Ex-aide delivers damning blows
Former US president Donald Trump has had some bad days recently, but perhaps none worse than yesterday, when former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson delivered the most alarming testimony yet about his behaviour during the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol.
Her testimony before the House select committee’s January 6 investigation probably left the former president more vulnerable legally, though ultimately that will be for the Department of Justice to decide.
Equally important, it threatens to further weaken him politically, despite the hold he has retained on much of the Republican Party’s base. More Republicans will be asking themselves if this is the person they want as their nominee in 2024.
Trump’s presidency and its aftermath – his actions in office, and his perpetuation of the lie that the 2020 election was rife with fraud and therefore stolen – have left many Americans without the ability to be shocked or surprised, whether through fatigue or mere disinterest. In measured and careful language, Hutchinson punctured that indifference.
Rarely have Americans heard such descriptions of the country’s highest elected official, descriptions made more powerful because they came from a 25-year-old who had served the president loyally but who yesterday acted courageously in service to the country instead.
There are always caveats after the kind of testimony Hutchinson delivered. She did not undergo crossexamination. The accounts of others whose names she invoked and who might contradict or refute her accounts have not been heard publicly, in large part because some – like former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, who was Hutchinson’s boss – have refused to cooperate fully with the committee.
Trump dismissed Hutchinson as a ‘‘phony’’ and someone he hardly knew, though he has done that frequently with people he knows well but whose words have cut into his ego.
Hutchinson provided the most intimate detail of what was happening inside the confined quarters that make up the West Wing on January 6, and the days before – who said what to whom; who knew what when; who did or did not act responsibly; who sought to temper the president and who didn’t.
The portrait drawn by Hutchinson, who served as a senior aide to Meadows, was of a president out of control on January 6. A president who smashed a dish in his personal dining room, splattering the wall with ketchup; a president who physically grappled with the head of his Secret Service detail when told he could not go to the Capitol with the mob; a president whose behaviour on that day led to the resignations from several senior administration officials, and talk within his Cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment to the US Constitution to remove him from operational control of his office.
More alarming, Hutchison recalled that Trump had expressed solidarity with those in the mob who were calling for Vice President Mike Pence to be hanged for failing to try to stop the ratification of the electoral count. And he wanted to pardon those who attacked the Capitol, until he was talked out of it.
Her portrait of Meadows was of a complacent chief of staff, unwilling to confront the president unless absolutely forced to do so, a senior official who was described multiple times as slouched on his couch, scrolling through his cellphone.
Her testimony was delivered without noticeable emotion or even nervousness. She was steady throughout, under the most pressure-packed of conditions.
Given how the committee has operated to date, no one should doubt that more revelations are coming – and that Trump will remain the principal focus of the investigation.