Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy

by Jamie Raskin

Overview

A #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER.

In this searing memoir, Congressman Jamie Raskin tells the story of the forty-five days at the start of 2021 that permanently changed his life—and his family’s—as he confronted the painful loss of his son to suicide, lived through the violent insurrection in our nation’s Capitol, and led the impeachment effort to hold President Trump accountable for inciting the political violence. 

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. Capitol hoping to hand four more years of power to President Donald Trump. 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. 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. 

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. And yet, on January 6, he faced the one thing he had failed to anticipate: mass political violence designed to block Biden’s election. 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. 

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. 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. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780063209794
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	01/03/2023
Pages:	448
Sales rank:	29,846
Product dimensions:	7.80(w) x 5.20(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Congressman Jamie Raskin has proudly represented Maryland’s 8th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives since 2017. Prior to his time in Congress, Raskin was a three-term State Senator in Maryland and the Senate Majority Whip. He was also a professor of constitutional law at American University’s Washington College of Law for more than 25 years. He has authored several books, including the Washington Post bestseller Overruling Democracy: The Supreme Court versus the American People and the highly acclaimed We the Students: Supreme Court Cases For and About America’s Students. Congressman Raskin is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School and a former Editor of the Harvard Law Review. He and his wife Sarah live in Takoma Park.

Table of Contents

Preface xi

Prologue: Democracy Winter 1

Part I 35

Chapter 1 Democracy Summer 37

Chapter 2 A Sea of Troubles 65

Chapter 3 The Trolley Problem 95

Part II 107

Chapter 4 "There Is a North" 109

Chapter 5 Complete the Count 141

Chapter 6 Midnight Meditations and Onwellian Preparations 165

Chapter 7 "This Is About the Future of Democracy" 183

Chapter 8 An All-American Defense of Democracy 217

Chapter 9 Reverse Uno 255

Chapter 10 Writing Trump 275

Part III 289

Chapter 11 Violence v. Democracy: The January Exception 291

Chapter 12 Is This America? Trump on Trial 319

Chapter 13 Spaghetti on the Wall 357

Chapter 14 Witnesses to Insurrection 371

Epilogue 399

Acknowledgments 425

Editorial Reviews

[An] extraordinary new memoir of an extraordinary year…It is hard to think of an American political figure for whom the past year brought stranger crosswinds: a tornado collision of chilling loss and rising moral leadership.” — Vogue

“Unthinkable is not a work of emotional austerity; rather, it is an unburdening, a howl, a devotional. The grief is nightmarish, but the love that suffuses the text is even more powerful—the love for family and a lost child, as well as a love for a fragile democracy. It takes its greatest inspiration from the idealism of Raskin’s son.” — David Remnick, The New Yorker

“[Congressman Raskin] is, in addition to everything else, a really good writer. The blow-by-blow of January 6 is riveting. The passages about his son, and his own pain, are sometimes searing.” — New Republic

“[In Unthinkable] Congressman Jamie Raskin, D-Md., is on a journey — moving through layers of excruciating trauma and grief…The journey to make sense of Tommy's death and honor his life has added a new fuel for Raskin to right the wrongs of the Jan. 6 attack.” — NPR

From the Publisher

Unthinkable is not a work of emotional austerity; rather, it is an unburdening, a howl, a devotional. The grief is nightmarish, but the love that suffuses the text is even more powerful—the love for family and a lost child, as well as a love for a fragile democracy. It takes its greatest inspiration from the idealism of Raskin’s son.

David Remnick

[In Unthinkable] Congressman Jamie Raskin, D-Md., is on a journey — moving through layers of excruciating trauma and grief…The journey to make sense of Tommy's death and honor his life has added a new fuel for Raskin to right the wrongs of the Jan. 6 attack.

NPR

[Congressman Raskin] is, in addition to everything else, a really good writer. The blow-by-blow of January 6 is riveting. The passages about his son, and his own pain, are sometimes searing.

New Republic

[An] extraordinary new memoir of an extraordinary year…It is hard to think of an American political figure for whom the past year brought stranger crosswinds: a tornado collision of chilling loss and rising moral leadership.

Vogue

2022-01-06
The constitutional lawyer and U.S. Representative considers the events of Jan. 6, 2021, and the lawless administration that fomented them.

“How did we end up here, with fascists trashing our Capitol Building and killing people?” asks Raskin, who led the House’s second impeachment proceedings against the former president. His narrative has three strands. The first is personal looking out on the political, recounting the experiences of his father, one of John Kennedy’s “best and brightest,” who left government in opposition to the nuclear arms race. More effective, and saddening, is the second: the suicide of his son, beset by anxiety and depression, who was buried on Jan. 5. The following day brought “strategic violence by extremist elements outside the Capitol…fusing with manipulative tactics inside the Capitol to coerce Vice President Pence and Congress to overthrow the electoral votes in the states and force us into a contingent election.” Raskin makes two related things eminently clear. First, he and other House leaders were prepared for the Republicans’ coercive ploy, albeit surprised that Pence, “despite lots of genuflecting to the disseminators of the Big Lie,” did the right thing. What they were not prepared for, he writes, was an armed mob storming the Capitol and pursuing elected officials through its corridors. For this, Raskin assigns a measure of self-blame, since Alexander Hamilton warned of just such a possibility in the first of the Federalist Papers, and the former president had recruited “thousands of the…‘very fine’ people he had seen marching on the fascist side of the street in 2017 in Charlottesville” to stage his insurrection. Raskin’s detailed account of the second impeachment proceedings goes on at great but not burdensome length, joining Adam Schiff’s Midnight in Washington as a close study in how such matters work.

A brilliant preface, one might guess, to further legal actions against the disgraced former president for his crimes.

Kirkus Reviews