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Senator Cory Booker, the Democratic presidential candidate who is polling at 1.6 percent, behind Andrew Yang, and has as much chance of winning the nomination, as, well, Andrew Yang, wants to give President Trump a knuckle sandwich.
Appearing on Late Night With Seth Meyers, Booker declared that his hormones get the best of him on occasion, and he gets so fired up that he nearly loses control. But then he remembers that punching The Donald, whom he called a “bully,” won’t solve anything.
Thus did Booker join the long line of intolerant leftists who have expressed a wish to harm the president or who have actually threatened him.
Booker’s Dream Punch
Booker, a bachelor who revealed that he had a girlfriend to quell rumors he might be gay, told the Trump-hating television host that his raging testosterone — a key signal that he’s “fiercely heterosexual,” as he is mockingly called — is the problem.
Meyers asked him about “politeness” and “civic grace,” and the “difficulty” of practicing those virtues in a campaign when other candidates won’t. Booker answered by telling Myers about a football player who approached him at a campaign event:
I was running on the Iowa stage, and we were so psyched, hundreds of people there, I’m about to jump up, and this guy sees me, a former tight end for Stanford University. He’s a big guy, he puts his arm around me and goes, ‘Dude, I want you to punch Donald Trump in the face.’ And I stop in my tracks and I go, ‘Dude, that’s a felony, man.’”
Continued Booker: “Donald Trump is a guy who, you understand, he hurts you, and my testosterone sometimes makes me want to feel like punching him, which would be bad for this elderly out-of-shape man that he is if I did that.”
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Calling Trump a “physically weak specimen,” Booker then confessed that punching the president would be punching a bully. “That’s his tactics,” Booker said, and “you don’t beat a bully like him by fighting him on his tactics, on his terms, using his turf. He’s the body shamer, he’s the guy that shows, that tries to drag people in the gutter.”
Explained Booker, “This is a moral moment in America. And to me, what we need from our next leader, especially after the kind of moral vandalism that we’re in right now, is we need a leader that’s not gonna call us to the worst of who we are, but call us to the best of who we are.”
“Moral vandalism” is a frequent refrain from Booker, who supports “trans rights,” abortion on demand, and enthusiastically repeated the lie that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted numerous women.
Somewhat ironically, Meyers claims to be part of the reason that Trump is in the White House. Meyers ridiculed Trump mercilessly at the White House Correspondents Dinner in 2011, noting that Trump “has been saying that he will run for president as a Republican, which is surprising since I’d just assumed he was running as a joke.”
Nothing New
Booker’s confession is nothing new. Hollywood celebrities have been threatening or expressing a desire to harm Trump for years.
In 2016, after calling Trump a “pig,” a “dog,” a “mutt,” a “fool,” and an “idiot,” has-been actor Robert DeNiro said “I’d like to punch him in the face.”
But 2017 was a boon year for anti-Trump threats.
Madonna opened 2017 with a talk at January’s Women’s March, at which she confessed to “have thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House.”
In May, Kathy Griffin, a reputed comedienne, released a photo of herself holding a model of Trump’s severed, bloody head.
In June, actor Johnny Depp, accused of beating his then-wife, Amber Heard, suggested killing Trump: “When was the last time an actor assassinated a president?” the unbalanced star of Pirates of the Caribbean said. He apologized.
The same year, rapper Snoop Dogg struck twice. In March, he released a video that featured him firing a gun at a clown that was supposed to be Trump, and in November offered the public an album that featured a dead body on the cover with a toe tag that read “Trump.”
Other threats through the years have come from another has-been, Mickey Rourke, who has repeatedly threatened Trump since 2015, as well as Trump nemesis Rosie O’Donnell, and other celebrities no one much cares about.
Image: screenshot from YouTube video