Bronwen Maddox
[Applause] Everyone, a very warm welcome. Sorry to have kept you waiting one minute. We knew there was going to be a full house and there certainly is online, as well. Thank you very much indeed for joining us.
I’m delighted to be having this conversation with Jamie Raskin, who’s joined us on what is already a rather combative trip to London. A very warm welcome from Chatham House. He is the Representative from Maryland, one of the Congressman for – the Representative for Maryland’s 8th Congressional District. And he is the Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee that’s the most senior member from the minority party in the House and previously served as the Ranking Member on the Oversight Committee. And of all the things that we are likely to be discussing, a particular part of his biography leaps out. After the insurrection at the Capitol in January 2021, then Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, appointed him as the Lead Impeachment Manager in the second impeachment trial of Former President Donald Trump, and that is something that we might, indeed, talk about.
We are absolutely delighted to be here today to discuss things. He’s got some remarks first, and he’s given me his – a copy of his book, ‘Unthinkable.’ It begins, as all political books, should number one on the New York Times Bestseller, ‘Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy.’ It did occur to me another ‘T’ was hanging over this conversation, but we’ll come onto the President later. A very warm welcome to you, thank you for coming to Chatham House, we look forward to what you’ve got to say.
Congressman Jamie Raskin
Awesome. Can I go up there?
Bronwen Maddox
You go up there, yeah.
Congressman Jamie Raskin
Alright, thank you so much. Well, thank you for such a lovely introduction, Bronwen. I’m delighted to be here. I just wanted to say at the beginning, never having been here before, that ‘Chatham House Rules,’ and I’m very grateful to you, to Max Yoeli and Andrew Payne for this wonderful invitation. And I think I have a couple of my colleagues who have come with me on this CODEL, who are here, including Congressman Lou Correa from California, and I believe, Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett is in the house somewhere [applause].
So, I am especially grateful to be here after hearing Vice President JD Vance’s lecture at the Munich Security Conference on Valentine’s Day 2025, because it wasn’t clear to me that any American Politician would ever be invited back to speak in Europe after that one. So, I’m going to do my best today to try to answer his very instructive provocation and to defend and recover our historic alliance for democracy and freedom on Earth, and at least not to aggressively insult my hosts and the people and values of Europe.
Now, we just visited Churchill’s War Room, which was really extraordinary to see where the War Cabinet met. And Churchill observed during the war that ‘The beating heart of the Anglo-American Alliance is the hatred of dictatorship,’ but it took JD Vance no more than the first two minutes of his speech to whitewash the world’s top autocratic dictatorships and to train his rhetorical fire on our European allies. Proclaiming that the threat that worries him is ‘not Russia, it’s not China, it’s the threat from within,’ which he described as ‘Europe’s retreat from our historic free speech values.’
He then proceeded to give a completely distorted reading of the state of free speech in Europe, which is obviously galaxies away from the state of free speech in Russia or China, and if you have any doubts about that, just ask the family of Alexei Navalny, or the people of Tibet. But Vance’s bizarre framing of our security situation invited the world to ignore Vladimir Putin, the former KGB Chief behind the Curtain, and his bloody invasion of Ukraine, which threatens to destroy the rules-based international order that Europe and the democratic nations have fought to sustain since World War Two. His framing also invited the world to ignore the profound implications of Chinese attacks on freedom in Hong Kong, Xinjiang, in Tibet, and its raids on our security, technology and intellectual property.
The trivialisation of the stakes of our fight with the authoritarian world has a clear political logic to it and is part of a clear political programme. Vance, Trump and their MAGA allies are aggressively promoting far-right parties in Europe, like Alternative for Deutschland, Reform UK and Rassemblement National Français, the authoritarian partners in kindred spirits of Vladimir Putin. This new Authoritarian Internationale seeks to align the United States with Russia and China, against the UK, France, Germany and our real democratic allies in Europe.
Putin has used social media and his internet research agency to inject racial, ethnic and ideological poison into the political discourse of American democracy and other Western democracies. But Vice President Vance remains essentially passive and silent when it comes to defending America against Putin’s campaign of disinformation, destabilisation and sabotage. As long as Putin’s interference is designed to help MAGA, then Vance sees no evil and he hears no evil. He and Putin share a common enemy, strong, liberal democracy. The Kremlin’s propaganda and disinformation campaign has been so successful in our country that last Congress, two leading Republicans, one, the Chair of the House Intelligence Committee, and one, the Chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, expressed alarm about how the Kremlin’s talking points were regularly parroted and amplified on the floor of the House of Representatives by their own conference members in the MAGA wing of the Republican Party.
Vance has no time to spare on China’s crushing of political freedom and dissent in Hong Kong or among the Uighurs and the Tibetans. Here he follows President Trump, who calls China’s President Xi ‘smart, brilliant, everything perfect.’ In his first term, Trump assured President Xi that sending Uighurs to forced labour camps was ‘exactly the right thing to do,’ and that violently cracking down on pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong was ‘acting very responsibly.’ To Vance, China’s efforts to repress and torture its own people and its no holds barred approach to strategic competition against the United States are trivial and irrelevant matters, at least compared to the gigantic threat he perceives in the European democracies’ efforts to balance their traditional commitment to wide open political free speech, with their work to oppose the dangerous content proliferating online, including child pornography, business scams, frauds and rip-offs, and foreign propaganda and disinformation.
Even on their own terms, Vance’s key examples of Europe’s woke thought crimes against freedom are pathetically weak. His main evidence focuses on the controversial Romanian decision to postpone a presidential election in the face of massive Russian spending and social media subversion on behalf of an ultra-right neo-Nazi candidate. While Vance is delighted to lecture Romania about postponing its election, he proposes no plan to mobilise the free world against the Russian sabotage and propaganda which prompted the postponement in the first place, and which should be the main concern of the United States.
Moreover, when you think about it, it’s terribly odd that Vance even brought up the matter of cancelling a presidential election, given that’s exactly what Donald Trump tried to do after he lost the 2020 Presidential Election to Joe Biden by more than seven million votes, 306 to 232 in the Electoral College. The violent attack on the Capitol on January 6th 2021 was the culmination of Trump’s plan to execute a political coup by getting Vice President Pence to reject the Electoral College votes of tens of millions of people in several major swing states, and then throw the election into the House of Representatives. Despite the fact that more than 60 federal and state courts had already rejected every claim of electoral fraud which had been advanced by Donald Trump.
That lawless coup attempt was accompanied by a violent mob riot, incited by Trump, a riot which wounded, disfigured and disabled more than 140 Police Officers, and interrupted the peaceful transfer of power for the very first time in the history of the United States, and that includes the Civil War. You would think that Vance might have the good judgement not to raise the electoral issue, given that the only reason there was a vacancy on Trump’s ticket for him to field his running mate in 2024 was because Trump’s mob tried to hang Mike Pence, who was driven out of the Capitol by the Proud Boys, and driven off the ticket by Trump’s unrepentant anger and contempt for Vice President Pence’s old fashioned devotion to the rule of law, which we continue to salute him for.
