Happy Thursday, this is Congress Editor David Sivak welcoming you to Capitol Tea, your inside guide to Capitol Hill intrigue and all of Washington’s biggest personalities. Miss our last edition? Catch up here.
In this edition …
– Cory Booker gets reel. The Senate’s biggest TikTok evangelist calls himself an “Instagram guy.”
– Steve Daines’s fly fishing plans. The senator escaped to the wilderness for a respite from Washington.
Are you a House or Senate staffer? Get in touch with ideas for future editions.
TOK OF THE TOWN
When Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) is watching the steady stream of Star Trek and vegan cooking videos he says populate his social feed, it’s Instagram, not TikTok, that he is scrolling.
“I have to be honest with you — my platform that I use every day and that I do my watching is Instagram,” Booker told me one afternoon before the August recess.
“I’m an Instagram guy,” he said.
Booker, without question, is the Senate’s biggest TikTok booster, both legislatively and as a strategy to reach younger voters. He opposed the sell-or-ban ultimatum Congress gave to ByteDance, its Chinese parent company, last year and, since becoming a communications chief for his caucus in January, has urged Democrats to create accounts.
So it came as a surprise to me that Booker, who has well over 1 million followers, does not spend much of his own time on the app.
“So TikTok, I open it probably daily, but I just — when I’m home at night, up in the middle of the night, looking at a screen, which I should not do, and trying to fall back asleep, I’m scrolling Instagram,” Booker said.
Booker says his “For You” page is replete with the cooking and fuzzy animal videos common to most users’ pages. But he was willing to give me a small window into the influencers he personally follows.
He listed three accounts in the health and fitness space that track with his decade-plus as a vegan. He name-checked Joanne Lee Molinaro, also known as the Korean Vegan, and Rich Roll, a vegan endurance athlete. The third health influencer he mentioned was Dr. Rhonda Patrick, a podcast host.
Notably, Booker does not shy away from the Make America Healthy Again movement, telling me he finds “overlap” when he watches health content on social media.
“There are people that some people consider in the MAHA movement that I actually think they have some substantive things that I agree on, from chemicals out of food to chemicals off of our crops,” Booker said. “So, I’m sure there’s people that ascribe to that.”
More generally, Booker said he uses Instagram to watch movie reviews and also follows Star Trek fan pages.
Booker has achieved viral success with TikTok, drawing more than 350 million likes in April when he delivered a 25-hour, record-breaking floor speech that his office live-streamed. And he wants his Democratic colleagues to see the app as an opportunity, despite security concerns over its ownership.
Booker, the chairman of the Strategic Communications Committee, has urged members of his caucus to install TikTok on their personal devices, a controversial workaround to a federal law banning the app on government devices, and offers them tips on how to connect over a relatively new medium.
“I love watching their growth on the platforms. I love to watch what they do,” Booker said. In terms of his own content, Booker said he embraces TikTok because of its large user base.
“That is where 170 million Americans are, and that is where the younger voters are that we need to really work hard on,” he said. “So I show up there.”
I inadvertently got some insight into Booker’s dating life as we wrapped our interview. He recounted one story in which his current girlfriend, Alexis Lewis, asked him to open his “For You” page on one of their first dates.
“I sort of held my breath as I opened it up, and she could see that I’m a nerd who loves food videos, animal videos,” Booker said.
“It was just a funny moment, because I never thought of it through the dating lens, but here it is, you know, a year and a half later, and we’re still together,” Booker added of Lewis, disclosing that the two share a place together in Washington.
Of all the apps on his phone, Booker said he likely spends the most time on Spotify and that he uses TikTok more than X.
GONE FISHING
Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT) is trading the D.C. “swamp” for the scenery of Montana with the Senate gone for the month of August.
Daines’s office shared with us photos of his recent fly fishing excursion to the Yellowstone River, known for its cutthroat trout — yes, that’s a species of trout. His recess plans also include fishing in the Beartooth Wilderness, which boasts high country lakes at an altitude of 10,000 feet or higher.
Daines, like other Republicans, has used the break from Washington to sell the GOP’s tax law back home. He visited a mine near Billings, Montana, last week to highlight a provision that will help keep it from shuttering.
His outings in nature, meanwhile, are scheduled throughout the year. Daines, an avid hunter and fisherman, told me he already has weekends blocked out for the fall.
“My team knows there are sacred weekends, if they were to schedule something like, for example, an opening weekend for antelope, it’s a terminable offense,” Daines joked in an interview shortly before the August recess.
He hunts regularly with his family, calling his wife Cindy a “good shot,” but said plans with Donald Trump Jr. could be in the works as well.
CAPITOL TEA: JD VANCE AND THE SENATE’S ‘REDSHIRT FRESHMEN’
Trump Jr. made headlines as Daines’s hunting partner last election cycle, when the two helped keep Republicans aligned in a slew of primaries.
“There might be something out there cooking,” said Daines, formerly the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee.
