Last Tuesday, the 2nd of April, Sen. Cory Booker stood behind a podium in the U.S. House of Representatives and performed a twenty-five hour and five minute speech beating the previous record set by South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond who did so to protest the Civil Rights act. The New Jersey senator spoke about many of the controversial actions of President Donald Trump and his administration along with Elon Musk’s actions as well.
In twenty-five hours, Cory Booker lamented the promises of America and spoke of how those promises have been broken: “In just 71 days, the president of the United States has inflicted so much harm on Americans’ safety, financial stability, the core foundations of our democracy, and even our aspirations as a people.”
This speech signifies that the American dream and the American people are not dead, not stuffed into a single box or faltering democracy, there are still many Americans who fight for the freedom that we have been fighting for since 1776.
When the government is actively trying to steal money from the millions of Americans who worked their fingers to the bone to achieve, people like Cory Booker stand up and say, “When 73 million American seniors, who rely on social security, were to have that promise mocked, attacked, and then to have the services undermined – to be told that there will be no one there to answer if you call for help – when our seniors became afraid and worried and panicked because of the menacing words of their president, of the most wealthy person in the world, of cabinet secretaries … Did we speak up?”
Even when the ease of low cost, high revenue was promised by the Republican party is spat out and stepped on, Cory Booker had something to say, “When the American economy, in 71 days – 71 days – has been upended, when prices at the grocery store were skyrocketing, and the stock market was plunging, when pension funds, 401(k)s, were going down, when Americans were hurting and looking up, where the resounding answer to this question was: ‘No.’”
Everything he says is true, April 4th 2025 marked the second day of the extreme tariffs that President Trump started rolling out, the stock market lost approximately $2 trillion dollars in just 48 hours, and in five days lost $5 trillion dollars.
And the concerns for social security’s possible disappearance had a lot of ground, the Trump Administration have already made remarks calling the program ‘unconstitutional’. This would bring an end to the nearly one-hundred year old program that started on August 14, 1935.
Senator Booker also reminded us of the strange forgiveness the Republican party gave those who participated in the January 6th riots, “when the people who attacked the police officers – defended [The Capital], an American democracy – on January 6, who just outside those doors put their lives on the line for us, and many of them would later die … Where were you when the president pardoned them, celebrated them, and even talked of giving them money – people who savagely beat American police officers?”
He of course is mentioning the five officers who lost their lives trying to protect the capital and all those inside. Officers Brian Sicknick, Howard Charles Liebengood, Jeffrey Smith, Kyle Hendrik DeFreytag, Gunther Paul Hashida. Four of these officers died by suicide in the days and months following the attacks, all of which sighted the attacks as reasons for their suicide.
The carelessness required to pardon the hundreds of people who not only committed a felony, but also the disregard for the deaths of the officers who responded to the attacks to pardon these criminals is abhorrent.
Cory Booker has not only successfully shined a light on the continuous problems emitting from the Trump Administration’s 2nd occupation of office, but also brought their unresolved blunders from their first term in office and the inbetween, and he did so while smashing records and keeping the attention of the America people, Democrats and Republicans, and America’s allies for twenty-five hours straight beating out the previous record of 24 hours and 18 minutes held by Senator Thurmond.
