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'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist 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 need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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