But for Vance, Britain’s decision to fine one prayerful protester for violating a buffer zone around an abortion clinic in England, as he lamented the abortion that he and his girlfriend had procured two decades before, is justification for declaring that ‘our European allies have abandoned their centuries old commitment to human rights.’ In a way, obviously more grating to him than anything taking place by Russia or China. Never mind that the US Supreme Court in Hill versus Colorado in 2010, upheld precisely such a buffer zone around abortion clinics in America, and we can certainly share some insights about evolving First Amendment jurisprudence in our Supreme Court about this question, with our friends and allies in England. Something our Congressional delegation actually was attempting to do yesterday, when one of the putative champions of free speech, presumably an ally of Vice President Fence – Pe – Vice President Vance, in the UK, shouted me down and abruptly terminated our dialogue, which was about freedom of speech.
But the truth is that Vance’s determination to conjure up and denounce woke thought control by bureaucrats in Europe is nothing more than an Orwellian projection of everything that Donald Trump has been doing in America. With Trump and his team, you know, every ideological accusation is an ideological confession, and repression is not their target, it is their agenda. In just a half year of the new administration, we’ve seen sweeping political thought control measures imposed in the United States. Trump has gutted the civil service, sacking thousands of career, non-partisan, professional Civil Servants for doing their jobs and staying faithful to the Constitution, to science and the rule of law.
He’s imposed his will on media companies and private universities and forced them to accept government minders and spies to ensure their compliance with the administration’s political orthodoxies. He’s attacked Lawyers and law firms for representing clients and causes he doesn’t like, and he’s attacked Federal Judges for making rulings that he opposes, and they call for the impeachment of the dozens of Federal Judges who have struck down his incessant, lawless executive orders. He’s purged libraries of books that he considers politically incorrect, like, ‘1984’ and ‘The Handmaid’s Tale.’ It’s interesting to me that they always insist on censoring the books about censorship. He’s rewritten history at displays and museums and national parks, in totally Orwellian fashion. He has sent masked Federal Agents in unmarked vans, without arrest warrants, to round up and deport lawful permanent residents and foreign students on visas, simply for writing editorials or attending rallies he disagrees with.
One of Trump’s first actions was to dismiss a dozen career civil service protected, experienced Federal Criminal Prosecutors at the Department of Justice, simply because they had worked on the criminal investigation and prosecution of the violent white supremacists who stormed the US Capitol on January 6th. It’s hard to imagine a more dangerous assault on the rule of law and political freedom than to fire Prosecutors for doing their jobs, especially when the job they’re doing is to prosecute a violent political insurrection supporting a coup against the government. But the firing of these Prosecutors was preceded by Trump’s shocking first executive order, in which he pardoned or released all 1,600 convicted J6th insurrectionists.
He described the extremists who assaulted our Officers and tried to overthrow our constitutional order, as ‘political prisoners,’ and ‘hostages,’ assuming we would just forget that a hostage of someone who’s been illegally abducted by a criminal or terrorist organisation and held for ransom. Trump wiped away the felons’ prison sentences and forgave all their fines and restitution payments still owed to their victims. With this sweeping use of the pardon power, not only did Trump seek to sanitise MAGA’s bloody attack on American democracy, but he created a functional private militia for his use going forward, a reserve army of extremists, ready to stand back and stand by for future street fighting engagements against the rule of law and Trump-designated political enemies.
Trump has weaponised the machinery of government against the media, any media that he believes are not acting in his political interests or are in his scopes for a financial shakedown. His recent $15 billion lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal for reporting about his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein is devoid of any merit, of course, but it’s a key part of the campaign to bring the free press to heel, which has merged with his enterprising personal corruption. Amazingly, he’s figured out a way to use the bureaucratic power of the Federal Communications Commission, the FCC, as leverage to shake down major news organisations to the tune of millions of dollars, paid to him as settlement for completely bogus, private nuisance lawsuits, which he files against the media. Something that no other President has done in the history of our country.
Consider the 60 Minutes case, in October of last year, Trump filed a $10 billion lawsuit against CBS and its parent company Paramount because he thought that its interview with Kamala Harris made her look too good. Okay, that was the sum and substance of his complaint. Not only did he personally sue CBS, he got the FCC to hold up the proposed merger of its parent company, Paramount, with Skydance Media. And only after Paramount agreed to settle his personal lawsuit, and pay $16 million directly to Trump’s Presidential Library, did the FCC grant permission for the merger to proceed.
This $16 million tribute was not the only concession he extracted, as part of the deal. Paramount was required to eliminate any programmes advancing diversity, equity or inclusion, and to accept a minder, a spy, essentially, empowered to monitor and report perceived anti-Trump bias in CBS’s reporting and editorial decisions. That’s a blatant violation of the First Amendment, whose core meaning is to prevent administrative prior restraints on journalism. Imagine how the MAGA forces would react if President Obama or Biden had required newspapers and TV stations to accept government-mandated monitors installed in their offices. These outrageous attacks on the press are actually surpassed in severity by Trump’s full-blown assault on academic freedom, deploying executive orders denouncing specific universities for alleged antisemitism.
While harbouring and coddling antisemites in – like, neo-Nazi, Nicholas Fuentes, and threatening sweeping cut offs of billions of dollars in research funding, Trump has tried to seize control of college student admissions, faculty hiring and curricular content at major universities in the country. Columbia agreed to a $200 million settlement with the administration in a desperate effort to unblock $1.3 billion in research funding that Trump was holding hostage. Once again, as part of the settlement, the administration demanded Columbia agree to install an on-site independent monitor to ensure its compliance with the administration’s demands. Surrenders like this are not only humiliating for the entities that undergo them, but they’re dangerous for everybody’s freedom. Neither the press, nor universities, can play their vital truth-seeking functions under the thumb of government-mandated minders and censors deployed to guarantee their submission to the strait’s ideological straitjacket.
While some institutions, like Columbia and CBS’s parent company, have capitulated to such demands, others have bravely and successfully stood up to them. There is no safety in inpeace – in appeasing the Trump administration, or any other bully, but there is dramatically more safety in resistance and collective solidarity. Harvard fought back against a panoply of outrageous coercive demands relating to its admissions process, its faculty hiring and its curricular decisions. It must continue to hang tough. It carries a high burden of hope for maintaining academic freedom in our country. After Trump attempted to prevent foreign nationals from enrolling at Harvard, and cut off more than $2.5 billion in research funding, Harvard sued. In Harvard versus US Department of Homeland Security, a federal court sided with the university, agreeing that the administration had, with its strong-armed tactics, trampled ‘on core constitutional rights that must be safeguarded in America, freedom of thought, freedom of expression and freedom of speech.’
In the face of Trump’s vindictive attacks against Lawyers and law firms who represented clients or causes he disfavours, several firms, including Perkins Coie, WilmerHale, Jenner and Block and Susman Godfrey, fought back. Federal Judges ruled in their favour, finding that the executive orders to strip thousands of Lawyers and firms of federal security clearances, deny them entry to federal buildings, including courthouses, which makes it a little bit difficult to practice law, and permanently bar them from federal employment and contracts, violated not just the First Amendment and free speech rights of the Lawyers, but the basic due process and right to counsel rights of the clients.
