One of the problems beleaguering political opponents of Donald Trump has been finding a form of protest that, given the scale of his outrages, doesn’t seem entirely futile. You can parade outside a Tesla showroom. You can hold up dumb little signs during Trump’s address to Congress inscribed with slogans such as “This is not normal” and “Musk steals”. You can, as Democrats appear to have been doing since the election, play dead.
Alternatively, you can go for the ostentatious, performative gesture. On Monday evening, Cory Booker, the Democratic senator for New Jersey who carries himself like someone who’d have been happier in an era when men wore capes, started speaking on the floor of the Senate and carried on for 25 hours and five minutes, breaking the chamber’s record by almost 50 minutes and delivering – finally – a solid, usable symbol of rebellion.
This wasn’t a filibuster per se; no legislation was being passed. Booker decided to speak for “as long as I am physically able”, he said, in general protest against Trump and in what he described as a “moral moment” – a claim that, when he ended his speech on Tuesday evening, hoarse of voice and teary-eyed, didn’t seem to me an exaggeration.
The power of the filibuster is vested in the iron-man stamina required to perform it: in Booker’s case, standing for longer than a direct flight between Washington DC and Sydney, without food, rest or toilet breaks. It puts him in a category of protest that floats somewhere between a sit-in and a hunger strike, a measure of commitment that demands a kind of default respect, as does the technical challenge of filling the airtime. A few hours into his speech, Booker asked a Senate page to remove his chair and with it the temptation to sit down. Democratic senators were permitted to ask him questions or make short remarks to give him brief respite from speaking. Mostly, however, it was on Booker to keep talking and talking, which he did – it should be noted, quite easily – by enumerating all the terrible things Trump has done in his first three months in office.
There was something immensely satisfying – cathartic, even – in watching Booker protest against Trump via a form of dissent that, while radical and pushed to its absolute limit, still fell within congressional norms. Part of the fallout from Trump and his cohorts’ behaviour has been the shocking realisation that you can ditch standards and protocols, ignore judges and bin entire social and scientific programmes created by Congress, and, at least in the immediate term, nothing will happen. (In the medium to long term, of course, people will die.)
It could be argued that Trump’s extraordinary, norm-busting behaviour requires protest that meets it in the extra-political realm. Democrats aren’t going to storm the Capitol, but I have friends who have talked about withholding their federal taxes this tax season. Teslas aren’t only being boycotted but set on fire. Beyond the US, Europe is targeting Republican states in particular with reciprocal tariffs – Alabama beef and soybeans from Louisiana – to inflict personal economic pain on Trump and his supporters.
Still, it is the direct political victories that matter the most. In a ringing blow to Trump this week, the election of judge Susan Crawford over her Musk-backed rival for the Wisconsin supreme court – in a race that garnered a huge turnout from voters – highlights the power of boring, process-observant political pushback over more flamboyant gestures. This race was critical in determining the state’s congressional lines, gerrymandered by the Republican-controlled state Senate to favour Republican outcomes. But it also sent a more broadly cheering message: that the involvement of Elon Musk – who, along with affiliated groups, ploughed more than $20m into trying to get Brad Schimel elected – ended up motivating the Democratic vote more emphatically than the Republican.
Meanwhile, Booker kept talking. It was telling that, during and after his marathon speech, neither Musk nor Trump acknowledged him on their various social media platforms, although a White House spokesman did derisively refer to Booker’s performance as a “Spartacus” moment. Over the course of the 25 hours, people drifted in and out to watch his feat of endurance, while his staff kept his face wipes replenished and placed folders of material before him to read from. To date, the art of the political spectacle has been almost exclusively Trump’s for the taking. It was a relief, finally, to see a Democrat seize and hang on to the mic.
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