A Democratic senator has delivered the longest ever speech in the US Senate in protest against Donald Trump.
Cory Booker, 55, took to the floor at 7pm local time on Monday – midnight in the UK – saying he would remain there as long as he was “physically able”.
He finally concluded at 8.04pm local time (1.04am in the UK) the following day, clocking in with 25 hours and four minutes – surpassing the previous record of 24 hours and 18 minutes.
The senator for New Jersey said his goal was to “uplift the stories of Americans who are being harmed by the Trump administration’s reckless actions, attempts to undermine our institutions, and disregard for the rule of law”.
During his speech, Mr Booker only took brief breaks from speaking, when he gave the floor instead to questions from his Democratic colleagues, according to Sky News’ US partner network, NBC News.
The rules of the Senate dictate a speaker holds the floor as long as they stay at the podium – meaning he could not leave at any point, even to go to the toilet or to eat.
So who exactly is the Democratic senator, what was his multi-hour speech all about – and how did he do it?
Image: Mr Booker has criticised the Trump administration during his speech. Pic: Senate Television via AP
Rising star of Democratic Party
Mr Booker was born in Washington DC and moved to northern New Jersey when he was a boy.
He is a graduate of Stanford University and Yale Law and started his career as a lawyer for charities.
Entering politics, he was considered a rising star in the Democratic Party. He was elected to serve on the city council of New Jersey’s biggest state, Newark, and then as mayor, a position he held until 2013.
He was first elected to the US Senate in 2013 during a special election held after the death of politician and businessman Frank Lautenberg.
He went on to win his first full term in 2014 and was re-elected in 2020.
2020 presidential bid
In February 2019 Mr Booker launched his bid for the US presidency from the steps of his home in Newark.
At the time, he played on his personal ties to the “low-income, inner city community” and urged for the US to return to a “common sense of purpose”.
He later dropped out of the race after struggling to raise the money required to make a bid for the White House.
Image: Senator Cory Booker. Pic: AP
Why did he speak in the Senate – and what did he say?
By holding the floor in the Senate, Mr Booker protested against the Trump administration.
Before he began, the senator said he had the intention of “getting in some good trouble”, NBC News reported.
He started by saying he intended to disrupt “the normal business of the United States Senate for as long as I am physically able”.
“I rise tonight because I believe sincerely that our country is in crisis,” he said.
In the hours that followed, he gave a warning about the “grave and urgent” threat Americans faced from the Trump administration, arguing that “bedrock commitments” to the country “are being broken.”
He read letters from constituents about how Mr Trump’s cuts were already taking a toll on their lives.
The longest Senate speeches in history
As he reached 16 hours of speaking, Mr Booker already had the sixth-longest speech in Senate history.
However, he still has a while to go to beat the all-time record for the longest individual speech.
According to the Senate’s website, this belongs to Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who filibustered for 24 hours and 18 minutes against the Civil Rights Act of 1957.
Only one other sitting senator has spoken for longer than Mr Booker.
In 2013, Senator Ted Cruz, a Republican from Texas, held the floor for 21 hours and 19 minutes to contest Barack Obama’s healthcare reform law.
As well as speaking about health law, Mr Cruz’s speech made headlines as he read the entirety of the Dr Seuss book Green Eggs And Ham, which he said at the time was a bedtime story to his children.
He claimed the US was giving up being a global leader, citing Mr Trump’s proposals to take over Greenland and Canada while feuding with longtime allies.
He also occasionally took aim at Elon Musk, the richest person in the world, who is advising Mr Trump and leading the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
“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,” Mr Booker said on the floor.
“These are not normal times in America. And they should not be treated as such in the United States Senate.”
“Twelve hours now I’m standing, and I’m still going strong, because this president is wrong, and he’s violating principles that we hold dear and principles in this document that are so clear and plain,” Mr Booker said at around 7am on Tuesday, holding up a copy of the Constitution.
Appearing to waver slightly at times, Mr Booker was accompanied by Senator Chris Murphy. In 2016, Mr Booker joined the Connecticut Democrat when he held the floor for almost 15 hours to argue for gun control legislation.
Image: Pic: Senate TV / Reuters
22 hours in, Mr Booker acknowledged he was struggling.
“I don’t have much gas left in the tank,” he said at around 5pm,before continuing.
“More Americans need to stand up and say enough is enough,” he said.
While the main motivation for the speech was to stand up to the Trump administration, Mr Booker later said he wanted to break the record previously set by Senator Strom Thurmond in 1957, who was protesting the Civil Rights Act.
During an MSNBC interview Tuesday night, Mr Booker said Mr Thurmond’s record “always kind of just really irked me”.
“The longest speech on our great Senate floor was someone who was trying to stop people like me from being in the Senate. 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,” he said.
A standing ovation and millions of TikTok likes
At 7.45pm, having already broken the record, Mr Booker said he would “stop soon”.
Minutes after he broke the record, he said: “I want to go a little bit past this, and then I’m gonna, I’m gonna deal with some of the biological urgencies I’m feeling.”
