A Tale of Twin Horrors

January 9, 2022 Michael Olesker

Rep. Jamie Raskin: "Trump and his team have done everything they can to make the public cynical about elections generally. We have to explain to people that that is an authoritarian tactic." (File Photo)

Rep. Jamie Raskin’s new book, “Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth and the Trials of American Democracy” (Harper), is powerful stuff. Having lost his son to the tragedy of suicide, Raskin tried to save America from Donald Trump.

It’s an ongoing struggle. The book arrives at the one-year anniversary of Jan. 6, 2021, when rioters savagely attacked the U.S. Capitol and tried to erase Joe Biden’s presidential victory.

Also, the book arrives as the Democrats finally seem fully aroused about last January’s insurrection. Last week, Biden gave the speech of his life, charging that Trump and his bully boys held “a dagger at the throat of democracy.”

But that speech was only part of the delayed Democratic reaction.

Attorney General Merrick Garland finally stepped forward to attempt assurance that his Justice Department hasn’t gone to sleep over last year’s rioting. Maybe he means it. And the House special committee investigating Jan. 6 alerted the big-mouth Sean Hannity that they’re after him.

Yes, Hannity has full First Amendment privileges to spew his invective over Fox News. Nobody’s disputing that, no matter how badly he butchers the truth, or hides it, night after night. But Hannity declared himself something beyond a journalist when it comes to Trump and Jan. 6.

He made himself a participant, a player and, maybe, a co-conspirator.

So finally, there seems to be some visible Democratic response to the horror of that Jan. 6 mob scene. And in the new book by Raskin, who represents Maryland’s 8th congressional district, we’re face to face with twin horrors.

It’s Raskin who finds his son Tommy, a brilliant Harvard law student who suffers from clinical depression. He finds him when it’s too late, when his son has taken his own life on New Year’s Eve, 2020.

Raskin tells us, in heartbreaking detail, how he had to telephone his wife and daughters to break the news, and how he then found himself “rocking back and forth, sobbing.

“All I could say,” Raskin recounts, was, “my boy, my dear Tommy. My boy, my dear boy. I have lost my boy. My life is over. My life is over. I have lost my Tommy, I have lost my son.”

Seven days later, though, came the second trauma. Returning to Capitol Hill to help certify the 2020 presidential election results, Raskin is there to give us an insider’s account of the Jan. 6 attack.

Here are the nation’s political leaders, fearing for their lives, wondering if they can escape the mob. Here are Raskin’s daughter Tabitha and son-in-law Hank, visiting the Capitol building that day to offer moral support to Raskin. They’re forced to hide behind a barricaded door in Rep. Steny Hoyer’s office as the mob pounds away.

On the House floor, Raskin writes, “Someone gets up and tells us to put on ‘your gas masks.’ I didn’t even know we had gas masks. But there they are, under our seats, wrapped in plastic.”

And yet, these twin traumas – the suicide, the mob’s attack – are only prologue. It’s Raskin, the former constitutional law professor, who’s called upon to lead the impeachment effort against Donald Trump for inciting the violence.

The Trump story is still being told. Last week offered some tantalizing hints of details to follow. Until then, we have this remarkable book. It will make your heart ache for a family’s lost son, but give you an intimate look into one of the brightest minds in the U.S. Congress, and one of the darkest hours in American history.

A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books. His most recent, “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age,” was reissued in paperback by the Johns Hopkins.