Cory Booker’s long speech offers a strategy for Trump opponents in a fragmented media landscape

April 16, 2025–April 16, 2025

Cory Booker’s record-setting speech from March 31-April 5, 2025 grabbed headlines for its length, but the senator’s media strategy helped sustain attention during and after the performance to disrupt Trump’s public spotlight. Our article on the website “The Conversation” draws from our published research (Matthew deTar and Erik Johnson, “The Long Speech: Rhetorical Abundance in Circulation,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 53, 4 (2023), 581-595) to provide a compelling framework to assess the significance of Booker’s speech and explain the surrounding media spectacle. The article briefly outlines our framework to analyze excessively long political speeches, and then demonstrates how Booker’s speech repeated common conventions that shape long speeches throughout history and public responses to them. Booker uniquely tailored his speech to be distributable via contemporary media technologies while also speaking for so long that almost no one could follow the entire content. The article also outlines the ways that the media simplified the speech in historically predictable ways by repeating a clear “message” for Booker’s performance, even when the “message” was more the media spectacle than the content. Ultimately, our analysis explains the strategies that Booker used to redirect media attention away from Trump for a news cycle.

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