Mr. Booker Goes to Washington—and delivers a must-see cultural moment

With his historic speech, the NJ senator embraced a Hollywood trope

Severance just concluded its second spellbinding season, Sunday brings us the much-anticipated finale of The White Lotus third installment, and with Emmys season around the corner there’s suddenly a flood of important shows for everyone to watch and dissect at length.

But it was Sen. Cory Booker who gave us the must-watch TV moment of 2025 so far, with a historic filibuster-that-was-not-technically-a-filibuster on the Senate floor. For 25 hours and four minutes, the senator from New Jersey delivered a speech railing against Donald Trump and defending democracy in stark terms.

Booker’s feat was a remarkable display of physical and mental stamina that felt like a David Blaine stunt, a Jerry Lewis telethon, and a Frank Capra film rolled into a single inspiring spectacle. And while it perhaps did nothing to substantively stop Trump, it offered a much-needed ray of hope to Democrats who, since November, have been desperate for their party do something—literally anything—to resist the MAGA agenda.

It was especially powerful to see Booker, a Black man, topple a record that was made 68 years ago by the ardent segregationist Strom Thurmond, who filibustered for 24 hours and 18 minutes against the Civil Rights Act of 1957. (It passed anyway.)

As it became clear Booker was about to make history Tuesday night, he acknowledged being driven by a desire to outdo Thurmond, a notorious racist (and quite possibly a rapist) who still has a Senate room named after him. “I’m not here, though, because of his speech. I’m here despite his speech. I’m here because—as powerful as he was—the people were more powerful,” he said. (Later, Booker told Rachel Maddow It “just really irked me” that the record had been set by “someone who was trying to stop people like me from being in the Senate.”)

Booker was consciously trying to rewrite American political history with his oratorical feat. But he was also shrewdly summoning a bit of Hollywood magic on the Senate floor.

In terms of ambition, idealism, and sheer patriotic fervor, Booker’s 25-hour marathon performance evoked nothing so much as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Frank Capra’s 1939 classic. Jimmy Stewart Jefferson Smith, an idealistic everyman (played by Jimmy Stewart) who is appointed to fill a vacant senate seat by crooked politicians who assume he’ll be easy to control. Instead, Smith stages a dramatic filibuster condemning corruption and greed in Washington D.C. After about 25 hours of grandstanding, he collapses into a pile of letters from angry constituents.

Initially denounced by many Washington insiders because of its jaded depiction of career politicians, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is now universally regarded as an earnest celebration of American democracy and the triumph of common decency over institutional corruption. Pop culture depictions of the Senate—from Otto Preminger’s Advise & Consent to Miss Sloane and Fellow Travelers—tend to emphasize corruption and backroom dealing. But the filibuster is a way to counter that skepticism with a bit of Capra-esque optimism.

Mr. Smith helped turn the filibuster into a Hollywood trope, a storytelling device screenwriters use to remind us of the difference a single person (outfitted with some comfortable shoes) can make in the face of entrenched opposition. (Conveniently, it also provides actors with the kind of juicy, scenery-chewing monologues they love.)

With all due respect to the time that Ted Cruz devoted to reading from the epic poem Green Eggs and Ham in an effort to keep poor people from getting healthcare, the device has been deployed more effectively—and to greater emotional effect—on screen than in real life.

In Parks and Recreation, city councilor Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler) leaves her husband’s roller skating birthday party to filibuster for voting rights—while her nemesis tries to break her with margaritas. In a 2015 episode of Scandal inspired by Texas Sen. Wendy Davis—which also featured Kerry Washington’s Olivia Pope getting an abortion—First Lady-turned Senator Mellie Grant (Bellamy Young) filibusters in support of Planned Parenthood and manages to squeeze in a bathroom break with help from Olivia. (The most implausible part of it all: Mellie is a Republican!)

If Booker was suffering as much as Jefferson Smith—or Mellie Grant or Leslie Knope did—he hardly let on Tuesday night. By the end of his day-long disquisition, he seemed tired and garbled a word here and there, but was generally sharper than most of us are at 10:30 a.m. after two strong cups of coffee and a bowl of Wheaties. He later said he prepared by fasting all weekend and foregoing water for several days. Unlike Cruz with his Dr. Seuss or Thurmond, who recited various documents and peed in a trashcan stashed in a nearby cloak room, Booker stayed on message; vehemently against the Trump agenda, all the way up until the moment he yielded by saying: “Let’s get in good trouble.”

On a day that also featured a pivotal election in Wisconsin, he garnered attention that would have otherwise been given to Elon Musk’s shenanigans. Booker closed in on the record at 7:18 ET, before polls in Wisconsin had closed, when cable news would have otherwise been full of talking heads in rampant speculation mode. Instead, CNN and MSNBC were both covering Booker’s speech live, complete with timers anticipating the record-break (Fox, of course, skipped it.)

His speech was an even bigger draw on social media: On TikTok live, it garnered more than 350 million likes. More than 100,000 people watched it all unfold on Booker’s YouTube channel, with thousands more on other livestreams. And because everyone always wonders about these things, searches for “Did Cory Booker go to the bathroom?” surged on Google.)

Unlike Thurmond back in 1957, Booker wasn’t trying to block a specific piece of legislation with his pseudo-filibuster. But he accomplished something that, in this chaotic news cycle, is just as necessary: he managed to grab the spotlight for a few precious, hope-filled hours.

Meredith Blake is the Culture columnist for The Contrarian