These attacks on freedom are not just fits of pique from the irascible President. They are strategic operations, designed to clear away opposition to Trump’s consolidation of power. The strategy draws heavily from Hungarian strongman, Viktor Orbán, the world model now for establishing one-party control of government and running society as an illiberal democracy in Hungary, illiberal democracy meaning elections without freedom.
Trump’s moves also bear striking resemblance to President Xi’s agenda for eradicating liberal democracy in China. His secretive Document Number Nine, ‘Communiqué on the Current State of the Ideological Sphere,’ which leaked a decade ago, identified seven perils faced by the CCP. Constitutional democracy and the separation of powers, universal values, like, civil rights and civil liberties and human rights, the existence of independent media control in active civil society, and efforts to replace the party’s own account of history with oppositionist Nihilist history. This document for authoritarianism in China now reads like one of Donald Trump’s executive orders. It pretty much articulates all of the liberal institutions and values under attack in our country.
It’s important for our European allies and friends to see that this authoritarian march through our institutions seeks to crush the essential dynamic hope that has driven the American democratic experiment. They are trying to destroy what makes America truly great and will always make America great. Our revolution overthrew monarchy and broke from centuries of religious warfare, holy crusades and witchcraft trials, to separate church and state and to establish government by the people, and with the consent of the governed. We fought a civil war to end slavery, agitated from women’s right to vote, dismantled Jim Crow apartheid, fought for marriage equality, and launched the modern environmental movement. These were not exercises in the dread woke political correctness, but rather, the essential civilising movements of our history that have defined American politics as the quest for a more perfect union.
As Dr King put it during the civil rights movement, ‘The greatness of America is the right to protest for what is right.’ But Donald Trump now wants to restore the names of confederate traitors removed over the last few years from American bil – military bases, like Fort Bragg and Fort Lee. Trump and Vance can see nothing that honours or redeems America in the movements waged by abolitionists, unionists and suffragettes, the Bonus Marchers and New Deal, the civil rights movement, the labour movement, the women’s movement.
To MAGA, these are just woke heresies that need to be whitewashed out of our history and literature, but the civilising movements are in fact what makes America exceptional. We are not exceptional because we are somehow magically immune from fascism or racism. We are obviously not. We are exceptional because our founders began with the self-evident truths of the unalienable rights of the people, the consent of the governed and all of us being created equal. And successive generations of American patriots have fought with all of their might to realise these ideals and indeed, to create a more perfect union.
Vance dishonours the whole meaning of the US-British Alliance in World War Two and disgraces our heroes. Churchill and Roosevelt stood strong for civilisation against the barbarism of fascism coming from the Axis powers, but they also stood strong against fascist sympathisers and racists, and antisemites in their own societies too. They did not pander to men like Elon Musk, who perform Roman salutes, promote eugenics, make jokes about Nazism, and idolise apartheid South Africa. They did not embrace pro-fascist, isolationist movements. They fought the America First Committee and Father Coughlin, and they defeated the pro-Nazi isolationist movements. And when Nazi hooligans marched down the boulevards of Europe, they did not see very fine people on both sides. They knew which side the UK and America must be on together.
So, what would FDR and Churchill be saying today? Who would their heroes and friends be? Not Vladimir Putin and not Viktor Orbán, but President Zelenskyy and Alexei Navalny. Not Kim Jong Un or Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, but the leaders of a free Europe, standing strong for democracy and human rights all over the world. People, like, Chancellor Merz, President Macron and Prime Minister Starmer. NATO and the European Union are not ‘instruments of oppression,’ as our far-right friends claim. They are the defenders of freedom against authoritarianism. This moment calls for transnational democratic solidarity.
All the bullies and oligarchs have found each other; they are networked together in a dark web of anti-democracy. From the autocrats in Moscow to the kleptocrats in Mar-a-Lago, from the far-right extremists of the national rally to the techno broligarchs of Silicon Valley, the enemies of freedom are on the march for autocratic state power and social control, creating gangster states and fascist networks to try and intimidate people all over the world. But every day, resilient democratic parties and people are fighting back. The unwavering efforts of our European and NATO allies appear to have prevailed on President Trump in the past month to temper his disgraceful embrace of Putin and to offer Ukraine some limited measure of renewed support in defending itself against Russia’s imperialist invasion.
In America, Trump’s attack on democracy, freedom and the rule of law has been blunted repeatedly in the courts by Americans fighting back. Whether it’s his blatantly unlawful executive order purporting to deny birthright citizenship, which has been part of our Constitution since 1868. His massive illegal firings of Civil Service protected federal workers. His attempt to remove permanent residents because of their political speech. His unconstitutional tariffs and global trade war, waged without congressional authorisation, or his repeat episodes usurping congressional spending powers.
We have been winning every day in the courts. More than 350 lawsuits against the administration have racked up more than 200 court orders blocking his lawlessness. The federal district courts and circuit courts have stood strong against this reign of lawlessness. But the Supreme Court itself, stacked, packed and gerrymandered by the Republican-controlled US Senate, has wavered and buckled in some of the cases, offering, we must admit, an uncertain final destination for constitutional justice.
Our true backstop has been the American people, who have fought every provocation everywhere, and who assembled in record numbers of millions of protesters all over the country on No Kings Day, June 14th, and have appeared in communities across the country to reject the attack on Medicare and Medicaid. The great achievements of progressive democracy in the 20th Century, the vilification and scapegoating of members of the LGBTQ+ community, especially our trans brothers and sisters, and the reckless, dangerous policies of mass deportation without due process.
The mass movements unleashed by this fight create the political energy we need to transform the Democratic Party and perhaps the party system all over the world. We may not be able to be Founding Fathers in the 18th century, but we can all be founding fighters in the 21st century. We have a whole host of new problems related to climate change, the internet, AI, economic monopolisation and market concentration, housing and healthcare rising prices, and we must develop policy responses that fit the times. ’As our case is new,’ said President Lincoln, ‘so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves from propaganda and confusion, and then we shall be able to save our democracy.’
But when we say ‘save democracy,’ it implies that democracy is a static collection of rules and practices, but that’s just part of it. Democracy is a project in an always unfinished draft, a process in motion in every democratic nation in the world. Tocqueville observed in Democracy in America, that ‘Democracy and voting rights in our country are either shrinking and shrivelling away, or they are growing and expanding, and we have to get back on the growth track again.’ John Dewey said, ‘The only solution to the ills of democracy is more democracy, and what we are suffering from is not democracy, but the impediments to it.’ Aggressive defence of democracy and freedom today means our case must be made new for this century, but we have the great alliance we need to succeed. We’ve got the young people in America and Europe, and all over the world, cheering for new structures of opportunity, for redesign of our environmental and energy systems, for less inequality, and for a lean, nimble government that is a powerful instrument for the common good of all.
On June 18th 1940, in his finest hour speech, Churchill rallied this great nation by saying, ‘Upon this de – battle depends the survival of civilisation. Upon it depends our own British life in the long continuity of our institutions. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free, and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new dark age, made more sinister and perhaps more protracted by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties and so, bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for 1,000 years, men will still say, ‘This was our finest hour.’’
