Raskin counters by asking, “How can the president claim that free speech gives him the right to destroy our constitutional democracy, steal our election, and make a mockery out of everyone else’s free speech?” Item: Trump’s defenders claim the First Amendment shields him from consequences after his incendiary speech to his mob on the Mall. Ta-da! Coup! Trump retakes the Oval Office! This would have pushed Biden’s Electoral College tally below 270 and triggered a “contingent election” in the House. The insurrection was aimed to force Pence to repudiate his constitutional restrictions by rejecting the electoral votes from Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania. Make no mistake! January 6 was no last-minute, bumbling clown act. Jim Jordan, and the most extreme elements of the GOP House and Senate conferences.” They are all under intense investigation. The third was the “innermost ring of the coup that Trump operated, likely along with Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, Rudy Giuliani, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Michael Flynn, Sen. After arrests, this group faces far more serious charges. The second ring was the “militarized insurrection ring,” Proud Boys, Three Percenters, Oath Keepers, Ku Kluxers, private militias, neo-Nazis, et al., organized, armed, and primed to injure and even kill members of Congress and Vice President Pence. Hundreds of these Trump minions have been charged with various offenses. To analyze this attempted power grab, Raskin describes “three essential rings of activity.” The first was “the riot ring, containing multitudes of protesters turned rioters,” those thousands of mostly aimless MAGA acolytes who stormed the Capitol, skirmished with police, and finally were routed by the National Guard. Then, when the fire alarms go off, he does nothing but sit back, encourage the mob to continue its arson, and watch on TV, with unmitigated glee and delight, as the fire spreads.”Īnd there’s this: Was the January 6 assault on the Capitol and Congress merely a petulant tantrum, or was it an attempted coup that failed to secure another term for Trump after he lost to Joe Biden? Raskin argues that Trump and his cronies failed at a coup. Raskin casts Trump not as a homicidal sheriff, but as a firebug fire chief: “Trump was the town fire chief, who is paid to put out fires, but who instead sends a mob to set the theater on fire.
president plans and launches an insurrection against the government, what happens to our constitutional democracy? In the aftermath of the 1964 murders in Mississippi of three civil rights volunteers, Bob Moses - visionary leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee - had posed this question: If the county sheriff does the murder, then what happens to justice?Ĭonsidering Trump’s role in the January 6 debacle, Raskin reframes Moses’ question: If the U.S. Raskin reaches into history for this parallel. Deeply personal, his complicated book is a jumble of sorrow, affection fury, political reporting, and lessons in the law, with his family in mourning and his nation in shock. He takes us from his family’s private tragedy in Takoma Park to the public eruption on Capitol Hill. Raskin’s anguish at Tommy’s death mixes with his anger at Trump and his gang. Who better than a constitutional professor to take on a constitutional criminal, Donald J. Congress in 2017, he now finds himself at the epicenter of the House Select Committee’s investigation into the January 6 Capitol insurrection. 13, 2021, as 43 GOP senators refuse to convict President Trump following his second impeachment.Īfter 25 years of teaching constitutional law at American University, Raskin - a liberal Democrat - won a seat in the Maryland Senate from Montgomery County in 2007.
It then continues through the seditious riot on Capitol Hill just a week later and ends on Feb. Jamie Raskin’s 25-year-old son, Tommy, commits suicide. A father’s elegy and free-swinging political chronicle, “Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy” begins on Dec.
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