ne 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.)

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