Then finally, at 8.04pm, he ended his speech to a standing ovation from Senate colleagues.
“This is a moral moment. It’s not left or right; it’s right or wrong. Let’s get in good trouble. I yield the floor,” Mr Booker concluded.
A live feed of the speech on the senator’s TikTok account had more than 350 million likes, according to Mr Booker’s office, which said that it had also received more than 28,000 voicemails of encouragement.
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After the speech, he wrote on X: “I may be tired and a little hoarse, but as I said again and again on the Senate floor, this is a moment where we cannot afford to be silent, when we must speak up.
“I believe that history will show we rose to meet this moment.
“It will show we did not let the chaos and division go unanswered. It will show that when our president chose to spread lies and sow fear, we chose to come together, to work together, and to rise together.”
How did he prepare for it?
Mr Booker’s speech wasn’t an impromptu one; his office said it stemmed from 1,164 pages of prepared material.
But it wasn’t just the speech itself that the senator had to prepare for – it was the physical demands of the display.
Mr Booker later told reporters that in preparation for the speech, he had stopped eating days in advance.
“My strategy was to stop eating – I think I stopped eating on Friday – and then to stop drinking the night before I started,” he said, adding that those decisions had left him dehydrated and with cramped muscles.
Senator Chris Murphy, who was with Mr Booker overnight during his speech, spoke admiringly of his performance – and endurance – as it headed into hour 23.
“It’s really hard to get your body past hour 22 and 23,” Mr Murphy said, “I just don’t think he’s going to stop until he has to stop.”
Asked whether Mr Booker wore a nappy or a catheter, Mr Murphy laughed and said he wasn’t the person to ask. A spokesperson for Mr Booker said he hadn’t worn either.
He noted that MrBooker had pain medicine in his desk drawer in case he needed it.
Some reports have referred to Mr Booker’s speech as a filibuster, but technically it was not.
A filibuster is a speech meant to halt the advance of a specific piece of legislation.
Mr Booker’s performance was instead a broader critique of Mr Trump’s agenda, meant to hold up any business scheduled to take place in the Senate and draw attention to what Democrats are doing to contest the president.
Democrats have been forced to use these types of opposition methods as they do not hold a majority in either congressional chamber.
Mr Booker has been involved in a filibuster, joining fellow senator Chris Murphy for his nearly 15-hour speech to advocate for gun control in 2016.
While the UK’s FTSE 100 closed down 1.55% and the continent’s STOXX Europe 600 index was down 2.67% as of 5.30pm, it was American traders who were hit the most.
All three of the US’s major markets opened to sharp losses on Thursday morning.
Image: The S&P 500 is set for its worst day of trading since the COVID-19 pandemic. File pic: AP
By 8.30pm UK time (3.30pm EST), The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 3.7%, the S&P 500 opened with a drop of 4.4%, and the Nasdaq composite was down 5.6%.
Compared to their values when Donald Trump was inaugurated, the three markets were down around 5.6%, 8.7% and 14.4%, respectively, according to LSEG.
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Worst one-day losses since COVID
As Wall Street trading ended at 9pm in the UK, two indexes had suffered their worst one-day losses since the COVID-19 pandemic.
The S&P 500 fell 4.85%, the Nasdaq dropped 6%, and the Dow Jones fell 4%.
It marks Nasdaq’s biggest daily percentage drop since March 2020 at the start of COVID, and the largest drop for the Dow Jones since June 2020.
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5:07
The latest numbers on tariffs
‘Trust in President Trump’
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told CNN earlier in the day that Mr Trump was “doubling down on his proven economic formula from his first term”.
“To anyone on Wall Street this morning, I would say trust in President Trump,” she told the broadcaster, adding: “This is indeed a national emergency… and it’s about time we have a president who actually does something about it.”
Later, the US president told reporters as he left the White House that “I think it’s going very well,” adding: “The markets are going to boom, the stock is going to boom, the country is going to boom.”
He later said on Air Force One that the UK is “happy” with its tariff – the lowest possible levy of 10% – and added he would be open to negotiations if other countries “offer something phenomenal”.
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3:27
How is the world reacting to Trump’s tariffs?
Economist warns of ‘spiral of doom’
The turbulence in the markets from Mr Trump’s tariffs “just left everybody in shock”, Garrett Melson, portfolio strategist at Natixis Investment Managers Solutions in Boston, told Reuters.
He added that the economy could go into recession as a result, saying that “a lot of the pain, will probably most acutely be felt in the US and that certainly would weigh on broader global growth as well”.
Meanwhile, chief investment officer at St James’s Place Justin Onuekwusi said that international retaliation is likely, even as “it’s clear countries will think about how to retaliate in a politically astute way”.
He warned: “Significant retaliation could lead to a tariff ‘spiral of doom’ that could be the growth shock that drags us into recession.”
It comes as the UK government published a long list of US products that could be subject to reciprocal tariffs – including golf clubs and golf balls.
