It was the day when the electoral votes of the 2020 presidential election would be counted. He spent a few days nearly catatonic, “rocking back and forth like a baby.” Then, on January 6, he rode down to the Capitol to try to work. “After searching frantically for my phone-which I had thrown high in the air when I came upon the scene-after dialing 911 and screaming after I tried to resuscitate him and get him to breathe by pressing repeatedly on his hard, beautiful chest…I floated through the house and under the grey winter sky, thinking perhaps I was gone forever, too,” Raskin writes in Unthinkable, his extraordinary new memoir of an extraordinary year. For Raskin and his wife and their two other children, this was the start of a nightmare. The previous Thursday, after preparing a breakfast smoothie, he had gone to the room where his 25-year-old son, Tommy, was staying while remotely attending Harvard Law School and had found him dead, a victim of suicide. Raskin, a Democrat who represents Maryland’s Eighth District, was entering his fifth year in Congress, having first been elected on the same night as Donald Trump.
Jamie raskin new book full#
At turns, a moving story of a father coping with his pain and a revealing examination of holding President Trump accountable for the violence he fomented, this book is a vital reminder of the ongoing struggle for the soul of American democracy and the perseverance that our Constitution demands from us all.In the history of workweeks that start badly, few can compete with the one Representative Jamie Raskin began on January 6, 2021, his first full morning back in the Capitol since discovering the corpse of his son six days before.
Through it all, he reckons with the loss of his brilliant, remarkable son, a Harvard Law student whose values and memory continually inspired the Congressman to confront the dark impulses unleashed by Donald Trump. With an inside account of leading the team prosecuting President Trump in the Senate, Congressman Raskin shares never before told stories of just how close we came to losing our democracy that fateful day and lays out the methodical prosecution that convinced Democrats and Republicans alike of Trump’s responsibility for inciting insurrectionary violence against our government. And yet, on January 6, he faced the one thing he had failed to anticipate: mass political violence designed to block Biden’s election. Now for the first time, Congressman Raskin discusses this unimaginable convergence of personal and public trauma, detailing how the painful loss of his son and the power of Tommy’s convictions fueled the Congressman’s work in the aftermath of modern democracy’s darkest day. Going inside Congress on January 6, he recounts the horror of that day, a day that he and other Democrats had spent months preparing for under the correct assumption that they would encounter an attempted electoral coup-not against a President but for one.
Jamie raskin new book trial#
Together this nine-member team of House impeachment managers riveted a nation still in anguish, putting on an unprecedented Senate trial that produced the most bipartisan Presidential impeachment vote in American history. As our reeling nation mourned the deaths of numerous people and lamented the injuries of more than 140 police officers hurt in the attack, Congressman Raskin, a Constitutional law professor, was called upon to put aside his overwhelming grief-both personal and professional-and lead the impeachment effort against President Trump for inciting the violence. Capitol hoping to hand four more years of power to President Donald Trump. On December 31, 2020, Tommy Raskin, the only son of Maryland Congressman Jamie Raskin, tragically took his own life after a long struggle with depression. Seven days later on January 6, Congressman Raskin returned to Congress to help certify the 2020 Presidential election results, when violent insurrectionists led by right wing extremist groups stormed the U.S.
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