The Memo: Cassidy Hutchinson drops hammer on Donald Trump

A young woman previously unknown to most Americans delivered a searing indictment of former President Trump on Capitol Hill Tuesday.

Cassidy Hutchinson, once a senior aide to Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, laid out a vivid succession of scenes that, if taken at face value, demonstrated Trump’s manifest unfitness for office.

Hutchinson, speaking at a public hearing of the House select committee investigating the events of Jan. 6, 2021, relayed how Trump had wanted security magnetometers removed before his bellicose speech at the Ellipse on the morning of the riot.

Trump’s complaint was that the metal detectors were preventing people with weapons from coming in and filling out the crowd. Hutchinson recalled that Trump said “something to the effect of, ‘I don’t effing care that they have weapons. They’re not here to hurt me.’”

Later that day, she was told that an irate Trump had tried to seize the wheel of his vehicle, tussling with a Secret Service agent, upon being told that he could not go to the Capitol.

NBC News reported after Hutchinson’s appearance that the Secret Service agent and the driver of the limousine were willing to testify under oath, asserting that they were not assaulted and that Trump had never sought to grab the steering wheel.

But Hutchinson also confirmed earlier press reports that the president had given Meadows the impression that he was supportive of the chants of some rioters to hang then-Vice President Mike Pence.

Pence had resisted fierce pressure from Trump and his allies to join their effort to overthrow President Biden’s victory in the 2020 election.

By Hutchinson’s account, when White House counsel Pat Cipollone urged Meadows to do more to quell the riot that was in full cry at the Capitol, Meadows replied, “You heard him, Pat. He thinks Mike deserves it. He doesn’t think they’re doing anything wrong.”

A significant swath of the public — 58 percent in a recent ABC News-Ipsos poll — believes Trump should face criminal charges for his role in the insurrection. His incitement of those events has already made him the only president in American history to be impeached for a second time.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) is pursuing its own criminal probe. It is far from certain that the House select committee will even make a criminal referral to the DOJ from the evidence it has developed.

Hutchinson’s evidence seemed less focused on the legal case, however, than in painting a portrait of Trump that was detailed and damning, even if familiar in its broad strokes.

Drawing on her experiences working only steps from the Oval Office, she portrayed a vengeful, narcissistic and perpetually profane commander in chief.

One of the most dramatic scenes she described came well before Jan. 6.

In early December 2020, The Associated Press published an interview with then-Attorney General William Barr. In it, Barr said that the DOJ had been looking into the allegations of election fraud pushed by Trump and his allies. It had “not seen fraud” that could have affected the election’s outcome, Barr said.

Once the interview appeared, Hutchinson recalled noise coming from the president’s dining room in the West Wing. A short time later, she went down the hall and, invited in by a valet, noticed “ketchup dripping down the wall.” The valet told her that Trump, enraged by Barr’s comments in the interview, had “thrown his lunch against the wall.”

Asked by the committee’s vice chair, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), whether this was the only time such a thing had occurred, Hutchinson said it was not.

“There were several times,” she said, “that I was aware of him either throwing dishes or flipping the tablecloth,” sending dishes crashing to the floor.

Trump, a fierce defender of his public image and notoriously thin-skinned about anything resembling mockery, blasted back at Hutchinson while her testimony was taking place.

The former president said that he was barely aware of Hutchinson but that he had “heard very negative things about her,” including that she was “a total phony.”

He also claimed that Hutchinson wanted to go to Florida with his team after he left office.

“I personally turned her request down,” Trump wrote on his favored social network, Truth Social. “Why did she want to go with us if she felt we were so terrible?”

Those statements will doubtless be taken as fact by Trump’s remaining legions of supporters.

The former president remains the clear front-runner to win the 2024 GOP nomination if he wants it. Polls consistently show he is viewed favorably by roughly four-in-five Republican voters.

But it would be tough for any open-minded viewers of Hutchinson’s testimony — if they exist — to dismiss her as vindictive.

She testified, for example, about being proud of what she considered “the good things [Trump] had done for the country” — a pride that she said made his rhetoric and behavior around Jan. 6 even more frustrating.

Hutchinson’s portrait of her former boss Meadows was almost as damaging as her details about Trump.

Meadows appeared an uninterested and blasé figure in her testimony, scrolling through his phone as American democracy teetered.

It’s quite possible that Hutchinson’s testimony changes no minds at all.

Most Americans already know what they think about Jan. 6 and Trump’s role in it.

But the House panel’s stated purpose is, in part, simply to gather the facts.

Hutchinson helped them do that on Tuesday.

The facts she related painted a compelling and ugly picture of Trump and his White House.

The Memo is a reported column by Niall Stanage.

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