Cory Booker says Elizabeth Warren’s tech plan sounds like ‘a Donald Trump thing to say’
"I don't think that a president should be running around, pointing at companies, and saying breaking them up without any kind of process here."
Sen. Cory Booker says he isn’t comparing Elizabeth Warren to Donald Trump.
But he sort of compared Elizabeth Warren to Donald Trump.
In an interview Sunday on ABC News’s “This Week,” the New Jersey Democrat was asked about his fellow 2020 primary candidate’s plan to break up giant technology companies like Amazon, Facebook, and Google — particularly after one of Facebook’s co-founders came out in support of breaking up his former company.
While he acknowledged that “we’ve had a problem in America with corporate consolidation,” Booker suggested he would take a different approach than Warren.
“I don’t think that a president should be running around, pointing at companies, and saying breaking them up without any kind of process here,” he told Jonathan Karl.
“It’s not me and my own personal opinion about going after folks,” Booker continued. “That sounds more like a Donald Trump thing to say, like, ‘I’m going to break up you guys, I’m going to break’ — no, we need to create systems and processes that work.”
Karl interjected to make the observation that “you just compared Elizabeth Warren to Donald Trump.”
“I most certainly did not,” Booker replied, calling the Massachusetts senator his “friend.”
“Let her discuss and debate her positions,” he said. “I’m telling you right now, we do not need a president that is going to use their own personal beliefs and tell you which companies we should break up. We need a president that’s going to enforce antitrust laws in this country, and I will be that person.”
While the 50-year-old former Newark mayor didn’t go as far as explicitly calling for the break up of a specific company, his preferred approach is not that different from what Warren has proposed in her tech plan.
During the interview, Booker said the country’s corporate consolidation problem extends beyond tech to the pharmaceutical and agricultural industries as well.
“If I’m president of the United States, I will have a Justice Department that uses antitrust legislation to do the proper investigations and to hold industries accountable for corporate consolidation,” he said.
For her part, that is what Warren has proposed, too: Tougher antitrust enforcement. Citing “weak” enforcement by the federal government over the past several decades, Warren said she would appoint regulators who would use “existing tools” to block and undo “illegal and anti-competitive” mergers.
However, the Bay State Democrat says she would also seek legislation action.
As part of her big tech plan, Warren proposed a bill that would prohibit the large companies that run an online marketplace (officially designated as “platform utilities”) from competing with other companies in that same marketplace. According to those rules, Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Apple would have to be broken up.
