Senator Cory Booker has been speaking for almost an entire day on the Senate floor in protest against Donald Trump’s administration.
The Democrat started speaking at 7pm ET on Monday evening, which was midnight here in the UK. At the time of writing, he is still addressing the floor, meaning he has been speaking for more than 20 hours.
The aim of Booker’s marathon address is to “disrupt” the Senate because the US is “in crisis.”
He has said he will carry on speaking “as long as I am physically able.”
Because his speech is not blocking a nomination or legislation, it is not technically a filibuster.
You can watch a live stream of his address below.
“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,” the New Jersey senator said.
“These are not normal times in America. And they should not be treated as such in the United States Senate.”
In a message on social media, which Booker scheduled to be posted during his speech, he said he was doing his job to “lift the voices of Americans who are being harmed by President Trump.”
As part of his marathon dismantling of the actions of Donald Trump and his ‘first buddy’ Elon Musk, Booker mentioned rumoured cuts to Medicaid and benefits payments by congressional Republicans, the Independent reports.
Musk has been placed in charge of the department for government efficiency, called DOGE, and is aiming to make trillions of dollars of savings on so-called government waste.
Although Republicans have claimed this will focus on cutting fraud and waste, it has not yet been specified which programs and departments will have spending cuts.
“It is maddening in this country to create greater and greater health care crisis and for us not to solve it but to battle back and forth between trying to make incremental changes or to tear it all down with no plan to make it better, leaving more Americans suffering,” Booker said.
Recently, Musk has hit out at the US’s Social Security program, which is America’s federal benefits program.
The billionaire described Social Security as the “biggest Ponzi scheme of all time” in an interview with Joe Rogan last month.
A couple of weeks later, he then told Fox News: “The waste and fraud in entitlement spending, which is most of the federal spending, is entitlements, so that’s the big one to eliminate.”
Related: Tim Walz fires back after being labelled an ‘evil creep’ by Musk