Investigating Trump: How America Survives the Coming Constitutional Firestorm

Alex Brandon/AP

For indispensable reporting on the coronavirus crisis, the election, and more, subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily newsletter.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: