Another kind of patriot
Whether you think former President Donald Trump is a threat to democracy, a gravely misunderstood populist genius or something in between, surely we can all agree that the testimony given by former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson was lucid and detailed, and that it required considerable bravery for her to deliver it. I mean, we can all agree on that, right? There will be outliers: Trump has called Hutchinson a liar who’s miffed that she didn’t get recruited for the relocated post-presidential court in Mar-a-Lago, while others have cited anonymous sources issuing carefully worded kinda-denials in response to the story that Trump lunged for both the wheel of the presidential vehicle carrying him away from the Jan. 6 rally and the neck area of the Secret Service agent after being refused a ride to the U.S. Capitol, where Trump wanted to join the protesters who were about to trash it.
With the desperation of people grabbing for flotsam as their lifeboat disappears beneath the foam, these critics have pointed out that Hutchinson’s testimony was mere hearsay — just some young woman’s recollection of an anecdote she was told shortly after the limo ride by thenWhite House deputy operations director Tony Ornato in the presence of Secret Service agent Robert Engel.
Ornato is a Trump loyalist, who according to the committee’s Rep. Liz Cheney and former colleagues, suffers from a sometimes hazy memory regarding certain topics. It’s unclear if he or Engel have been reinterviewed under oath by the committee about the limo incident. Readers should listen to Hutchinson’s account and assess for themselves if it sounds like hype. But — and I write this fully aware that I just devoted two and a half paragraphs to this episode — does it really matter?
The things that Hutchinson was a direct witness to, including her boss Mark Meadows’ blithe response to the news that violence was brewing on Jan. 6, has been damaging enough to the former administration. Her account of what happened in the White House that day has already moved former White House counsel Pat Cipollone to agree to testify before the committee, albeit under conditions that will allow him to keep his conversations with Trump private and won’t require him to appear on video.
Hutchinson came to the White House after working for U.S. Rep. Steve Scalise, who responded to her testimony by tut-tutting over “salacious headlines,” and Sen. Ted Cruz, who doesn’t seem to have commented on her appearance in any way — which is not surprising, as it might have sucked energy away from the Texas lawmaker’s flame war with “Sesame Street”
regarding Elmo getting vaccinated for COVID.
Which brings us to Rep. Elise Stefanik, who in many ways can be seen as a fast-forward dystopian political version of what Hutchinson could have become. Separated in age by a decade, their early-career resumes are extraordinarily similar, right down to their both serving as aides to White House chiefs of staff and on Capitol Hill.
Stefanik’s transformation from moderate conservative to fire-breathing MAGA acolyte has paid off by making her the No. 3 Republican in the House. Hutchinson’s recent shift from Trump worker bee to key witness, in contrast, has already resulted in her being smeared by trolls both named and anonymous. She has become one of those people whose name will kick loose associations in the brains of millions of Americans for many years. Ask yourself why someone would sign up for that kind of treatment, other than they believe it’s the patriotic thing to do.
The scorched-earth tactics of Hutchinson’s critics are familiar to Tim Miller, a former Republican operative who worked with Stefanik on the GOP’s post-2012 deep analysis of the reasons it lost that year’s presidential election. Miller just released “Why We Did It,” an insider’s account of how the party ended up with Trump, and how so many smart people accommodated and enabled him.
Miller’s portrait of Stefanik is devastating: “She represents the most kind of base justification that politicians have for doing any bad thing, which is just striving for power,” Miller told Politico in a comprehensive interview. “The shamelessness with which Elise did it has paid off for her to a level that I truly believe that she will be one of the most likely people to be named vice president if Donald Trump runs again.”
As with Cruz, it’s hard to find any comment from Stefanik on Hutchinson’s testimony beyond generic criticism of the Jan. 6 committee’s work as a tactical distraction from inflationary woes. (This rhetoric works in reverse.) Just minutes after Hutchinson left the stand, Stefanik tweeted out thanks to a local fan who had written a letter to the Daily Gazette praising her unwavering support of Trump.
Her campaign adviser Alex deGrasse — the kind of operative who pops up throughout Miller’s book — didn’t respond to a request for the congresswoman’s response to Hutchinson’s testimony. For those Trump faithful seeking some respite over the holiday weekend, silence seems to be golden.