country's history, how somehow we were able to redeem the dream of America. And that's why I love that historians have been praising the book because this is instruction and inspiration for how we fight now. And the parties, in my opinion, have let us down. That's why I want to be a part of a new generation of leaders that chooses a different way.

BASH: Well, on that note, you make a point to push back on your party and Democratic purity tests. You say, "If everyone in your coalition agrees with you on everything, your coalition is too small, too small to make big change and too small for what our democracy demands." What's an example of where you push back on Democratic Party purity?

BOOKER: Well, I think our party, for too long, has created these things. If you're out of line with us on one of the 10 things we stand for, then get the hell out. That's not what America is. And I see this in the way we -- in fact, I know this from social scientists I've talked to, that the in-group sanctions are worse than what the other party can do that. If you're --

BASH: But it doesn't seem like that's over.

BOOKER: No, no, not at all. But I'm going to fight against that. This is what I'm telling people is, I'm -- my politics right now, as I get ready for -- run for re-election, I'm kind of done with politics as usual. I think we need a renewal and a re-imagination of who we are. And we need people courageous enough.

And I wish this was more on the Republican side to speak the truth within their own parties about their failings, their faults, and their foibles.

[12:55:00]

This is a time that we stand up and remember who we are, where we came from, and what is demanded in this moment. And that's why, people asking me, what do I do, how do I fight? That's why I wrote the book, because I wanted to give not examples of what just I'm doing, but what Americans have done in every tough time like this.

Americans showed the best of who we are in the worst of times, and that's what we need now.

BASH: I like when you said, as I run for re-election, because you are on the ballot in New Jersey.

BOOKER: Yes, I am. Please, Jersey, help a brother out.

BASH: And let's see what happens in 2028. I won't push you on that now. I think we'll have a lot more time.

BOOKER: Yeah.

BASH: This is such a great book. I have to say, what you say about John Lewis in here, I had my own personal experience in covering him and getting to know his story personally from him directly. It really was life-changing, and you talk about it as well. Senator, thank you.

BOOKER: Thank you very much.

BASH: Appreciate it. Thank you for joining "Inside Politics." "CNN News Central" starts after a quick break.

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