What do you think?
Rate this book
Midnight in Washington: How We Almost Lost Our Democracy and Still Could
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The vital inside account of American democracy in its darkest hour, from the rise of autocracy unleashed by Trump to the January 6 insurrection, and a warning that those forces remain as potent as ever—from the congressman who led the first impeachment of Donald J. Trump
“Engaging and informative . . . a manual for how to probe and question power, how to hold leaders accountable in a time of diminishing responsibility.”— The Washington Post
With a new afterword by the author
In the years leading up to the election of Donald Trump, Congressman Adam Schiff had already been sounding the alarm over the resurgence of autocracy around the world, and the threat this posed to the United States. But as he led the probe into Donald Trump’s Russia and Ukraine-related abuses of presidential power, Schiff came to the terrible conclusion that the principal threat to American democracy now came from within.
In Midnight in Washington , Schiff argues that the Trump presidency has so weakened our institutions and compromised the Republican Party that the peril will last for years, requiring unprecedented vigilance against the growing and dangerous appeal of authoritarianism. The congressman chronicles step-by-step just how our democracy was put at such risk, and traces his own path to meeting the crisis—from serious prosecutor, to congressman with an expertise in national security and a reputation for bipartisanship, to liberal lightning rod, scourge of the right, and archenemy of a president. Schiff takes us inside his team of impeachment managers and their desperate defense of the Constitution amid the rise of a distinctly American brand of autocracy.
Deepening our understanding of prominent public moments, Schiff reveals the private struggles, the internal conflicts, and the triumphs of courage that came with defending the republic against a lawless president—but also the slow surrender of people that he had worked with and admired to the dangerous immorality of a president engaged in an historic betrayal of his office. Schiff’s fight for democracy is one of the great dramas of our time, told by the man who became the president’s principal antagonist. It is a story that began with Trump but does not end with him, taking us through the disastrous culmination of the presidency and Schiff’s account of January 6, 2021, and how the antidemocratic forces Trump unleashed continue to define his party, making the future of democracy in America more uncertain than ever.
“Engaging and informative . . . a manual for how to probe and question power, how to hold leaders accountable in a time of diminishing responsibility.”— The Washington Post
With a new afterword by the author
In the years leading up to the election of Donald Trump, Congressman Adam Schiff had already been sounding the alarm over the resurgence of autocracy around the world, and the threat this posed to the United States. But as he led the probe into Donald Trump’s Russia and Ukraine-related abuses of presidential power, Schiff came to the terrible conclusion that the principal threat to American democracy now came from within.
In Midnight in Washington , Schiff argues that the Trump presidency has so weakened our institutions and compromised the Republican Party that the peril will last for years, requiring unprecedented vigilance against the growing and dangerous appeal of authoritarianism. The congressman chronicles step-by-step just how our democracy was put at such risk, and traces his own path to meeting the crisis—from serious prosecutor, to congressman with an expertise in national security and a reputation for bipartisanship, to liberal lightning rod, scourge of the right, and archenemy of a president. Schiff takes us inside his team of impeachment managers and their desperate defense of the Constitution amid the rise of a distinctly American brand of autocracy.
Deepening our understanding of prominent public moments, Schiff reveals the private struggles, the internal conflicts, and the triumphs of courage that came with defending the republic against a lawless president—but also the slow surrender of people that he had worked with and admired to the dangerous immorality of a president engaged in an historic betrayal of his office. Schiff’s fight for democracy is one of the great dramas of our time, told by the man who became the president’s principal antagonist. It is a story that began with Trump but does not end with him, taking us through the disastrous culmination of the presidency and Schiff’s account of January 6, 2021, and how the antidemocratic forces Trump unleashed continue to define his party, making the future of democracy in America more uncertain than ever.
- GenresPoliticsNonfiction
544 pages, Paperback
Published August 16, 2022
3 people are currently reading
42 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
June 25, 2024
Absolutely phenomenal. No qualms.
