From Hutchinson, we learned Trump’s plan to join the Capitol turmoil and toddler crisis he threw in The Beast, the presidential limo, when told he couldn’t go. go. “I’m President Effing, take me to the Capitol now,” Trump reportedly said. Robert Engel, head of Trump’s security service, insisted they return to the White House. According to Hutchinson, to whom Deputy Chief of Staff Tony Ornato told the story in the presence of Engel, “The president reached out to the front of the vehicle to grab the steering wheel. Mr. Engel grabbed his arm and said, “Sir, you need to take your hand off the wheel.” Trump lunged at Engel’s collarbone with his free hand. This Trump story gives him additional center stage in the Jan. 6 riots: If there was any doubt before, we now know that he wanted to personally join the fray on Capitol Hill and overturn the election.
From Hutchinson, we learned again that Trump shared the view, expressed by some chanting rioters, that Vice President Mike Pence deserved to be hanged. This former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and chief of staff Mark Meadows asked for a pardon on January 6. That Trump wanted to forgive the rioters in the video speech he finally gave that day, telling them to go home. It is not criminal to want a pardon, but to want it before being found guilty of anything implies a guilty mind.
And we learned of another toddler’s crisis that Trump launched on December 1, 2020 at the White House – throwing a dish on the dining room wall and smearing it with ketchup after receiving a report that Attorney General Bill Barr had determined that there had been no voter fraud. “There were several times during my tenure with the chief of staff that I was aware of [Trump] either tossing dishes or turning the tablecloth over to let the entire contents of the table fall to the floor and likely break or go all over the place,” Hutchinson said. Is there a better metaphor for the Trump administration?
Thanks to Trump’s shamelessness superpower – and on top Republicans wrongly reject Hutchinson’s words hearsay – these new revelations will not stand until we break the spell he has held over the nation for so long.
Hutchinson’s testimony won’t be powerful enough on its own to undo Trump’s hex – it was just an afternoon TV interview, and Trump weathered the worst . But coming as it does from a White House insider and loyalist who worked just a 10-second walk from the Oval Office and appears to be a credible witness, the session damaged the Trump Building in ways that a thousand editorials and a hundred political speeches could not. Without any apparent animosity or theatrics, Hutchinson shrewdly sketched the portrait many of us have in mind of the former president: a belligerent idiot who only cares about himself; a porcupine who will do anything to maintain power; and a messy kid who breaks when he doesn’t get what he wants and leaves us to clean up after him.
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What are the odds that Cassidy Hutchinson has a brother named Kerouac? Send beat poetry and cheer pills to [email protected]. No new email alert subscriptions are honored at this time. My Twitter feeding benefits from a good food fight once in a while. My RSS feed thinks Trump should have driven The Beast to the Capitol himself.
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