Our great freedom fighter through the Civil War and Reconstruction in America was Frederick Douglass, who was born into slavery at the Wye River Plantation, about a half an hour away from where we live in Maryland, on the Eastern Shore. He escaped from slavery to devote his life to freedom and rebuilding a great new society out of the horrors of slavery. Douglass said, ‘If there’s no struggle, there’s no progress, and the struggle may be moral, or it may be physical, it may be moral and physical, but there must be struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will.’
And I’ll leave you finally with the words of the great Tom Paine, who was born here but came to America and fell in love with the promise of our land. He said, ‘If America lived up to its great values and ideals, it would become,’ he said, ‘an asylum to humanity.’ Not an insane asylum, mind you, but a place of refuge for people seeking freedom from political, religious and intellectual repression from all over the world. And he wrote the greatest pamphlet of our history, ‘Common Sense,’ by which he meant not just the five senses that we are born with, if we’re lucky, but the sixth sense, the sense we have in common, if we’re willing to reason and speak together, without dogma and superstition, or what we would call today, ‘propaganda and disinformation and fake news.’ But 1776 was a tough year all around, and our nation, contrary to popular belief, was split over the right thing to do.
I’m reading interesting book by this right now – about this, by H. W. Brands, who’s an Historian in Texas. It’s called ‘The First Civil War,’ and it’s about how the colonists were split, and half the people were saying, ‘You can’t beat the greatest empire that ever existed. You can’t beat the Kings and the Queens and the Lords and the Monarchs, and it’s just never happened. Nobody’s ever lived without it, it’s not possible.’ And half the people said, ‘Let’s give it a try. Let’s try to put government on a different principle here, on the consent of the governed, with respect for the unalienable rights of the people and the idea that all of us are created equal.’
So, anyway, he wrote this other pamphlet in 1776 to give people hope during a time of very difficult protracted struggle, and so he wrote this pamphlet called ‘The American Crisis.’ I just want to tell you a little passage from it. I’m going to update the language pursuant to instructions from Speaker Pelosi, who said, ‘Tom Paine was a feminist, and he wouldn’t mind if we made the adjustments so as not to offend modern sensibilities.’ But he said, ‘These are the times that try men and women’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will shrink at this moment from the service of their cause and their country. But everyone that stands with us now will win the love and the favour and the affection of every man and every woman for all time. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered, but we have this saving consolation, the more difficult the struggle, the more glorious in the end will be our victory.’ Let’s make that victory ours in the 21st century.
Thank you very much, Chatham House [applause].
Bronwen Maddox
Congressman, thank you very, very much for your speech, and I want to thank, incidentally, Susan Schoenfeld Harrington for helping have made this conversation possible. You referred to yourself upstairs as a ‘Soldier come fresh off the battlefield,’ and that is the speech you’ve given us. I wanted to ask you something I was asking you on the way down, which actually, I’ve got a few things I’m going to ask before coming to questions, but actually, one of our people watching online from Nigeria, [Chida Berabon Jeku – 38:14] has said, ‘What is your aim in giving this presentation now in the UK? Who are you trying to persuade to do what?’
Congressman Jamie Raskin
Well, I’m just trying to persuade all of our friends in UK and around the world, including in Nigeria, to hang tough for democracy and freedom. I want everybody to know that the people of America are not going to go down the road of tyranny and oppression. We’re not going to accept it.
Bronwen Maddox
Should [applause] the UK and Europe and other countries regard the US as a threat at this point?
Congressman Jamie Raskin
So, I don’t want to identify any particular country as the problem or the peril. I mean, there’s a struggle for democracy, human rights and freedom in every society, and all of us can be doing better. The question is, really, what is our aim? Is our aim in this or that society to create more authoritarian power and control and inequality and propaganda and disinformation, or is the aim, as with our democratic forebearers, you know, who I tried to cite at the end, to try to create more civilisation, more freedom, more enlightenment, more progress? And so, I want the democratic peoples and parties and movements of the world to stand together, to stand strong and to be in constant communication, the way that the autocrats and the theocrats and the plutocrats and the kleptocrats are.
Bronwen Maddox
Let’s go to the resistance to what you’ve been describing within the US, and you say, ‘Our true backstop is the American people.’ But the polls are surprisingly mixed, these long six months on since President Trump got into the White House the second time, and absolutely, some things against him, but some of the things he’s doing, even just within the US, are appearing very popular. On immigration, on an approach to cutting the federal government, even if not support for doing it with a red chainsaw. Why aren’t the Democrats doing better?
Congressman Jamie Raskin
Well, we’re in the minority in the House, in the Senate, and we’re – we don’t have the White House, and these are very narrow margins, but they’re fundamentally important margins. You know, we’ve had a bit of a breakthrough in finding some common ground with our Republican colleagues over the Epstein files, which is something that, you know, Donald Trump had revved them up on for months and years, and then decided, after apparently having some report about them, he no longer wanted them to go public. And so we have a lot of our Republican colleagues who are standing with us and demanding their release. I wish they had stood with us a few weeks before when we tried to stop them from stripping 17 million American citizens of their Medicaid health insurance.
But, you know, this is why I ended my little talk there by invoking what happened at the time of the American Revolution. I mean, even then, what looks so obvious in hindsight, which is – at least to us, okay, so – but – which is, you know, American independence for democracy, was very controversial at the time. And you – you know, and remember, Churchill didn’t convince Roosevelt to get into the war until after the bombing at Pearl Harbour and was begging him for years to engage America. And he said that ‘Public opinion moves slowly there.’
So, I – you know, we’re not that concerned about the polls, and, you know, when I got into politics, somebody had told me when I first announced I was running and I made a speech, and I included a bunch of stuff I wanted to do, including to fight for marriage equality, and a woman came up to me at my announcement, and she said, you know, ‘That was…’
Bronwen Maddox
You – so, same sex marriage?
Congressman Jamie Raskin
Same sex marriage, yeah…
Bronwen Maddox
Yeah.
Congressman Jamie Raskin
…same – a lot – or – yeah, it’s actually not a different institution, it’s the same institution, letting gay people into the marriage institution. But…
Bronwen Maddox
Got it.
Congressman Jamie Raskin
…she said, ‘That was a great speech, but, one thing, take out everything you got in there about gay marriage, because it’s not going to happen. It’s never going to happen. Even the gay candidates don’t talk about it, and when you talk about it, it makes you sound like you’re really extreme, like you’re not in the political centre.’ And I said, ‘You know what? I – thank you for telling me that.’ My three kids were with me, and one of my daughters is here today, Tabitha – but anyway…
Bronwen Maddox
She was just there.
Congressman Jamie Raskin
Yeah, I think she walked out in protest then. No, so – but they were watching me, and they wanted to see how I was going to respond to this woman. And I said, ‘You know, I thank you for telling me that, but it makes me realise it’s not my ambition to be in the political centre which blows around with the wind. It’s my ambition to be in the moral centre, to try to find what’s right and bring them political centre to us.’ And so…
Bronwen Maddox
Okay, so on the moral centre, and you’ve given this – us this barnstorming speech about the threat that you’re saying Trump and JD Vance are posing to American democracy, and yet, it takes the Epstein files to get consensus in Congress. I’m wondering why. What…
Congressman Jamie Raskin
Well, welcome to my world. I mean, that’s what I…
Bronwen Maddox
Well, why…
Congressman Jamie Raskin
I mean, that’s politics for you.