May 20, 2024
A STUNNING AND DEVASTING OVERVIEW/SUMMARY OF THE TRUMP PRESIDENCY
Adam Bennett Schiff is a Democrat who has represented California's 28th congressional district since 2013. He wrote in the Prologue to this 2021 book, “We made Donald Trump possible. We the voters, yes, but we in Congress even more so. He would not have been able to batter and break so many of our democratic norms had we not let him, had we not been capable of endless rationalization, had we not forgotten why we came to office in the first place, had we not been afraid. How does that happen? … I set out to write a book about what I witnessed at that very human level, about the friendships I lost with colleagues on the other side of the aisle that I had long worked with and admired, about their failings and my own, about the heroism of people I had never met but who would enter my life and change it…” (Pg. xv-xvi)
He also said in the Prologue about Trump’s first impeachment trial, “as I walked to the lectern, I suddenly understood… that this was the central question: Why should he be removed? He was the president of their party. He was putting conservative judges on the court. He was lowering their taxes. Why remove him?... I should have known better. For the past three years, Republicans had confided… their serious misgivings about the President…And it became clear that many Republicans felt someone needed to do it… even if they couldn’t, or wouldn’t. And the question wasn’t so much ‘Why should he be removed?’ as ‘Why should I be the one to remove him? Why should I risk … my position of power and influence, my career and future? Why should I?’” (Pg. xiii)
He recounts that during the January 6th insurrection, when members of Congress were in hiding, “a Republican member said to me… ‘I know these people, I can talk to them, I can talk my way through them. You’re in a whole different category.’ … At first I was oddly touched… But by then, I had been receiving death threats for years, and that feeling soon gave way to another: If these Republican members hadn’t joined their president in falsely attacking me for four years, I wouldn’t need to be worried about my security, none of us would.” (Pg. 6)
He continues, “At around three in the morning, we voted on the baseless objections to the Pennsylvania electors. One hundred thirty-eight Republican members of the House… as well as seven Republican senators, voted to reject the votes of millions of Pennsylvanians. Impervious to logic, Republican members still maintained that the ballots were fraudulent even though they themselves had been elected on the very same ballots… consistency mattered very little when it was weighed against ambition and the desire to keep power.” (Pg. 16)
He summarizes, “I could not help but be struck by the conviction or these insurrectionists; they really believed the election had been solen, they were completely taken in by the president’s big lie…. Relentlessly repeated and amplified by a complicit right-wing media. It infuriated me … that many of the Republicans in Congress continued to push that lie, because, unlike the insurrectionists, my colleagues had to know it was a lie. In that way, they were as culpable as anyone for the tragic events of January 6…” (Pg. 17)
He observed, “Evidence of illicit contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia was now coming to light every week and sometimes several times a day. In a healthy democracy, that would have resulted in a growing and bipartisan imperative to uncover the truth. But that required Republicans to put the interest of the country first, rather than their party affiliation… With every new discovery, the degree of Republican obstructionism only grew, and by the summer of 2017, it was clear that as long as Donald Trump was in the White House, it would be harder and harder to find people of conscience in his party.” (Pg. 137-138)
He notes, “the metamorphosis of the GOP under Trump had … [put] me in direct and often daily conflict with an American president who lavished praise on dictators, alienated our closest allies… lined his pockets with the fruits of his office, and colluded with a foreign adversary to undermine our election… His actions did not reflect Republican values, at least not as a generation of Republicans had expressed them. Trump learned to inflame his base by casting his own critics as the enemy… It was a political tactic that … [was] the hallmark of autocrats everywhere.” (Pg. 160)
He says of the Mueller Report, “Almost three weeks after release of his summary, [Attorney General] Bill Barr was still withholding the Mueller Report from Congress and the public… and I had little way to counter the false narrative that he and the president were pounding into the public consciousness day after day… As I opened the Mueller report, one of the first things I noticed was that Mueller had written his own summary, and one very different from Barr’s… No wonder Mueller’s team had been so furious. Barr’s summary---and his press conference---was replete with falsehoods… The weeks Bill Barr spent misrepresenting the report before it was public, amplified endlessly by the president and right-wing media, had been spectacularly successful. The false narrative of ‘no collusion, no obstruction’ had sunk in, in indelible as if it had been written by Mueller himself.” (Pg. 183-184)
