The Most Depressing Book Talk I Have Ever Attended

What I learned from Rachael Bade and Karoun Demirjian. It's not pretty.

Photo by Mike Doherty on Unsplash

It’s been a busy semester so I had not read any excerpts of Rachael Bade and Karoun Demirjian’s Unchecked: The Untold Story Behind Congress's Botched Impeachments of Donald Trump. But Demirjian is a distinguished alum of the Fletcher School, so she and Bade came to Medford to chat about what they learned while covering both impeachments of Donald J. Trump.

How did it go? Let me put it this way. After the talk, as I was leaving, two of my students came up to me, bug-eyed, and asked, “What do we do?”

“About what?” I said.

“About the country! About our future!” they responded.

And in the moment, I had nothing.

That is how dispiriting Bade and Demirjian’s book talk was. Why was that? Well, I’m gonna leave the rest of this post for paying subscribers. Doomscrollers will have to pay to have their worst fears realized!