October 30, 2020

Investigating Trump: How America Survives the Coming Constitutional Firestorm

Alex Brandon/AP

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We are days out from what could be the most high-stakes election of our lifetimes. If Trump loses, will he go quietly? Which parts of the constitution will he trample on the way out? If Trump wins, how much more can American institutions take—and what recourse will Congress have to hold him to account?

I got the chance this week to pose all these questions and more to a real expert on this stuff, Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, during a special Mother Jones live event this week. Early in his career, Raskin was an assistant attorney general in Massachusetts and he served as general counsel of Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition. (One piece of trivia: Raskin once represented Ross Perot when he was frozen out of the 1996 presidential debates.) He’s a member of the judiciary and oversight committees, where he has investigated the Trump administration’s politicization of the census, white supremacist infiltration of law enforcement, and the mistreatment of immigrants in for-profit detention centers.

Raskin didn’t hold back during our conversation about how to heal the country in the coming months, describing the Republican Party as “a mass religious cult surrounding an organized crime family.” He noted: “A failed state, that’s where we are right now. A failed state is one that doesn’t protect the population against disease, against random gun violence, against people getting into office and using it as an instrument of money-making and private corruption. We’ve become a banana republic under this guy.”

We’re bringing you my (lightly edited) conversation about Raskin’s democratic fixes and the long walk back to sanity for today’s bonus episode of the Mother Jones Podcast. Take a listen below.

And you can re-watch the full livestream here:

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

payment methods

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