Of Trump’s infamous phone call to Ukraine President Zelensky, he comments, “The ease of Trump’s corruption was tunning. I couldn’t get over how overt the president had been about seeking dirt on his rival, and how often he connected his ‘favor’ with the requests that Zelensky was making. Zelensky wanted military support… and Trump brings up the investigations. Over and over, Trump tells Zelensky to talk to Guiliani---his personal attorney. The references to Barr were equally numerous and troubling… the attorney general of the United States was being used as the president’s personal lawyer and consigliere…” (Pg. 220)
He notes, “The impeachment inquiry into Donald J. Trump was different from prior impeachments in one key respect—in both the Clinton and Nixon impeachments, an independent counsel or special prosecutor had been appointed to conduct the investigative work… Here, Barr’s Justice Department had not only declined to appoint an independent counsel but also refused to … allow the inspector general to do so… the attorney general represented Trump’s interests alone.” (Pg. 258)
He recounts, “On December 17, the day before the House vote to impeach … Trump sent a long personal letter to the Speaker, accusing her of an ‘illegal, partisan attempted coup.’ … Reading this letter, I was struck once again at how unwell a man the president was, and what a danger he posed to the country… because he seemed so unbalanced mentally. What kind of person in a responsible position writes a letter like that? Could he really have his finger on the nuclear button?” (Pg. 335)
He turns to the impeachment hearings themselves, and “Ken Starr, the independent counsel in the Clinton impeachment investigation, who decried an ‘age of impeachment’… with no sense of irony or self-awareness… I was incredulous. Was the man who pursued Bill Clinton with such a messianic zeal over an extramarital affair really going to lecture the Senate on the perils of impeachment? Yes, he was.” (Pg. 394)
He recalls, “Of all the iconic images of the period, the one that stands out most vividly for me is that of Donald Trump standing in front of St. John’s Church, holding a Bible… Peaceful protesters had been gassed and beaten to put up fencing nearby, while Trump made his way to the church… Trump was accompanied by … General Mark Milley, who wore full combat fatigues, a tangible demonstration of the president’s threat to use military force to quell the protests nationwide. In that one obscene image… one sees the entire Trump presidency: a skilled contrivance, a desecration of that which is holy, and a dangerous projection of power divorced from both principle and the law.” (Pg. 427)
He notes, “Knowing that it would take days to count al of the absentee ballots, and that many of those late votes would come from Democrats, Trump began predicting that he would win on election day, but that the election would then be stolen from him. Trump donor turned postmaster general Louis DeJoy heavily cut overtime for postal workers and took postal sorting machines offline, jeopardizing the timely delivery and return of absentee ballots. Trump was setting the stage for a contested result… Asked… whether he would ‘commit … for a peaceful transfer of power,’ Trump refused to do so. ‘Get rid of the ballots and … there won’t be a transfer, frankly. There will be a continuation.’ There would be no continuation, but then, there would be no peaceful transfer of power either.” (Pg. 448-449)
He laments, “Looking back on these events, I am struck not only by the inevitability of the violent insurrection, but by how perilously close Trump came to overthrowing the American government and remaining in office without benefit of being elected… The brutal assault on the Capital was never going to succeed in permanently stopping Congress from certifying the results, but only because the House was in Democratic hands. What if Kevin McCarthy had been Speaker, and the majority of the Youse had voted as he did to overturn the decision of the majority of Americans” We came so close to losing our democracy. So very, very close.” (Pg. 453)
He summarizes, “What if Trump had been just a little smarter, a little more competent or capable, with an agenda beyond his own self-aggrandizement, and had delivered on his promises or actually cared about the lives of the people who voted for him? … he might have gained such a stranglehold on our country that he would have obtained another four years and little of our democracy would have been left…Trump marginalized the free press and caused millions of Americans to distrust it. He politicized our intelligence agencies… He used the Justice Department as his personal law firm to shield him from criminal liability and as a sword to go after his enemies… And no institution suffered more under the Trump presidency than Congress, which saw its oversight powers emasculated and its impeachment power rendered obsolete.” (Pg. 465)
This is a powerful, often frightening, memoir of the Trump years, that will be “must reading” for anyone studying contemporary American politics.
