In a political season full of theatrics, Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) has emerged once again as Capitol Hill’s most dramatically underwhelming performer. After delivering an excruciating 25-hour anti-Trump speech on the Senate floor from March 31 into April 1—a performance that could charitably be called a “fake filibuster”—Booker is now attempting to cash in with a book.
Titled “Stand” (perhaps the opposite of his Capitol Hill sit-in with Rep. Hakeem Jeffries), the upcoming release is being pitched as a monument to resistance and a call to action for preserving democracy. Or at least, that’s how the publishers at St. Martin’s Press and Macmillan are spinning it.
🚨NEW: Senator Cory Booker is releasing a new book, capitalizing on his 25-hour anti-Trump speech from earlier this year.
‘Stand’ will be published November 11, St. Martin’s Press announced today. pic.twitter.com/wx9ythRkgu
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) May 28, 2025
According to the publisher’s overwrought synopsis, Booker’s hours-long floor speech was “remarkable,” painting him as an eloquent orator standing against “the Trump administration’s relentless challenges to civil liberties, government institutions, the rule of law, and our nation’s international standing.” But critics on both sides of the aisle were mostly wondering the same thing: Did anyone actually hear it?
Despite the stunt spanning two calendar months, it received little media traction and virtually no organic public attention. Even Booker’s supporters were forced to admit that a 25-hour soliloquy in a Republican-controlled Senate wasn’t going to move any legislative needles—or headlines.
“Sen. Cory Booker has expanded upon his historic Senate floor speech from last month into an upcoming book.”
The title: “Stand.”
It will come out in November. https://t.co/1rLy8aHPtd
— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) May 28, 2025
Booker had previously called the filibuster an “abuse of power” in 2022. But in 2025, it suddenly became an “act of defiance.”
The book, due out this November, is being described as a follow-up to the speech—because apparently, the actual speech wasn’t enough. The promotional blurb doesn’t hold back in glorifying Booker’s solo marathon, calling it a continuation of the civil rights tradition and urging readers not to “surrender to cynicism.”
“Now is the time to defiantly declare like our ancestors before us: I too stand for America,” it reads.
That line may draw polite applause from Booker’s fellow progressives, but to others, it comes across as peak Booker—full of lofty ambition, absent of measurable impact.
Booker’s flair for self-dramatization isn’t new. His infamous “Spartacus moment” during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings in 2018 was met with widespread ridicule and set the tone for his brand of earnest overacting. In “Stand,” we’re likely to see more of the same—long on rhetoric, short on results.
And the irony of naming his book “Stand” after staging a Capitol steps sit-in with Hakeem Jeffries isn’t lost on anyone. Nor is the fact that while Booker writes about civil liberties being under siege, Democrats control none of the three branches of government. The gestures feel more symbolic than strategic—and the audience has noticed.
