Late last night (April 1), New Jersey Senator Cory Booker broke the record for the longest continuous speech in Senate history, taking a bold stand against Donald Trump’s ominous administration.
“I rise tonight with the intention of getting in some good trouble,” Booker said as he kicked things off, nodding to the late civil rights icon John Lewis. “The threats to the American people and American democracy are grave and urgent, and we all must do more to stand against them.”
For hours, Booker spoke about the legitimate fear coursing through the nation as Trump’s administration continues to dismantle every great about this country. He read letters from constituents describing dystopian unease over immigration-centered family separations, authoritarian vibes and a nation descending into disarray.
Midway through the session, he quoted a USAID employee who was terminated for refusing to toe the Trump line. “
“The beacon of our democracy grows dim across the globe,” Booker read aloud, accusing Trump of deploying secret police without due process, strong-arming the press and shrinking executive power in a way that echoes modern strongmen like Erdoğan and Putin.
He flipped JFK’s old line several times on its head: “It’s no longer ‘ask not what your country can do for you.’ It’s ‘what can you do for Donald Trump?'”
“We are in a moral moment,” he said, channeling Lewis again. “It’s time to cause good trouble.”
Booker, New Jersey’s first Black senator, urged his peers not to block civil rights like Strom Thurmond once did in 1957 with his infamous 24-hour rant but to defend democracy from what he described as “existential threats” unleashed by Trump’s White House.
“To be candid, Strom Thurmond’s record always kind of just really irked me — that he would be the longest speech, that the longest speech on our great Senate floor was someone who was trying to stop people like me from being in the Senate,” Booker told journalist Rachel Maddow on Tuesday night.
“So to surpass that was something I didn’t know if we could do, but it was something that was really, once we got closer, became more and more important to me.”
In the clip below, Karen Hunter is joined by Dayvon Love for a powerful dialogue unpacking the complex relationship between Black communities and the Democratic Party.
