By any measure, Democratic Senator Cory Booker’s marathon speech on the Senate floor was a stunt.
But it was also mesmerizing and inspiring — a display of perseverance and defiance at a time when this country desperately needed it.
In a historic speech that literally lasted more than a day — 25 hours and four minutes, to be exact — the New Jersey senator lambasted President Trump’s damaging, cruel, chaotic, and Constitution-defying administration.
With the length of his speech, Booker broke a nearly 70-year-old Senate record.
An unapologetic South Carolina segregationist, Strom Thurmond, gave a 24-hour and 18-minute screed against passage of the 1957 Civil Rights Act.
“Strom Thurmond was a racist senator,” Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic House minority leader, said after Booker’s speech, which began March 31 and ended on April 1. “For that record to fall to an African American man delivering a speech from the head and from the heart [is] what America actually should be about.”
To hate Thurmond, Booker said, “is wrong, and maybe my ego got too caught up that if I stood here, maybe, maybe, just maybe, I could break this record of the man who tried to stop the rights upon which I stand.
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“I’m not here though because of his speech,” he said. “I’m here despite his speech. I’m here because as powerful as he was, the people were more powerful.”
That’s exactly the message that a nation feeling powerless needs to hear as Trump and the billionaire who bought him, Elon Musk, maliciously upend lives, livelihoods, and human rights.
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The immeasurable power of everyday people has been Booker’s mantra since he was elected mayor of Newark, N.J., and became a rising Democratic star in 2006.
For Gwen Ifill’s 2009 book, “The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama,” Booker told the late legendary journalist, “The real test of leadership has never been who can get people to follow them. We’ve got charismatic leaders who get followed a lot. The real test of leadership is to motivate people to be leaders themselves and carry the burden.”
Perhaps more than ever, Booker’s point still holds — politicians alone will not get us out of this roiling mess. With his speech he offered a rejoinder to Trump, and a challenge for those underestimating their own ability to fight the corrupt powers that be.
Beyond detailing the various atrocities inflicted on this nation — and most of the world — by the Trump administration, Booker showed the power of a single voice of resistance. And he did so in a way that embodied how wresting this nation from the hands of a tyrant and his accomplices will be a long and demanding effort, both mentally and physically.
For the first few hours of Booker’s speech, some on various social media platforms derided his actions as performative spotlight-hogging. But as Booker neared the end of his speech, there were more than 350,000 viewers on YouTube alone.
What they saw was a speech that was as impassioned as it was methodical in dissecting the onslaught of the Trump agenda. Booker condensed into 25 hours what this nation has suffered for more than 70 days — from tariffs wreaking havoc on the global economy to the trampling of civil liberties and the rule of law to brutish threats against judges and a president behaving like a king who believes he is beholden to no one.
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Booker did not meander. He didn’t resort to time-killing gimmicks like Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas did when he read Dr. Seuss’s “Green Eggs and Ham” during his 21-hour filibuster against the Affordable Care Act in 2013.
Nor did Booker take breaks to eat or use the bathroom, an astonishing feat in and of itself. It was as if the gravity of this perilous time trumped even the most basic demands of human physiology.
As Booker neared Thurmond’s record, many on social media were rooting him on. Cable news stations went live to the Senate floor to capture his accomplishment. But its true weight lay in more than a historical moment.
Of course, Booker’s speech can’t shift the balance of congressional power, rein in Trump, or jettison Musk from the government. But combined with Democrats maintaining control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court — a closely watched race that Musk poured millions into, only to have the Republican candidate lose by 10 points — Booker’s remarkable day was a timely jolt and a reminder that the way forward may be long, but will never be found in silence.
Renée Graham is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at renee.graham@globe.com.