Adam Bennett Schiff is a Democrat who has represented California's 28th congressional district since 2013. He wrote in the Prologue to this 2021 book, “We made Donald Trump possible. We the voters, yes, but we in Congress even more so. He would not have been able to batter and break so many of our democratic norms had we not let him, had we not been capable of endless rationalization, had we not forgotten why we came to office in the first place, had we not been afraid. How does that happen? … I set out to write a book about what I witnessed at that very human level, about the friendships I lost with colleagues on the other side of the aisle that I had long worked with and admired, about their failings and my own, about the heroism of people I had never met but who would enter my life and change it…” (Pg. xv-xvi)
He also said in the Prologue about Trump’s first impeachment trial, “as I walked to the lectern, I suddenly understood… that this was the central question: Why should he be removed? He was the president of their party. He was putting conservative judges on the court. He was lowering their taxes. Why remove him?... I should have known better. For the past three years, Republicans had confided… their serious misgivings about the President…And it became clear that many Republicans felt someone needed to do it… even if they couldn’t, or wouldn’t. And the question wasn’t so much ‘Why should he be removed?’ as ‘Why should I be the one to remove him? Why should I risk … my position of power and influence, my career and future? Why should I?’” (Pg. xiii)
He recounts that during the January 6th insurrection, when members of Congress were in hiding, “a Republican member said to me… ‘I know these people, I can talk to them, I can talk my way through them. You’re in a whole different category.’ … At first I was oddly touched… But by then, I had been receiving death threats for years, and that feeling soon gave way to another: If these Republican members hadn’t joined their president in falsely attacking me for four years, I wouldn’t need to be worried about my security, none of us would.” (Pg. 6)
He continues, “At around three in the morning, we voted on the baseless objections to the Pennsylvania electors. One hundred thirty-eight Republican members of the House… as well as seven Republican senators, voted to reject the votes of millions of Pennsylvanians. Impervious to logic, Republican members still maintained that the ballots were fraudulent even though they themselves had been elected on the very same ballots… consistency mattered very little when it was weighed against ambition and the desire to keep power.” (Pg. 16)
He summarizes, “I could not help but be struck by the conviction or these insurrectionists; they really believed the election had been solen, they were completely taken in by the president’s big lie…. Relentlessly repeated and amplified by a complicit right-wing media. It infuriated me … that many of the Republicans in Congress continued to push that lie, because, unlike the insurrectionists, my colleagues had to know it was a lie. In that way, they were as culpable as anyone for the tragic events of January 6…” (Pg. 17)
He observed, “Evidence of illicit contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia was now coming to light every week and sometimes several times a day. In a healthy democracy, that would have resulted in a growing and bipartisan imperative to uncover the truth. But that required Republicans to put the interest of the country first, rather than their party affiliation… With every new discovery, the degree of Republican obstructionism only grew, and by the summer of 2017, it was clear that as long as Donald Trump was in the White House, it would be harder and harder to find people of conscience in his party.” (Pg. 137-138)
He notes, “the metamorphosis of the GOP under Trump had … [put] me in direct and often daily conflict with an American president who lavished praise on dictators, alienated our closest allies… lined his pockets with the fruits of his office, and colluded with a foreign adversary to undermine our election… His actions did not reflect Republican values, at least not as a generation of Republicans had expressed them. Trump learned to inflame his base by casting his own critics as the enemy… It was a political tactic that … [was] the hallmark of autocrats everywhere.” (Pg. 160)
He says of the Mueller Report, “Almost three weeks after release of his summary, [Attorney General] Bill Barr was still withholding the Mueller Report from Congress and the public… and I had little way to counter the false narrative that he and the president were pounding into the public consciousness day after day… As I opened the Mueller report, one of the first things I noticed was that Mueller had written his own summary, and one very different from Barr’s… No wonder Mueller’s team had been so furious. Barr’s summary---and his press conference---was replete with falsehoods… The weeks Bill Barr spent misrepresenting the report before it was public, amplified endlessly by the president and right-wing media, had been spectacularly successful. The false narrative of ‘no collusion, no obstruction’ had sunk in, in indelible as if it had been written by Mueller himself.” (Pg. 183-184)
Of Trump’s infamous phone call to Ukraine President Zelensky, he comments, “The ease of Trump’s corruption was tunning. I couldn’t get over how overt the president had been about seeking dirt on his rival, and how often he connected his ‘favor’ with the requests that Zelensky was making. Zelensky wanted military support… and Trump brings up the investigations. Over and over, Trump tells Zelensky to talk to Guiliani---his personal attorney. The references to Barr were equally numerous and troubling… the attorney general of the United States was being used as the president’s personal lawyer and consigliere…” (Pg. 220)
