The New Yorker Radio Hour - Congressman Jamie Raskin on Impeaching Donald Trump—Again

Episode Date: February 19, 2021

Tommy Raskin, a twenty-five-year-old law student, took his own life on New Year’s Eve, after a long battle against depression. His family laid him to rest on January 5th, and, the next day, his father went to the United States Capitol, where he serves in Congress. Representative Jamie Raskin, who represents Maryland’s Eighth District, had an enormous task ahead of him: he was mounting the defense of the Electoral College vote. When a violent mob incited by Donald Trump breached the building, Raskin’s life was in danger, along with the lives of his daughter and son-in-law, who had joined him that day for support. Just weeks later, when the House impeached Donald Trump for his role in inciting that insurrection, Raskin was the lead manager prosecuting the case. Raskin told David Remnick about the devastation of a suicide in the family, his condolence calls from President Biden and Vice-President Harris, and how he believed the entire Senate would unite to convict Donald Trump. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. January 6th, the day when mobs descended on the Capitol building in Washington will live very long in the memories of millions of Americans. For Jamie Raskin, that is especially the case. Raskin is a Democrat representing Maryland's 8th Congressional District. Just a week earlier, he had tragically lost his son, Tommy. a law student who suffered from depression and took his life on New Year's Eve.

The Raskin family laid Tommy to rest on the fifth. And on the sixth, Jamie Raskin went to the Capitol. One of his daughters and a son-in-law went with him for moral support because Raskin had a crucial job to do. He was defending the certification of the electoral college and the election of Joe Biden. That's the process that Donald Trump and his supporters just could not abide. and they wanted to stop it by any means necessary.

When the mob breached the building threatening violence on lawmakers, Raskin and his family were all in danger, along with so many others. When the House impeached Donald Trump for his role in inciting that insurrection, Jamie Raskin was the lead manager prosecuting the case. This trial is personal indeed for every senator, for every member of the House, every manager, all of our staff, the Capitol Police, the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Police, the National Guard, maintenance and custodial crews, the print journalists and TV people who were here,

and all of our families and friends. And I hope this trial reminds America how personal democracy is. And how personal is the loss of democracy, too. I reached Jamie Raskin last week as he was traveling with his family. Now, Congressman, this moment is, I have to think the first moment you've had to breathe since so much, and I have to ask you, how do you begin to process all this? Well, I'll probably spend the rest of my life trying to process the last couple of months because some, you know, very profound and terrible things have happened to our family. but we've also been the beneficiary of a lot of love and a lot of solidarity. And I got to participate in an extraordinary effort to defend American constitutional democracy against the tyranny of Donald Trump and the violent insurrection that he unleashed against us.

Do you feel that you succeeded? Well, yeah, I do. we, of course, impeached him in the House of Representatives. So he is a now twice-impeached president for his crimes against the union, his high crimes against the union. And we received 57 votes in the Senate in the most bipartisan presidential impeachment conviction vote in the history of the United States. That was 57 to 43.

We won seven Republicans over as well. as all of the Democrats. But the reason I consider it a success is because we irrefutably convicted the president in the court of public opinion. We irrefutably convicted him in the court of history. And he will increasingly become an absolute pariah. My mistake was to think that we were going to win this thing 100 to 0. I always thought it was more likely that we would win 100 to 0 than 67 to 33. when people said to me, you know, where you can get the 17 Republican votes? I said, I'm not going for 17 Republican votes. We're going for 100 votes. We want the evidence to be so overwhelming and unrefuted and irrefutable that everybody says there's nothing else that can be done. But we underestimated the moral and political cowardice of a lot of people in the Republican Party who are just accepting the autocratic bullying of Donald Trump. It's a pretty shocking thing. Congressman, you and your family suffered a loss that's unspeakable, unimaginable, and everyone, all of my colleagues, and I'm sure all the listeners send their deepest condolences,

I don't know how you summoned the will to do what you did. How did you manage to not just get out of bed, but move forward and appear on the public stage and summon the intelligence and all that's necessary to perform as you did, if I can use that word, in the well of the Senate, and make your case and organize the prosecution. How did you do it? How did you manage?

Well, you've got to read some of my son, Tommy Raskin's writings and talk to some of the people who know Tommy. He was just the most magnificent young man. He had a perfect heart and a perfect soul and an extraordinary mind. And he was profoundly committed to democracy and everything we might be able to create through a democracy, a world that values each person and gives each person the opportunity to flourish and to excel and shine. So I had my son with me in my heart in my chest the entire time. I felt him and I, of course, was surrounded by this magnificent team of managers, all of whom I'm very close to.

But your son was speaking to you in some sense. Well, yeah, I mean, I, you know, not in any supernatural sense, but I felt very much his presence. and his strength and his beliefs. And, you know, Tommy was someone who was 10,000 years ahead of his time in terms of his thinking. I mean, really, he had just exceptional visionary qualities that everybody recognized around him. but he felt every bit of pain and hardship and injustice in the world.

It was with him. And so Donald Trump, to me, represents everything antithetical to strong democracy and human rights and the civilizing movements of our time. And I hope that

the trial will be remembered is a time when we told the truth about what Donald Trump did to America. How close were we to losing American democracy? Very close. Very close. And, you know, Mike Pence really was a critical actor that night. You know, I was working with the team of people, including Joe Neguse, getting ready for Wednesday, January 6th, because we had anticipated all of the extreme parliamentary tactics that were being used to try to thwart the counting of the electoral college votes, try to nullify the electors from swing states that went for Biden, including Pennsylvania and Georgia and Arizona. We saw all that stuff coming. We knew that was going to happen.

