Who really believes that Senator Cory Booker’s testosterone level is so strong that he has to fight the urge to punch President Trump? Is it just me or does everyone else in America look at Booker and chuckle when he talks about his high level of testosterone? Sure, maybe actress Rosario Dawson, his girlfriend, buys into it but come on.

Yet, here we are. In Trump’s America, a sitting senator and candidate running for president can freely admit his desire to punch the president in the face on national television and it is just a normal interview. Booker was a guest on Late Night with Seth Meyers Monday night. The irony is that Booker goes on to virtue-shame President Trump as the one perpetuating hateful speech. Self-awareness is hard.

At first, Booker tried to sound like a reasonable man as he described a conversation with a supporter, a former fellow Stanford University football player, at a campaign event in Iowa. The gentleman told Booker to “punch Donald Trump in the face.” Booker claims his reaction was, “Dude, that’s a felony man.” (Forgive my skepticism about a man who refers to himself as Spartacus.) Instead of trying to continue to rise above thuggish attacks, Booker claims his testosterone level makes him want to do the very thing he knows is a felony. It’s as though he can’t let the supporter sound more manly than himself. Or something.

“Donald Trump is a guy who you understand- he hurts you and my testosterone sometimes makes me want to fee like punching him, which would be bad for this elderly, out-of-shape man that he is if I did that,” Booker laughed. “Physically weak specimen, but do you see what I’m talking about here? That’s his tactics and you don’t beat a bully like him, fighting him on his tactics, on his terms, using his turf. He’s the body shamer, he’s the guy that tries to drag people in the gutter.”

Clueless Booker calls Trump “the body shamer” as he shames Trump for being out-of-shape and old. You can’t make this stuff up. Does he not hear himself? Though the show’s audience cheered, Seth Meyers looked “visibly uncomfortable” as Booker went on to call President Trump a “physically weak specimen”. Booker is all about “this moral moment”, you know.

Booker said bigotry and demagoguery has always existed in American politics, but that notorious Southern Civil Rights era politicians including George Wallace, and Bull Connor weren’t defeated with “bigger dogs and bigger fire hoses,” but instead by “artists of activism” who drew upon the American sense of morality.

“How did we beat them before? First off, don’t mistake strength for — ‘to be strong you need to be mean,'” Booker said. “We need to be as a party, in this moral moment, we need to talk about not what we’re against, but what we’re for.

I disagree with just about every policy stance that Cory Booker takes yet this snippet stands out. He slams America’s criminal justice system as “one of the most shameful” on the planet. Well, now. That’s going some, isn’t it? Would he prefer the justice meted out in the Middle East? China? Russia? North Korea?

Booker said the country has “one of the most shameful criminal justice systems on the planet” and that was what drove him to run for Senate after serving as the mayor of Newark from 2006 to 2013. He complained many in the Democratic Party just want to beat Donald Trump in 2020, but he said the priority should be to aim higher.

Booker fails the leadership test. He reacts instead of leading with policy ideas and actionable plans. Even his physical threat to President Trump is following in the footsteps of another old white guy – remember in March 2018 when Joe Biden threatened President Trump physically when he said he’d “beat the hell out of him?” That was a cringe-worthy kind of remark, too.

It can be noted, too, that Booker followed Biden’s lead and described President Trump as worse than George Wallace. Biden did it last Friday and by Sunday, Booker repeated the slam on two Sunday morning shows.

Joe Biden, the former vice president now among candidates for the 2020 Democratic nomination, said Friday in widely reported public remarks that Trump was “more George Wallace than George Washington.”

Democratic Sen. Cory Booker took up the theme during Sunday morning appearances on CNN’s “State of the Union” and the CBS program “Face the Nation.” On the latter program, in response to a question from host Margaret Brennan, Booker said he considered Trump as being worse than simply a racist.

“(H)e is somebody that is using race like a weapon to divide our country against itself,” Booker said. “He’s been using it since before he became president as a way to accelerate his gaining of political power. And the language he uses is actually language — tired old tropes that have been used by demagogues all throughout our country’s history. From the know nothings who were fighting against Irish and German immigrants, literally using some of the same language, to some of the same tactics that George Wallace was using for his own political power, literally calling his opponents communist and the like.”

It’s all more name-calling by the people chastising others for partaking in it. This is why so many Trump supporters are willing to ignore any crude language that may come from President Trump – his opponents do the same, or in some cases, worse than the president. Their own language is uncivil and can incite violence, just like what they complain comes from Trump. And as for the claims of racism, the party of identity politics has come to a point where the standard attack has now morphed into calling the president worse than George Wallace. It’s not just standard racism, it’s next-level racism. It was bound to happen.