Rep. Adam Schiff chronicles his search for small-d democratic sanity during the Trump presidency

Like many of his colleagues, Congressman Adam Schiff came to politics from the law. He worked as a law clerk, then as an Assistant United States Attorney before running for office.

Since 2001, he has served as a U.S. Representative, a Democrat, from southern California. In his role as Chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, he led the first impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump.

Schiff’s memoir of his experience of the Trump presidency is Midnight in Washington: How We Almost Lost Our Democracy and Still Could. In no uncertain terms, Schiff blames his colleagues across the aisle, or nearly all of them, for enabling an immoral, anti-democratic president. He writes that the Republican Party has become “an anti-truth, antidemocratic cult organized around the former president.”

Congressman Adam Schiff is interviewed here by author and historian Jon Meacham. Meacham won a Pulitzer Prize for Biography for his American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House. The mutual admiration between Schiff and Meacham is evident -- Schiff calls himself a "Meacham fanboy" -- but the focus is on the dark significance of the Trump presidency, which culminated in the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, and questions surrounding how we move forward as a nation.

The Elliott Bay Book Company presented this conversation on October 21, 2021. Elliott Bay’s Rick Simonson introduced the program.

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