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

Tyrants tell stories only about themselves because history for them begins and ends with their own insatiable appetites.

If a person can grow through unthinkable trauma and loss, perhaps a nation may, too.

Memory requires active engagement with the complexities of the past. It is not an unthinking or passive process, like breathing or (for most people) sleeping. I have found that good memory, like good history, requires disciplined and focused attention, an honest effort to overcome one's perceptual and cognitive biases, and sustained effort.

As I told the senators, this trial was not about Donald Trump, for the whole world knew exactly who he was and what he stood for. The trial was about who we are.

Attention must be paid to the mundane details. This is how authoritarianism will infiltrate your society and control your life, one little aggression at a time.

Too many radicals love humanity in the abstract but don’t like people concretely, while too many conservatives like the people in their group, but don’t care about anybody else and can’t stand humanity generally. We could take the best from both the radicals and conservatives and show love for everybody, or we could take the worst from both and just hate everyone, and that’s Donald Trump for you.

The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.

have learned that trauma can steal everything from you that is most precious and rip joy right out of your life. But, paradoxically, it can also make you stronger and wiser, and connect you more deeply to other people than you ever imagined by enabling you to touch their misfortunes and integrate their losses and pain with your own. If a person can grow through unthinkable trauma and loss, perhaps a nation may, too. If you are one of millions of Americans who have suffered, in these hard days of plague, violence, and climate emergency, a trauma and rupture like the ones we have experienced in our family, I bid you and your family deep healing and recovery for the battles

I feel no fear. I have felt no fear today at all, for we have lost our Tommy Raskin, and the very worst thing that ever could have happened to us has already happened.

if destruction were ever to come to America, it would come not from abroad, from a “transatlantic military giant,” but from within, specifically the vigilante forces of racist mob violence that target the press, innocent people, and democracy itself.

fascism is not a fixed ideological system but rather a strategy for taking and holding power.

Hannah was wondering how it made the man’s kids feel, and she was outraged that Trump could lure people into this cauldron of violent bloodshed and then skip away from it all, refusing to testify and disclaiming any responsibility.

Likewise at the impeachment: no level of brilliant legal persuasion and no thick body of precedent would move a single Republican senator unless and until we shocked their consciences and woke up their human feelings to the meaning of the violence that had entered our House. This was why I told Speaker Pelosi in our very first conversation over this trial that we would set about to create a meticulous video presentation of the facts that would be riveting and unforgettable.

was experienced by my fearless constituent in Silver Spring, Harry Dunn, an African American officer for thirteen years on the Capitol Police force, whom I interviewed and who told me he had been subjected to what he called a “torrent” of racist abuse and

told Dar about the Amish-quilt theory someone had shared with me, which is that a family is not best seen as a sequence of generations that just leaves the oldest ones behind but, rather, as an Amish quilt in which each of us is represented by a square, whether we happen to be alive or not, and no one ever loses his or her place in the quilt, but the whole quilt just keeps getting bigger and more beautiful over time.

Trump is not like a citizen who falsely shouts fire in a crowded theater,” Larry said. “He’s like a fire chief who sends the mob to burn the theater down.

Hawley’s jack-in-the-box performance did not surprise me much, given that he had clearly been auditioning to become Trump’s successor as America’s top authoritarian populist.

Tommy always came down on the side of determinism, insisting that our actions are always the product of biological and environmental forces beyond the force field of free will.

Meanwhile, Hamilton, in Federalist No. 1, said the greatest danger to republics and the liberties of the people comes from political opportunists who begin as demagogues and end as tyrants and from the people who are encouraged to follow them. “President Trump may not know a lot about the Framers,” I told the Senate, “but they certainly knew a lot about him.

But I suspect that the idea of an American president inciting a violent attack on Congress as we conducted our constitutional duties was so utterly strange and unthinkable that it kept us from incorporating the possibility into our analysis and preparation.

whip up the crowd into a mob frenzy, but ends as a “tyrant,” a ruler who uses his power to oppress the people, Hamilton said.

have thus looked away from a very old threat suddenly staring us in the face again, the threat that Alexander Hamilton warned us of in Federalist No. 1: the threat of an opportunistic demagogue unleashing a violent mob and primitive impulses against the Constitution to override the political and constitutional infrastructure of representative democracy. The demagogue panders to the negative emotions of the crowd, pretending to be the champion of the people, only to wage war against the Constitution, the legal order, and the democratic political process, all of which belong to the people. He starts as a “demagogue,” one who knows how to whip up the crowd into a mob

The next person to approach was my friend Don Beyer from Virginia, a soulful and gentlemanly member of the House, a former American ambassador to Switzerland, a former lieutenant governor of Virginia, and an extremely successful new- and used-car salesman with Don Beyer Volvo. Like his fellow Virginian Thomas Jefferson, who said, “[I]n matters of style, swim with the current, but in matters of principle, stand like a rock,

wanted us to win the audience, to advance moral and political propositions about constitutional democracy that would lift America out of the mud and blood of the Trump nightmare.

American carnage was not actually what Trump was denouncing on his first day in the presidency; it was what he was promising. And he had delivered.

would pin Trump’s devious acts on him like medals of shame. But this trial ultimately would not be about him, for the whole world already knew who Donald Trump was and what he was capable of. This trial would be about us and who we were.

Tommy told me that “Too many radicals love humanity in the abstract but don’t like people concretely, while too many conservatives like the people in their group, but don’t care about anybody else and can’t stand humanity generally. We could take the best from both the radicals and conservatives and show love for everybody, or we could take the worst from both and just hate everyone, and that’s Donald Trump for you.

don’t know precisely when Tommy came to identify as antiwar, but it was very young. Once it dawned on him that violence was the essence of war, it overthrew his early naïve fascination with military history. I associate this change with his learning the basic facts of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and then about the horrors of the Holocaust. These historical events shook him and kept him up at night, sometimes giving him dreadful nightmares, and when he learned about genocidal violence against Native Americans, he stopped playing war and battle games altogether. After he learned what war actually was, and how it destroyed people’s lives and communities, his fascination with it ended—or, to be more precise, the character of his fascination changed. What he cared about was stopping wars and blocking militarism as a cultural and political obsession.

But its meaning was now revealed. This was American carnage.

byzantine architecture of the Electoral College.