Cory Booker to Trump: ‘I love you, Donald. I pray for you.’

Donald Trump was not impressed by Cory Booker’s speech on the opening night of the Democratic National Convention.

“If Cory Booker is the future of the Democratic Party,” Trump tweeted, “they have no future! I know more about Cory than he knows about himself.”

The New Jersey senator, though, says he isn’t going to engage in a war of words with the Republican nominee.

“I love Donald Trump,” Booker said on CNN’s “New Day” on Tuesday. “I don’t want to answer his hate with hate. I’m not going to answer his garbage with garbage. I love him. I know his kids, I know his family. They’re good — the children especially — good people.”

Booker joked that he had been “feeling left out” after Trump’s attacks on his Senate colleagues John McCain and Elizabeth Warren.

“Thank you, Donald,” he said. “I finally feel like I’m important enough that you will attack me.”

The former Newark mayor said Trump’s assertion that he knows “more about Cory than he knows about himself” is the kind of conspiratorial rumormongering the GOP nominee has become known for.

“That’s what he wants, he wants us to be speculating: ‘Ooh, it sounds so sinister,'” Booker said. “I don’t care. I love you, Donald. I pray for you. I hope that you find some kindness in your heart that you’re not going to be somebody that spews out insults to your political opposition. That you’re going to start finding some ways to love. I’m going to elevate him. I love you, I just don’t want you to be my president.”

He added: “I’m just gonna keep loving on him. I’m going to keep telling the truth about him — but I’m going to keep loving on him, praying for the best for him and his family. That kind of vitriol, that kind of meanness, has no place in the presidency.”

Booker, who was tabbed as a possible vice presidential pick for Hillary Clinton before she chose Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine as her running mate, also confirmed that he had been vetted by the presumptive Democratic nominee.

“They looked at every area of my life,” he said earlier Tuesday on Fox’s “Good Day New York.” “It was incredibly intense and very secretive. I couldn’t even tell my mother about it.”

Booker continued: “What a privilege to sit with the secretary and sit with her team, go through that process. I feel incredibly blessed to be even considered. To get down to that shortlist is an honor I couldn’t have even imagined a few years ago.”
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