Andy Kim

By the time U.S. Sen. Andy Kim took the stage in Princeton on Tuesday, the day had already gotten away from him.

That morning, President Donald Trump had posted on Truth Social that “a whole civilization will die tonight” if Iran failed to reach a nuclear deal — language that triggered immediate condemnation from Democrats and some on the right as well.

At least 45 Democratic members of Congress had called for Trump’s removal from office as of Tuesday afternoon, including three New Jersey House Democrats.

They were joined by former U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), who called the post “evil and madness,” as well as conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.

Kim, the soft-spoken New Jersey Democrat who is the only career diplomat serving in the United States Senate, said Congress should abandon its recess and return to Washington immediately.

“We absolutely cannot tolerate language coming out of this president about attacking civilizations or threatening tens of millions of people,” he said.

Asked by NJ.com after the speech if the senator would join his colleagues in calling for Trump’s removal, a spokesperson pointed to a Tuesday afternoon statement by Kim that only urged Congress to reconvene.

U.S. Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) similarly stopped short of calling for invoking of the 25th Amendment, which provides a pathway for a president to be removed from office under extreme circumstances.

Kim’s Tuesday speech at Princeton, prepared weeks in advance, was less a response to the morning’s events than a rebuttal to the chaotic last several years — a methodical, frequently personal argument that the United States is more fragile than it appears and that the current administration is accelerating a decline that predates it.

Kim, who represented South Jersey in the House before winning the Senate seat long held by fellow Democrat Bob Menendez in 2024, has been building toward this kind of address for some time.

He opened with a disarming detail: the last time he gave a formal foreign policy speech at Princeton, he was a ninth-grader competing in a Model UN simulation, tasked with representing Djibouti on the Security Council. The year was 1996. America was, in his telling, at the height of its global confidence.

That world, he said, is gone.

“In the eyes of the world, we are no longer the indispensable nation,” Kim told the audience. “We have instead become the undependable nation.”

In February, Kim said, he attended the Munich Security Conference for the third time — and found it unlike anything he had experienced there before.

European partners who once coordinated with Washington are now openly strategizing around it. One senior official told him that his government’s internal deliberations now treat the United States as a security threat to Europe.

Multiple countries were discussing how to “de-risk” from America — a term, Kim noted with frustration, that Washington had invented to describe reducing dependence on China and Russia, both of which, he said, are “gleefully watching our own self-sabotage.”

“We can’t wait for you anymore,” one European partner told him.

Kim’s solution, as he laid it out, involves modernizing American diplomatic infrastructure and defense capabilities, restoring trust in government institutions and renewing investment in sectors like biotechnology and quantum photonics, where he said American leadership is quietly eroding.

“The next five years will shape the next five decades,” he said.

But the speech also returned to something closer to home.

Kim, whose father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease last year, opened up about getting a ground-level view of a crisis he said affects 65 million family caregivers across the country — and that American policy has largely failed to address.

The average cost of a private room at a nursing facility in New Jersey, he told the room, is close to $15,000 a month. Medicare, most families discover too late, does not begin to cover that cost.

Many of those families are also unable to afford the time and expense of traveling to Washington to lobby for the kind of reforms needed to fix the system, Kim added.

“My job is not just to listen to those that can yell the loudest,” he said during the question-and-answer session that followed his remarks. “It’s to try to make sure that we are looking across the board at those who need help the most.”

Kim also invoked his sons, ages 8 and 10, telling the audience that he figures he has about 15 years — “as a father and as a senator” — before they are out building their own lives.

That, he said, is the timeline he is working against.

But he can’t do it alone, he reminded the students in the room.

“You are going to be the leaders of this country when my kids grow up,” he said. “So don’t screw it up, okay? I’m counting on you.”