Earlier today, Penn announced that Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), an outspoken opponent of President Donald Trump, will speak at the 2017 Commencement ceremony.
The junior senator from New Jersey and former mayor of Newark has recently emerged as one of the most vocal adversaries of Trump’s administration. He has been especially critical of Trump’s recent ban on immigrants from seven majority-Muslim countries.
Booker has taken an active role in protesting against Trump’s executive orders. A photograph tweeted by his office account shows him marching at the Elizabeth Detention Center against Trump’s immigration ban and plan to build wall on the border with Mexico. The caption includes the hashtag #NoBanNoWall.
In this video, Booker bashes Trump’s ban, calling it “fundamentally un-American.”
Booker has praised former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates for ordering the U.S. Department of Justice to not enforce the immigration ban and criticized Trump for firing Yates.
He is co-sponsoring Sen. Christopher Murphy (D-Conn.)’s bill to overturn this executive order.
In a recent tweet, he pointed out an inconsistency with Trump’s immigration ban and its purported purpose.
CNN tweeted a video in which Booker calls Trump’s executive order a “a crime and a sin” at Washington Dulles International Airport.
Last week in an interview with CNN, Booker denounced Trump as “a liar” and described Trump’s voter fraud allegations as “stunning and deeply offensive given the challenges we’ve had with voting in our nation’s history.”
He also criticized Trump’s recent refugee ban as “a wrong assault on people who are the most vulnerable, who are the most persecuted on planet earth.”
Booker previously faced off against Trump last July after President Trump shared an enigmatic tweet about the candidate.
Booker responded in an interview with CNN’s morning news program, “New Day,” saying “I love you, I just don’t want you to be my president. I don’t want to you have the White House to be spewing that kind of mean-spirited hate that doesn’t even belong on a playground sandbox.”
Booker has interspersed quotes from prominent public figures about activism and public resistance among his tweets condemning the Trump administration.
In a recent interview on MSNBC’s “All In with Chris Hayes,” Booker called upon Americans to hold President Trump accountable.
He said, “I’m outraged and America, I don’t care if you’re on the right or left, to have a president lie to you repeatedly, distract you from the real issues of health care, of jobs, of our fundamental freedoms is unacceptable and demands that we as a people respond.”
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