Meadows’ ex-aide back in limelight
Hutchinson’s book details quick rise from intern in Trump White House
WASHINGTON — Cassidy Hutchinson, now 26, dropped out of sight last year after she testified in damning detail in a nationally televised committee hearing about President Donald Trump’s actions during and after the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021.
Some 15 months later, the onetime staff member in Trump’s West Wing is heading back into the maelstrom with the publication of “Enough,” a memoir about her time as a top aide to Mark Meadows, Trump’s last chief of staff. On a recent Sunday morning, she spoke in the kitchen of her Washington high-rise with the blinds to her living room window open, a recent development in her reclusive life.
“I would like not to be a hermit,” she said. But, she added, “I am not a victim in any of this. I did what I did, and I knew what I was getting myself into.”
If anything, becoming a target of the right after publicly disclosing what she had learned in the White House was perhaps the least surprising thing that Hutchinson had encountered over the past three years. Some of her most vivid testimony to the Jan. 6 committee was her description of an enraged Trump hurling his plate of lunch across the room after hearing Attorney General William Barr say he saw no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 election.
“I grabbed a towel and started wiping the ketchup off of the wall to help the valet out,” Hutchinson testified.
Both in print and in the conversation in her high-rise, Hutchinson described a journey down a political rabbit hole that might have tested the psychological stamina of a more seasoned operative. It was one in which loyalty to Trump surmounted all else, to the point where White House staffers routinely laid “leak traps” in hopes of discovering who was feeding information to the media. Once Meadows asked Hutchinson if she would “take a bullet” for the president. Perhaps in the thigh, she nervously joked in reply.
It was, by her telling, an administration awash in paranoia, with Meadows and others refusing to dispose of daily litter in “burn bags” for fear that someone from the “deep state” might intercept the contents. Instead, she writes, Meadows burned so many documents in his fireplace in the final days of the Trump presidency that his wife complained to Hutchinson about how expensive it had become to dry clean the “bonfire” aroma from his suits.
For all its obsession with secrecy, the Trump White House was also strangely unpoliced, she writes, particularly in the waning days of the administration. On Jan. 15, 2021, Hutchinson encountered Mike Lindell, the conspiracy-minded My Pillow entrepreneur, roaming the building unescorted, declaring, “We can still win.”
But what most defined Hutchinson’s swift ascent and sudden estrangement were her two superiors, Meadows and Trump. Coming from a working-class and politically disengaged family in Pennington, N.J., Hutchinson was a college sophomore when she first attended a Trump rally in April 2017.
“I was maybe six rows from the stage,” she recalled, “and I was surrounded by all these people I felt I could relate to.” That included the president, whose coarse and boastful rhetoric sounded to her like her father, a self-employed landscaper and aficionado of “The Apprentice,” Trump’s long-running reality show.
Even today, Hutchinson seems somewhat at pains to understand how she fell so deeply into the sway of a president she now describes as “dangerous to our democracy.” To Jonathan Karp, president of Simon & Schuster, which is publishing “Enough,” Hutchinson’s continued inner conflicts are understandable: “This book is about trauma and about trying to overcome trauma. And it was written in the white heat of the moment.”
Hutchinson landed in the White House after two internships on Capitol Hill and then a third in the White House Office of Legislative Affairs, where her organizational skills caught the attention of senior staffers. Straight out of college in June 2019, Hutchinson, then 22, became a White House legislative staff assistant.
Two months into the job, she found herself in conversation with a key Trump ally on the Hill, Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., then the House Freedom Caucus chair, who hugged her and took down her personal contact information. The two began to talk almost daily.
When Meadows became Trump’s chief of staff in March 2020, he asked Hutchinson to join him in the West Wing. “You’re going to be my eyes and ears,” he said, adding, “I want you with me all the time.”
By her account and that of former colleagues, Hutchinson zealously dedicated herself to her two bosses. She could be brusque to junior aides who did not perform up to her standards. She readily excused Trump’s shortcomings, blaming herself and other staffers for his tantrums, all the way up to the end of his presidency.
“In my mind at the time,” she said, “I felt like Jan. 6 largely happened because we didn’t do enough to stop it.”