Bronwen Maddox
…there is not more purchase…
Congressman Jamie Raskin
Well…
Bronwen Maddox
…of these kind of arguments…
Congressman Jamie Raskin
Well…
Bronwen Maddox
…if they have the force that you’re saying that this is…?
Congressman Jamie Raskin
…let’s not dismiss the Epstein…
Bronwen Maddox
Yeah.
Congressman Jamie Raskin
…files too quickly. Let me just say a word about that.
Bronwen Maddox
Yeah.
Congressman Jamie Raskin
We’ve had a whole bunch of massive, institutionalised sex abuse scandals, in churches, in schools, in universities, and it’s a critical exploitation of people’s power over other people. And there are entire institutions that have operated, essentially, like what we call ‘RICO conspiracies,’ you know, where it’s constant racketeering and criminal activity and covering up. So, the Democrats have always taken this seriously and we’ve always tried to deal with this problem and prevent child sex abuse and conspiracies of silence around it. And if you look at the history of the Epstein case, there was a 60-count federal indictment that was prepared two decades ago on this. And the guy who later became Donald Trump’s Secretary of Labor, Alex Acosta, who was the US Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, threw that away and then agreed to a one count of solicitation in State Court against Epstein. I mean they, you know, they were celebrating with champagne, it was such a joke to them, and then, you know, he got – it wasn’t even a slap on the wrist, it was like a massage on the wrist or something.
And President Trump is the one who – and he was best friends with Epstein for more than a decade, who said, ‘There’s a lot more there,’ and he was demanding for the Republicans that it be released. And then they got back into power, they had access to all of the Epstein files, and now they’re refusing to release them. So, we’ve got a bipartisan motion in Congress right now to release all of the files, to compel release of them. We have a dozen Republicans who’ve joined all of the Democrats, we’ve got a discharge petition to try to, you know, unlock the legislative gears to get it out, and we’re going to do that.
And so, obviously, that’s not our entire programme or anything, but it’s something that will begin to move things in a good way. And I, you know, I just feel, at a certain point, they’re people who’ve been a member of a cult for a long time and they wake up on the basement floor one morning, and they realise that their saviour has actually been a false prophet, and this might be the moment where people on the MAGA side begin to question other stuff that’s been going on.
Bronwen Maddox
So, I take your point about the Epstein files, both in themselves and the resonance they have, but the point I’m pushing at is one that the whole world is grappling with looking at the United States, which is, is Trump just an anomaly, an extraordinary political figure, and the real America, if you like, will re-emerge after that? Or is America, which has elected him, albeit by the margins you described, has elected him twice, is that the shape of the future, and was Biden in getting back and saying, ‘Normality’s back, I’m back,’ and, you know, ‘what the world…
Congressman Jamie Raskin
Yeah.
Bronwen Maddox
…would expect for America, normality’s back,’ is that the anomaly?
Congressman Jamie Raskin
Well, okay, so now, you press me on this, and the first thing I want to say, I really am of the John Dewey school that ‘The only solution to the ills of democracy is more democracy.’ Donald Trump he tweet – not tweeted, he Social Truthed me – he Truth Socialed at me a couple of weekends ago, and one of the things he did was he called me a ‘loser,’ in all caps, bolded, all caps, which made me mad, you know, because I don’t like to brag about it, but I’ve never lost a popular election. He has lost two popular elections for President, so you forced me to enter into a little disquisition about the Electoral College.
Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump by two and a half million votes in 2016. Now, it should’ve been 20 million, I concede, but if we had a direct popular vote for President, he never would have won in the first place. They eked out a razor thin victory in the Electoral College, with the assist of the ideological barrage from Vladimir Putin. Then he lost again in 2020 to Joe Biden by more than seven million votes. That one wasn’t even close, and I told him, you know, ‘There’s no shame in losing an election. there is a shame in trying to overthrow the government after you lose the election,’ which is, you know, essentially, what he did. But he lost those two, and the last one he seems to have actually won a real popular vote victory. He’s massively…
Bronwen Maddox
You’re not…
Congressman Jamie Raskin
…overstated…
Bronwen Maddox
…seriously questioning that, are you…
Congressman Jamie Raskin
No, I’m not.
Bronwen Maddox
…here?
Congressman Jamie Raskin
No, I’m not, I…
Bronwen Maddox
Just to be sure.
Congressman Jamie Raskin
No, I’m saying he won…
Bronwen Maddox
Yes.
Congressman Jamie Raskin
…that one, but he’s massively overstated…
Bronwen Maddox
Yeah.
Congressman Jamie Raskin
…the dimensions of that victory.
Bronwen Maddox
Absolutely, yeah.
Congressman Jamie Raskin
He’s claimed some huge mandate to do all kinds of things he never mentioned, like, throwing people off of their Medicaid health insurance. But his popular vote victory is one of the smallest that any winning President has won in the last three or four decades, I mean, it was very narrow. So, let’s not overstate what happened there, and we are still dealing with some antique political institutions, including the Electoral College. Having said that, I don’t want to, you know, dodge the basic force of your question, which is, well, there are a lot of people voting for this guy, even after he’s, you know, an adjudicated…
Bronwen Maddox
And some of the things that he is doing appear to be very popular.
Congressman Jamie Raskin
Yeah, well, some do, some don’t.
Bronwen Maddox
Okay.
Congressman Jamie Raskin
I don’t know that the tariffs are very popular. I mean, they’ve caused hell for lots of small businesspeople in the country, the Farmers are up in arms about it. DOGE was a nightmare, you know, stealing away the, you know, the civil service rights of tens of thousands of people, we’re talking Air Traffic Controllers at the FAA, and Food and Drug inspectors at the FDA, and, you know, so on. So, he – his numbers, I mean, I’m not a big poll person, I’m sure you’ve got a polling expert here, but his numbers are not good when you compare them to other Presidents at the same time…
Bronwen Maddox
Yes.
Congressman Jamie Raskin
…in their first years. They’re low, but again…
Bronwen Maddox
I’m not one to put loads on polls either, but as I was saying before, nor are the Democrats numbers particularly good at this point.
Congressman Jamie Raskin
Exactly.
Bronwen Maddox
We don’t have – need to have a polls on…
Congressman Jamie Raskin
But here’s the point I want to make…
Bronwen Maddox
I’m with you on this.
Congressman Jamie Raskin
…and the reason…
Bronwen Maddox
Yeah.
Congressman Jamie Raskin
…why I try to put this in a somewhat grander vision about democracy, democracy is the exception. For the vast majority of the existence of our species, people have lived under dictators and Kings and Emperors and people like Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. So, there’s obviously something there in humanity…
Bronwen Maddox
Hmmm.
Congressman Jamie Raskin
…that inclines some people to go with that, which is, ‘Oh well, a strongman or a bully will get us out of that.’ Then you’ve got the Abraham Lincolns and the Winston Churchills and the Franklin Roosevelts, who say, ‘No, we’re going to make progress on the side of freedom and democracy, and it’s going to take all of us to do it.