And it really did come down to, in the morning, Trump told Pence, you're going to go down in history as a patriot or a pussy. But if Pence had given in, just like if Raffensberger had given in in Georgia or these other Republican legislative leaders had given in in different states, we could be in a very different situation. If Pence had said, we'll send three or four states back. There's just too much confusion because of what Trump has done. And it's foggy. And now there's no majority in electoral college. We kick it over to a contingent election in the House, at that point, the Republicans would have won because it's there a vote, one, one vote, one state rather than one vote, one member. And they had a majority in the state

delegations. And so Trump, you know, Trump was saying it's not going to take much for Pence to give us the election. Then Trump could have come in and say, we've won, I'm going to impose martial law because of all this chaos that he had unleashed on us. I think we were very close. to having a coup, or what the political scientists call, a self-coup in the country. Congressman Jamie Raskin, the lead manager in the second impeachment of Donald Trump. We'll continue in a moment.

Congressman, has President Biden reached out to you? President Biden very kindly called Sarah and me and our daughters after we lost time of me. So we spoke to him then. What was that conversation like? Whoa, he was very powerful. He obviously has experienced a lot of loss of intimate family. I mean, his son, Boe, and he's lost, I mean, you know, it's been a nightmare for him.

And so he connects very strongly with people who are going through that kind of grief and that kind of agony. And we found it enormously strong. soothing and reassuring to hear from him. And I could not be happier that he is the president that we have at a time of such grief and devastation in the country because of COVID-19 and all of the other plagues that have been unleashed upon us during the course of the Trump presidency. You know, Joe Biden really leads from the heart. And we heard from also Vice President Kamala Harris, who was equally beautiful. and tender in her comments to us.

So it meant a lot to our daughters, and it meant a lot to Sarah and me to hear from the president in that way. And he called me after the first day of the trial, and he said, you're a great lawyer, but you're an even better father, and I'll never forget that. Extraordinary.

Congressman, the other day, President Biden said he was tired of talking about Trump. In fact, he tried to avoid using his name. I know how he feels. I agree completely. You know, people who live in authoritarian societies to say that's what it's like to have a fascist, authoritarian demigod kind of leader. You know, it violates every boundary that you have between what's public and what's private. It inhabits every nook and cranny of your existence. And Donald Trump, you know, demands that kind of totalitarian attention and it's been exhausting for the country for four years and it would be great if we could

forget about him. Unfortunately, we can't because of, you know, 10 missing votes in the Senate. We can't forget about him. It's not over this former president, this disgraced, twice impeached president is going to be the subject of criminal prosecutions for the rest of his natural days civil litigation, class action suits, KK Act civil prosecutions. You sound pretty confident that he'll be, in a sense, litigated into oblivion. I think that his victims are not going to let it rest. Congressman, what rest, what ease do you and your family anticipate in the weeks to come, or is the work just too relentless?

What do you afford yourself? I mean, I've been quite exhausted by the last several weeks, and so we're getting some rest, and we're staying together, and we're with other family, and we're with other friends, and we're trying to read through the thousands of letters we've gotten at different points in this sequence of events. But I'm not going anywhere. I mean, this is all of our historical assignment to defend American democracy. And it's a beautiful struggle and it's an urgent struggle.

It's an imperative. And so I plan to be right there with my colleagues and right there with the great movements of our time, defending an American democracy that really will be a model to the world of how, you create a multiracial, multi-ethnic, multicultural, constitutional democracy that works. And that's threatening to a lot of people. I heard that one of your colleagues in the House said to you something that just astonished me. She said, you have to respect Tommy's decision. What did she mean by that?

I don't know. I mean, I don't know. Obviously, we have to accept his decision. He wrote us a note on that day, which said, please forgive me my illness won today, look after each other, the animals and the global poor for me, all my love, Tommy. And I mean, we miss him every second, you know. But, you know, his illness was very painful, extraordinarily. painful. I mean, you know, we've asked doctors what it's like and, you know, they, they just,

they say for people in it, it is, it's just, you see no way out. It's just blindingly painful. And so our daughter, Tabith, has said something that was pretty profound because she said, Tommy was above all a utilitarian. He wanted to maximize the happiness and the well-being and the good for the most number of people and animals and reduce the pain and suffering. And she said, so either he looked at it and he said that our pain and suffering in response to his leaving us was less than his pain and suffering going through this because he knew for us it would be spread out among many, many people in our family and friends and even in the rest of the world now. She said, so either he made that basic utilitarian judgment, or she said he committed the first

selfish act of his life. Congressman Raskin, thank you so much. Thank you for having me all. Jamie Raskin of Maryland. I spoke with him last week. You can find the Tommy Raskin Memorial Fund online. And if you're having thoughts of suicide yourself or one of your loved ones is, please, Ask for help.

The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is at 800273 Talk. 800273 Talk. I'm David Remnick, and that's it for us this week. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time. This is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado.

This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Aave Carrillo, Riannon Corby, Callalia, David Krasnow, Caroline Lester, Gauphin and Putubuele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Alison McAdam, Mengfei Chen, and Emily Mann. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.