Running to more than 400 pages, the list is part of a four-week-long consultation with British businesses and suggests whiskey, jeans, livestock, and chemical components.
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said on Thursday that the US president had launched a “new era” for global trade and that the UK will respond with “cool and calm heads”.
It also comes as Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney announced a 25% tariff on all American-imported vehicles that are not compliant with the US-Mexico-Canada trade deal.
He added: “The 80-year period when the United States embraced the mantle of global economic leadership, when it forged alliances rooted in trust and mutual respect and championed the free and open exchange of goods and services, is over. This is a tragedy.”
Tanking stock markets, collapsing world orders, devastating trade wars; economists with their hair ablaze are scrambling to keep up.
But as we try to make sense of Donald Trumps’s tariff tsunami, economic theory only goes so far. In the end this surely is about something more primal.
Power.
Understanding that may be crucial to how the world responds.
Yes, economics helps explain the impact. The world’s economy has after all shifted on its axis, the way it’s been run for decades turned on its head.
Instead of driving world trade, America is creating a trade war. We will all feel the impact.
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0:58
PM will ‘fight’ for deal with US
Donald Trump says he is settling scores, righting wrongs. America has been raped, looted and pillaged by the world trading system.
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But don’t be distracted by the hyperbole – and if you think this is about economics alone, you may be missing the point.
Above all, tariffs give Donald Trump power. They strike fear into allies and enemies, from governments to corporations.
This is a president who runs his presidency like a medieval emperor or mafia don.
It is one reason why since his election we have seen what one statesman called a conga line of sycophants make their way to the White House, from world leaders to titans of industry.
The conga line will grow longer as they now redouble their efforts hoping to special treatment from Trump’s tariffs. Sir Keir Starmer among them.
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President Trump’s using similar tactics at home, deploying presidential power to extract concessions and deter dissent in corporate America, academia and the US media. Those who offer favours are spared punishment.
His critics say he seeks a form power for the executive or presidential branch of government that the founding fathers deliberately sought to prevent.
Whether or not that is true, the same playbook of divide and rule through intimidation can now be applied internationally. Thanks to tariffs
Each country will seek exceptions but on Trump’s terms. Those who retaliate may meet escalation.
This is the unforgiving calculus for governments including our own plotting their next moves.
The temptation will be to give Trump whatever he wants to spare their economies, but there is a jeopardy that compounds the longer this goes on.
Image: Could America’s traditional allies turn to China? Pic: AP
Malcolm Turnbull, the former Australian prime minister who coined the conga line comparison, put it this way: “Pretty much all the international leaders I have seen that have sucked up to Trump have been run over. The reality is if you suck up to bullies, whether it’s global affairs or in the playground, you just get more bullying.”
Trading partners may be able to mitigate the impact of these tariffs through negotiation, but that may only encourage this unorthodox president to demand ever more?
Ultimately the world will need a more reliable superpower than that.
In the hands of such a president, America cannot be counted on.
When it comes to security, stability and prosperity, allies will need to fend for themselves.
And they will need new friends. If Washington can’t be relied on, Beijing beckons.
America First will, more and more, mean America on its own.
Actors, directors and celebrity friends have paid tribute to Val Kilmer, after he died aged 65.
The California-born star of Top Gun, Batman and Heat died of pneumonia on Tuesday night in Los Angeles, his daughter Mercedes told the Associated Press.
She said Kilmer was diagnosed with throat cancer in 2014 but later recovered.
Tributes flooded in after reports broke of the actor’s death, with No Country For Old Men star Josh Brolin among the first to share their memories.
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2:49
Watch: Val Kilmer in his most iconic roles
He wrote on Instagram: “See ya, pal. I’m going to miss you. You were a smart, challenging, brave, uber-creative firecracker. There’s not a lot left of those.
“I hope to see you up there in the heavens when I eventually get there. Until then, amazing memories, lovely thoughts.”
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Kyle Maclachlan, who co-starred with Kilmer in the 1991 biopic The Doors, wrote on social media: “You’ll always be my Jim. See you on the other side my friend.”
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Michael Mann, who directed Kilmer in 1995’s Heat, also paid tribute in a statement, saying: “I always marvelled at the range, the brilliant variability within the powerful current of Val’s possessing and expressing character.
“After so many years of Val battling disease and maintaining his spirit, this is tremendously sad news.”
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Heat co-star Danny Trejo also called Kilmer “a great actor, a wonderful person, and a dear friend of mine” on Instagram.
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Cher, who once dated the actor, said on X that “U Were Funny, crazy, pain in the ass, GREAT FRIEND… BRILLIANT as Mark Twain, BRAVE here during ur sickness”.
Lifelong friend and director of Twixt, Francis Ford Coppola said: “Val Kilmer was the most talented actor when in his High School, and that talent only grew greater throughout his life.
“He was a wonderful person to work with and a joy to know – I will always remember him.”
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The Top Gun account on X also said it was remembering Kilmer, who starred as Iceman in both the 1986 original and 2022 sequel, and “whose indelible cinematic mark spanned genres and generations”.
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