Bronwen Maddox
Hmmm.
Congressman Jamie Raskin
So, I – we – I don’t spend that much time, you know, on the prediction part of it. I’m not in the prognostication business; I’m in the mobilisation business. I’m out there trying to organise people to stand up strong…
Bronwen Maddox
Alright, so let me just…
Congressman Jamie Raskin
…for democracy in our country.
Bronwen Maddox
…ask you two – a couple of things, and I want to come to your questions, and we have only a clean hour. Supposing Donald – you take Donald Trump out of the picture, a Democratic President candidate wins the next election, is there – are there things that he’s done that you’re concerned about, a lot of the attacks on democracy that you have laid out, that won’t snap back?
Congressman Jamie Raskin
Well, it…
Bronwen Maddox
Or is there stuff that is going to stick, even if you take him out of the picture?
Congressman Jamie Raskin
Well, look, we’re going to have to – the great American tradition is reconstruction, as coming out of the Civil War. We’re going to have to have a reconstruction of our institutions, and there may have been some things broken that can be built back in a far more effective and productive way. There are some things that will just have to be restored, and there can be things that, you know, that are changed. So, I don’t know, we’d have to look at specifics.
I mean, one thing that seems clear to me is the US Supreme Court is the only Supreme Court in our land, we’ve got 50 State Supreme Courts, it’s the only Supreme Court in the land, it’s the only court in the federal system which doesn’t have a binding rule of ethics on it.
Bronwen Maddox
Hmmm.
Congressman Jamie Raskin
And that’s become a huge problem for us. So, that’s something we’re going to have to engage in in order to improve. But in terms of things that Donald Trump has broken, like the Civil Service, or due process, I mean, ‘due process’ are the two most beautiful words in the whole…
Bronwen Maddox
Yeah.
Congressman Jamie Raskin
…English language, right? They’re what separate our rights and freedoms from arbitrary state power. So, yeah, we’re going to have to rebuild due process, we’re going to have to rebuild the separation of church and state, which is something that they’ve been…
Bronwen Maddox
Yeah.
Congressman Jamie Raskin
…bulldozing, so…
Bronwen Maddox
So, the – just the final thing in this vein, Congress or the courts, and this is picking up a lot of things online, there are tonnes of great questions online, including, I can see the word ‘excoriating,’ it’s a compliment.
Congressman Jamie Raskin
I accept that, it sounds very British.
Bronwen Maddox
Yeah, it’s from – yes, it is, possibly Irish. The courts, or Congress, are they going to rein him in, in particular in this question of governing by executive order?
Congressman Jamie Raskin
Well, so here’s the thing, I don’t – do you have something like executive order with the Prime Minister? I don’t know.
Bronwen Maddox
We have ways of…
Congressman Jamie Raskin
I mean, so…
Bronwen Maddox
…getting things quickly through…
Congressman Jamie Raskin
…an executive order…
Bronwen Maddox
…Parliament, but it’s different.
Congressman Jamie Raskin
Yeah, I mean, executive order is basically, a presidential pronouncement to his own staff and to people in the federal government, of what his position is on something. An executive order does not trump a federal law that’s been passed by Congress and signed into law by the President. It does not trump the US Constitution, sorry, I keep using that word. It is not superior to real law, right? And then, what’s funny is that the Republicans have been denouncing, they’ve been excoriating the Democrats, like Biden and Obama, for executive orders…
Bronwen Maddox
Hmmm.
Congressman Jamie Raskin
…and saying, you know, ‘You’re running wild with it.’ Well, you know, we ain’t seen anything yet. I mean, this is wild. This is a guy who literally tries to overturn the Constitution by executive order. The first sentence of the 14th Amendment says, ‘All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States.’ We’ve had birthright citizenship since 1868. It has already withstood constitutional challenges and attempts to rewrite it. And then he thinks he can issue an executive order, and just, you know, strip…
Bronwen Maddox
And that is an example…
Congressman Jamie Raskin
…you know…
Bronwen Maddox
…where he has been constrained.
Congressman Jamie Raskin
So far.
Bronwen Maddox
So far, so far.
Congressman Jamie Raskin
But – no, but see, that’s an interesting…
Bronwen Maddox
Yeah.
Congressman Jamie Raskin
…example, because he’s been constrained by four district courts, two Republican appointees, two Democratic appointees, three circuit courts. Then it got up to the Supreme Court, they did not straight out, reverse the opinion. What they said was that ‘the district courts had gone too far in issuing nationwide injunctions against the lawlessness,’ and they struck down nationwide injunctions, saying they couldn’t do it. So, now, you know, objectors to it have had to bring a class action lawsuit, which was certified in New Hampshire, so we’re working on doing it that way. But – so that’s why I say the Supreme Court is slicing the baloney very fine in order not to…
Bronwen Maddox
Hmmm.
Congressman Jamie Raskin
…aggravate the delicate constitution of our Presidents.
Bronwen Maddox
Thank you. I’ve scooped up about a dozen questions in asking that. Right, a whole load here. Let me see, I’ll take woman there. I’ll take three now.
Lizzie Weingart
Thank you, Congressman Raskin. It’s been excellent to hear you speak today. I’m curious, I think, kind of, building on the conversation that…
Bronwen Maddox
Would you like to say who you are?
Lizzie Weingart
Yes, I’m Lizzie Weingart from Gatehouse Advisory Partners here in London. Also, an American living in the UK, so it’s great to hear the…
Congressman Jamie Raskin
I’m not living here now, so, yeah.
Lizzie Weingart
No, you’re visiting.
Congressman Jamie Raskin
Yeah.
Lizzie Weingart
My question centres more on mid-terms and 2028, so how Democrats are thinking about building an alternate message to, kind of, sceptical Trump voters, particularly in the economic realm. So, voters – I’m from Ohio, so from Ohio, from West Virginia, from those, sort of, Rust Belt. How can you, kind of, look to win them back?
Bronwen Maddox
Okay. I’m going to take three questions at once, if it’s alright. I’ll remind you of them…
Congressman Jamie Raskin
Okay.
Bronwen Maddox
…but I just want to get a few voices in. Here, in the second row.
Prashanie Dharmadasa
Thank you, Congressman Raskin. My name is Prashanie Dharmadasa, I’m from SORAA3. My question is, so in a world where US relationships are quite fractured, quite honestly, with the international community, we’re seeing, you know, continued political whiplash, you know, in terms of, you know, what we’re hearing from Washington. And it also seems like the US is oscillating between withdrawal and assertion, and while, you know, countries like China are, you know, really stepping in to fill that leadership vacuum. My question is, what soft power levers do you think America still possesses to – and how could it be deployed to be able to restore good faith with the international community?
Bronwen Maddox
Okay, US and soft power, thank you.
Congressman Jamie Raskin
Hmmm.
Bronwen Maddox
And right here in the front.