He notes, “The impeachment inquiry into Donald J. Trump was different from prior impeachments in one key respect—in both the Clinton and Nixon impeachments, an independent counsel or special prosecutor had been appointed to conduct the investigative work… Here, Barr’s Justice Department had not only declined to appoint an independent counsel but also refused to … allow the inspector general to do so… the attorney general represented Trump’s interests alone.” (Pg. 258)
He recounts, “On December 17, the day before the House vote to impeach … Trump sent a long personal letter to the Speaker, accusing her of an ‘illegal, partisan attempted coup.’ … Reading this letter, I was struck once again at how unwell a man the president was, and what a danger he posed to the country… because he seemed so unbalanced mentally. What kind of person in a responsible position writes a letter like that? Could he really have his finger on the nuclear button?” (Pg. 335)
He turns to the impeachment hearings themselves, and “Ken Starr, the independent counsel in the Clinton impeachment investigation, who decried an ‘age of impeachment’… with no sense of irony or self-awareness… I was incredulous. Was the man who pursued Bill Clinton with such a messianic zeal over an extramarital affair really going to lecture the Senate on the perils of impeachment? Yes, he was.” (Pg. 394)
He recalls, “Of all the iconic images of the period, the one that stands out most vividly for me is that of Donald Trump standing in front of St. John’s Church, holding a Bible… Peaceful protesters had been gassed and beaten to put up fencing nearby, while Trump made his way to the church… Trump was accompanied by … General Mark Milley, who wore full combat fatigues, a tangible demonstration of the president’s threat to use military force to quell the protests nationwide. In that one obscene image… one sees the entire Trump presidency: a skilled contrivance, a desecration of that which is holy, and a dangerous projection of power divorced from both principle and the law.” (Pg. 427)
He notes, “Knowing that it would take days to count al of the absentee ballots, and that many of those late votes would come from Democrats, Trump began predicting that he would win on election day, but that the election would then be stolen from him. Trump donor turned postmaster general Louis DeJoy heavily cut overtime for postal workers and took postal sorting machines offline, jeopardizing the timely delivery and return of absentee ballots. Trump was setting the stage for a contested result… Asked… whether he would ‘commit … for a peaceful transfer of power,’ Trump refused to do so. ‘Get rid of the ballots and … there won’t be a transfer, frankly. There will be a continuation.’ There would be no continuation, but then, there would be no peaceful transfer of power either.” (Pg. 448-449)
He laments, “Looking back on these events, I am struck not only by the inevitability of the violent insurrection, but by how perilously close Trump came to overthrowing the American government and remaining in office without benefit of being elected… The brutal assault on the Capital was never going to succeed in permanently stopping Congress from certifying the results, but only because the House was in Democratic hands. What if Kevin McCarthy had been Speaker, and the majority of the Youse had voted as he did to overturn the decision of the majority of Americans” We came so close to losing our democracy. So very, very close.” (Pg. 453)
He summarizes, “What if Trump had been just a little smarter, a little more competent or capable, with an agenda beyond his own self-aggrandizement, and had delivered on his promises or actually cared about the lives of the people who voted for him? … he might have gained such a stranglehold on our country that he would have obtained another four years and little of our democracy would have been left…Trump marginalized the free press and caused millions of Americans to distrust it. He politicized our intelligence agencies… He used the Justice Department as his personal law firm to shield him from criminal liability and as a sword to go after his enemies… And no institution suffered more under the Trump presidency than Congress, which saw its oversight powers emasculated and its impeachment power rendered obsolete.” (Pg. 465)
This is a powerful, often frightening, memoir of the Trump years, that will be “must reading” for anyone studying contemporary American politics.
August 6, 2023
best as audible at 1.2x speed...
Schiff narrates himself., so you need to like him, and he talks slow.
so much detail and his personal opinion about events leading up to Jan 6, hindsight, and the challenges in bringing truth to light and the fallibility of human character.
Schiff narrates himself., so you need to like him, and he talks slow.
so much detail and his personal opinion about events leading up to Jan 6, hindsight, and the challenges in bringing truth to light and the fallibility of human character.
January 23, 2023
Excellent and gripping, although about 50 pages too long
April 21, 2024
The inside view of Trump's first impeachment and the January 6th insurrection from the viewpoint of Adam Schiff, the lawmaker who led the first impeachment.
May 6, 2025
Hard to give a rating given the subject matter, author, and the political times in which we live. The book is well written and thought provoking.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews