A Tale of Two Tough Guys: Booker & Trump brutalized their constituents

By James J. Devine

Newark was burning, or at least that’s how the mayor sold it—Cory Booker, the golden boy with a Yale pedigree and a cop’s nightstick, strutting through the wreckage like some urban messiah with a badge.

The streets were a war zone, and Booker played the general, deploying his troops with the cold efficiency of a man who’d read too many Giuliani press clippings.

He made the stats look good—crime down, arrests up—but the bodies piled up in the margins: Black kids slammed against squad cars for loitering, grandmothers frisked on stoops, a police force so jacked up on authority that the feds had to ride in and remind them the Constitution wasn’t a suggestion.

Booker called it reform. The people of Newark called it terror.

Then came The Donald, a different beast entirely—no Ivy League polish, just pure, unfiltered id, a carnival barker with a taste for blood and a Rolodex full of enforcers. He didn’t just want order; he wanted vengeance.

Remember the Central Park Five? Trump took out full-page ads demanding their execution even after DNA proved their innocence, then doubled down decades later when Netflix made the documentary. Some men learn from their mistakes; Trump collects them like trophies.

Migrants? Round ’em up, cage ’em, lose their kids in the system. The death penalty? Bring it back with a flourish, a macabre revival tour for the electric chair and the needle.

Thirteen federal executions in six months—a record since the 19th century, back when they hanged horse thieves in the town square.

Trump didn’t just approve; he reveled in it, grinning like a man who’d just found a fresh bucket of chum.

Booker tried to dress his brutality in progressive jargon—community policing, urban renewal, all that glossy nonsense. Trump didn’t bother with the facade.

His cruelty was the point, the selling feature, the red meat tossed to the howling mobs at his rallies. “Be rough!” he barked at the cops, and they listened, because why wouldn’t they?

The man in the Oval had their back, even when they choked a man to death on camera or kicked in the teeth of some asylum seeker’s kid.

In the end, the difference was just scale.

Booker brutalized a city. Trump brutalized a nation.

They both neglected their oaths “to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

One hid behind respectability; the other wore his sadism like a badge of honor.

But the result was the same—boots on necks, cells overflowing, and a country where justice wasn’t blind so much as it was grinning, sharpening its knives, and counting the bodies.

But here’s the kicker: Newark didn’t stay broken under Ras Baraka, the poet-mayor with a blueprint instead of a baton.

Violent crime at a 60-year low, not by cracking skulls but by cracking the code—Project Chill talking gang members off ledges, cops actually trained to de-escalate, a civilian review board with teeth.

Same streets, different playbook. Booker’s cops wrote misleading reports; Baraka’s write apology letters when they screw up. Baraka’s walk beats instead of kicking doors, now gang members get job offers instead of rap sheets, and the murder rate in Newark cratered because someone finally figured out common sense is cheaper than prisons.

The Last Word: Reality vs. The Racket

Tough talk plays well on cable news—the barked orders, the blood-and-thunder promises, the chest-thumping spectacle of politicians selling safety at the price of freedom.

It’s an old con, and a good one: scare people enough, and they’ll hand over their rights like pocket change to a mugger.

Booker mastered the game, outraising three Democratic rivals combined before sprinting to the Senate in 2013, his timing impeccable. He left Newark just 12 months before the Justice Department’s hammer came down, releasing its 2014 report that confirmed what street protesters had screamed for years: Newark’s cops were out of control, choking citizens for sport and targeting Black neighborhoods like occupied territory.

Booker did it with statistics, Trump with primal screams, both peddling the same lie—that justice comes from the heel of a boot.

The dirty secret of America’s tough-on-crime charlatans? Their brutality is always selective.

Trump bellowed about law and order while preparing pardons for the January 6 rioters—1500 insurrectionists walking free, some who beat cops with flagpoles and smeared shit on Capitol walls.

Booker played the reformer while his campaign coffers swelled with cash from Charles Kushner, the billionaire felon who hired a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law, filmed it, and mailed the tape to his sister—a crime that earned him just 14 months in Club Fed before Booker’s donor became the Ambassador to France.

This is how the game works. The Cory Bookers and Donald Trumps of the world thunder about “thugs” and “animals”—but only the poor ones, the Black ones, the ones without connections. The real criminals—the billionaires, the political arsonists, the guys who can cut checks or deliver votes—get handshakes instead of handcuffs.

But real life isn’t a soundbite. It’s the quiet miracle of a Newark summer without sirens, the immigrant shopkeeper who doesn’t glance at the door when uniforms walk in, the jury that hesitates before checking the “death” box on a form.

Liberty and justice aren’t slogans—they’re what’s left when the shouting stops and the grown-ups finally take over. The tragedy isn’t that the tough talking guys keep winning elections; it’s that we keep forgetting they always lose the peace.

The crowd still loves a hanging. But the rope burns on America’s neck are getting harder to ignore.