John Wilson
John Wilson, I’m a member of Chatham House. The Trump administration and its TV Secretary of Defence has sacked the two US women four-star Admirals from their positions as Head of the US Navy and the US Coast Guard. Lisa Franchetti of the Navy had not been in position for very long, following a distinguished career, culminating as a Task Force Commander of a carrier group.
Bronwen Maddox
John, could you…?
John Wilson
And the unanimous…
Bronwen Maddox
Could you get to your question, please?
John Wilson
Sorry.
Bronwen Maddox
I’m sorry, we’re so short of time, could you get to your question, please? Please could you ask your question?
Member
She just wants you to skip forward…
John Wilson
Sorry.
Member
…with your question.
Bronwen Maddox
Can you ask your question…
Member
She just wants you to skip forward…
Bronwen Maddox
…please?
Member
…to your question.
John Wilson
She wants me to?
Bronwen Maddox
Ask your question.
John Wilson
The question is the – that the Trump are pursuing a policy of misogynism. What are you going to do about it?
Bronwen Maddox
Oh.
Congressman Jamie Raskin
Got you.
Bronwen Maddox
Great, okay, John, thank you for that excellent question [applause].
Congressman Jamie Raskin
You should have just said that, yeah.
Bronwen Maddox
Alright, we have Lizzie on the mid-terms, Prashanie on the US soft power, if it still retains any, and John on what to do about Trump misogyny. You have three minutes, Congressman.
Congressman Jamie Raskin
Okay, so the Democrats are actually engaged in the hard work of democratic progress. And if you look at what we did during the Biden administration, it is a very telling contrast with the Trump administration, either the first or the second. So, I sat there for four years under the first Trump administration. We had an infrastructure week, we had an infrastructure month, we had an infrastructure BBQ, we just never had an infrastructure bill.
Bronwen Maddox
Hmmm.
Congressman Jamie Raskin
Okay, Joe Biden got in, we had a bill, the first week we passed it, in the first month we made a $1.2 trillion investment in the roads, the highways, the bridges, the ports, the airports, trail and rail and so on, cybersecurity, we did that. They just gave a $3 trillion tax cut to the wealthiest people in our country, the wealthiest corporations in the country, and drove our debt $3 trillion more into the ditch. So, I could – I wish I could give you ten more examples. If I had the time, I would. By the way, we can stay, but I don’t know what your rules are.
Bronwen Maddox
Our…
Congressman Jamie Raskin
Rather than try to…
Bronwen Maddox
…rules are to end, but possibly gently in this case.
Congressman Jamie Raskin
Okay, alright, so…
Bronwen Maddox
We can go on a few more minutes…
Congressman Jamie Raskin
Alright, so, the number one is, so that’s – like, let’s just compare the records. Okay, number two, Prashanie, about…
Bronwen Maddox
US soft power.
Congressman Jamie Raskin
…that soft power.
Bronwen Maddox
Yeah.
Congressman Jamie Raskin
This administration has been dismantling every soft power vehicle that America has developed. Take USAID, the Agency for International Development, which comes out of the Kennedy administration, and which has been a central lever for us to help on development, to help on building democratic institutions, the rule of law, anti-hunger, anti-starvation all over the world, anti-malaria. And their very first target was USAID, and they’ve been demolishing it. So, that’s an institution that we must revive, recover and restore. But it’s – you know, I represent a lot of federal workers, they just sacked last – two Fridays ago, I think, 1,400 workers at the US State Department, who were involved in diplomacy and peacekeeping and conflict de-escalation. So, we can rebuild those, but I’m sure that there are lots of other things that we can be doing, but we got to start with that.
And John, you’re absolutely right to identify the misogyny. I mean, I think Americans are so used to it from the first administration, we don’t talk about it enough as we should. And you give great examples, with the sacking of the women who have been able to attain to levels of prominence and leadership in the Department of Defence and Armed Forces. Well, you know, for them, that’s just the triumph of wokeness and, you know, DEI. The alternative, you know, is what I call their DUI hires, people like Secretary Hegseth. One Soldier came up to me the airport and said that ‘the Soldiers call him Secretary Keg Seth,’ but – so what they’ve replaced is actually this…
Bronwen Maddox
I have to say that these allegations, we’re not able to substantiate, right?
Congressman Jamie Raskin
Yes, I’ll take full responsibility for what’s been published in the American press widely. So – but the – what you have, you know, the military has been a principal instrument for racial, ethnic, gender integration in our history, and it’s been the first place that we have dismantled a lot of barriers to professional advancement for people from minority groups. Now they want to completely reverse that and go back to a very different kind of military. So – but the misogyny, of course, does go way beyond that.
And just to go back for one second to the sex abuse theme that we were talking about. One of the things this administration has been doing, in addition to hiding the Epstein files that they had campaigned on releasing, is they have been dismantling all of the programmes and funding that we have at the State Department, the Department of Justice, USAID, HHS, to combat human trafficking around the world. They have just taken that down. So, if they want to show some good faith on the Epstein files, they could start by restoring all of the funding that they’ve dismantled from the fight against human trafficking on Earth.
Bronwen Maddox
I mean, if it’s alright with you, we will go on five minutes, because there’s a huge demand to ask questions, and so on, and I’ve got a couple of excellent ones online. Here in the middle, in the white shirt. Thanks.
Richard Castle
My name is Richard Castle. I’m Head of Legal of Lim Miliband. I specialise in international law and cases before the ICC. Be interested to talk about international politics, in particular in Europe and in the UK, with the social movement of the extreme right. And it seemed to be that the Commentators here in the UK did predict the election victory of Donald Trump, given that the context and the spirit of the time was for the extreme right. Is Donald Trump part of the extreme right or is he a fascist? Do you have any opinion about that?
Bronwen Maddox
Okay, is he a fascist? And I’m going to couple that with a question from Dmitry Shilov online…
Congressman Jamie Raskin
Yes.
Bronwen Maddox
…who’s saying, ‘What strategies do you think democracies in Europe and North America should adopt to prevent the rise and spread of authoritarian instinct?’ So, that’s – we’ve got this from Richard, fascist or not, and how to stop authoritarianism. Let me take another one here, right at the edge.
Katja Bego
Thank you. Thank you very much, Congressman Raskin. Katja Bego here, Chatham House. So, I had a question, a lot of people have called Joe Biden ‘the last Transatlanticist President,’ or, kind of, someone still from a generation where that was the most important relationship. And I think, well, the US has changed, but the world has changed and Europe’s role in it, and I was just wondering how you see the, sort of, future of Transatlanticism in this new, sort of, constellation of powers that we have.
Bronwen Maddox
Okay, future of Transatlanticism, and I’m going to add here one from Vijay Srao, saying, ‘Does everything Trump says have a kernel of truth to it?’ Picking up the phrase of Britain’s Ambassador, Peter Mandelson, who has said, ‘Everything Trump says has a kernel of truth in it.’ So, we have…
Congressman Jamie Raskin
Hmmm hmm.
Bronwen Maddox
…is Trump a fascist? How should Europe, in particular, resist authoritarianism?
Congressman Jamie Raskin
Hmmm hmm.
Bronwen Maddox
Future of Transatlanticism, and…
Congressman Jamie Raskin
The ‘kernel of truth.’
Bronwen Maddox
…the ‘kernel of truth.’
Congressman Jamie Raskin
Alright. Well, I mean, the ideological complexion of Donald Trump is a fascinating thing. He’s – he was a Democrat for much longer than he was a Republican. He flirted with running for President on the Reform Party ticket. He’s quoted as saying that he ‘decided to run as a Republican because that’s where’ he thought ‘all the stupid people were,’ and he thought that that would be easier way for him to go. You know, and so I would say he’s a constellation of a lot of things, and he’s clearly a businessman, who went bankrupt multiple times, but he thinks in terms of business deals.
He’s – as we see from all of his recent crypto engagements, he’s – he is interested in making a lot of money in this term in office, which may be his overriding motivation. That is clearly different from the fascists of the last century. You know, Mussolini and Hitler, they all made, you know, deals with large corporations and businesses, but it doesn’t seem like the critical element for them was wealth, as opposed to totalitarian power and, you know, taking over other countries, and so on.
So, I don’t know, you know, Madeleine Albright, who I’m sure has spoken in this great institution, she wrote a book before she died, called ‘Fascism: A Warning,’ and in it she said, ‘The mistake is to think that fascism has a stable and transhistorical enduring ideological content. It doesn’t.’ She says, ‘it’s better to think of fascism as a strategy for taking power for small groups of people in the society to govern everybody else, and using racism, antisemitism and different forms of bigotry as tools for doing that.’ So, you know, I consider the matter so serious that I don’t want to cavalierly call anybody a ‘fascist,’ but let’s just say there are definitely ingredients of fascism that have been set loose on Earth right now, and we’ve got to resist those in a structural sense.
I would say, secondly, let’s see, the second one was about the future of the…
Bronwen Maddox
And – yeah, and how to resist – the future of Transatlanticism.
Congressman Jamie Raskin
Yeah, I mean…
Bronwen Maddox
Was Joe Biden the last one?
Congressman Jamie Raskin
I mean, you know, as long as we have an FAA, we’re going to have Transatlanticism from the American side, if, you know, if we keep the Air Traffic Controllers working and there are still flights going. I mean, Americans, I think love Europe, and, you know, and we marvel at the extraordinary successes of the European countries and the European peoples. And the whole reason I’m here is in order to restate that, and rearticulate it, because I’ve heard that a lot of the Europeans are feeling very gloomy and despondent about America and about who we are. And we’re still America, and we will always be America, and you know, part of democracy is people have the right to make mistakes, and so, some mistakes have been made, as they say. But it doesn’t change fundamentally who we are or what our commitments are. So, I hope that we will have a thriving transatlantic relationship that allows us to address the titanic problems of our day.
Bronwen Maddox
Hmmm.
Congressman Jamie Raskin
And I think it’s going to be very tough to confront the problem of climate crisis if Europe and America are not working together, and I do think we will get through this, and we will come through it stronger than we were and we will help to solve the problem of climate crisis. And when we do, we will be able to see all of this as a regrettable diversion from, and distraction, from the real work that we need to be doing there.
Bronwen Maddox
Hmmm.
Congressman Jamie Raskin
And that’s true of a whole bunch of other issues, but we live in a time of extraordinary danger, but also extraordinary opportunity…
Bronwen Maddox
Hmmm.
Congressman Jamie Raskin
…and we need to make sure that artificial intelligence, for example, is mobilised as an instrument for real social progress and enlightenment and democracy, and not for the purposes of repression and control of populations.
Bronwen Maddox
So, we come to the ‘kernel of truth.’
Congressman Jamie Raskin
The ‘kernel of truth,’ yeah.
Bronwen Maddox
And the thrust of the question is about, look, hasn’t he won the argument on getting Europe to pay more for defence? Something that Europe now embraces, on acknowledging that voters feel very strongly about immigration. Has he even won the argument on tariffs, given the money that at the moment the US is collecting and inflation not showing up? We don’t have to get into the whole economic argument now, nor do we have time.
Congressman Jamie Raskin
Yeah.
Bronwen Maddox
But I don’t think the words that Peter Mandelson used were chosen, and certainly haven’t been taken in the reporting of it, simply because he’s a Diplomat has to get on, but as a question, after six months, is there a kernel of truth in some of it?
Congressman Jamie Raskin
Well, you know, let’s see. I think it was the Philosopher Terence who said, ‘Nothing human is alien to me.’ So, that there’s got to be some truth in statements uttered by anybody, by everybody, right? And that would include Donald Trump. He’s obviously in politics and has found a way to connect with large numbers of people, and so, there’s a certain, kind of, at least emotional truth in some of the things that he’s talked about. But let’s be clear that this is not a person who is committed to truth as we understand it in the scientific sense, okay?
I mean, somebody who is denying the reality of climate change today is not somebody who is truly interested in the truth, he’s got some different agenda going on. Somebody who claims he won a presidential election that he lost by more than seven million votes, 306 to 232 in Electoral College, and where every single one of his claims of electoral fraud and corruption were rejected by federal and state courts, including by seven or eight Judges he himself named to the bench, is not interested in legal truth or constitutional truth. You know, he’s interested in truths for him and truths that he can communicate to people who want to see the world in the way that he sees it.
Bronwen Maddox
Hmmm.
Congressman Jamie Raskin
Okay, and the – I accept that that’s part of what it means to live in a democracy. That he’s perfectly able to get up and say, you know, Europe is going down the tubes if you don’t remove the windmills that are adjoining his golf course in Scotland, okay, and you can attribute to that statement whatever truth you want. Maybe you love windmills, maybe you hate windmills, and maybe you think windmills should be dealt with as a matter of energy and environmental policy, rather than from the standpoint of a golf course and the vistas that are provided there.
So, you know, we take it for what it is. We’re really – this is his last term in office, something else he might not accept, despite the fact that the Constitution says you’re limited to two terms in office, but this is his last term in office. We’ve got to make sure that America gets back on the path of democratic enlightenment. We are a country that was born out of opposition to dogma and superstition and fake news, and all of that. Our founders wanted to put government on the basis of reason, and so, that’s why, you know, from my political vantage point, I’m fighting for the framers of our Constitution, and I’m fighting for the vision they had in our Constitution.
So, you know, from a religious perspective, people can believe whatever they want, but in public spaces, we try to base things on facts and on science and on reason, and we try to speak in a way that cuts across different sorts of religious faiths and perspective, so everybody can participate. So, that’s…
Bronwen Maddox
So, on that…
Congressman Jamie Raskin
…what I would say, the…
Bronwen Maddox
Okay.
Congressman Jamie Raskin
Yeah, there’s a kernel of truth, and there’s a lot of kernels of untruth in there too, so, yeah.
Bronwen Maddox
Okay, on that note, I – as people who come often here will know, it is so rarely that we go over time, deliberately or accidentally, but I’ve chosen to tonight because there is so much interest in this. And a really global audience, online, questions not only about the Middle East and Asia, but from there and right around the world, and I could take in only a fraction, and only a fraction of those here. But thank you for asking terrific questions, and, Congressman, thank you for coming.
Congressman Jamie Raskin
Thank you, Bronwen [applause].
