Opinion: How Cassidy Hutchinson reached her breaking point

Editor’s Note: Nicole Hemmer is an associate professor of history and director of the Carolyn T. and Robert M. Rogers Center for the Study of the Presidency at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of “Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s” and cohosts the podcasts “Past Present” and “This Day in Esoteric Political History.” The views expressed in this commentary are her own. View more opinion on CNN.

Cassidy Hutchinson learned early in life that not everyone can be trusted.

After a brief prologue, her new memoir, “Enough,” opens with a happy childhood memory: 4 or 5 years old, her springer spaniel Abby by her side, Hutchinson sprints to meet her father as he returns home for work, jumping into his slow-rolling pickup truck and singing along to the radio. It is the only memory of this kind she shares about her father. The next memorable outing between them involves a dismayed Hutchinson watching her father and his friends shooting snapping turtles for sport. He mocks her for not being a warrior; she decides to become a vegetarian.

That sort of spine reappears now and then as Hutchinson, who rose to insta-fame in the summer of 2022 for her explosive testimony before the January 6 committee, hurtles into politics during her summers in college.

A first-generation college student at her second-choice school, Hutchinson quickly finds herself interning for Rep. Steve Scalise in the Republican House leadership office, then briefly in Sen. Ted Cruz’s Senate office and finally in the Office of Legislative Affairs in the Trump White House. She takes charge of schedules and contacts with a devoted work ethic and preternatural confidence, repeatedly putting a boundary-crossing Rep. Matt Gaetz in his place (“He chuckled and brushed his thumb across my chin,” she writes about an interaction with Gaetz after the first House impeachment vote; she would later work to block his communication with the White House.)

But when it came to working in the West Wing as a staffer for then-Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and being a regular presence in meetings with the president, things unfold differently. Her memoir may be titled “Enough,” but despite repeated warnings that she is embedded with some of the least trustworthy people in politics, it takes quite a long time for Hutchinson to reach her breaking point — a point that only comes after she has been abandoned and betrayed by nearly everyone she had come to trust. In a book that exposes the corrosive and corrupt inner workings of the Trump White House, which valued loyalty to Donald Trump above all else, Hutchinson’s own sense of loyalty proves to be her central flaw.

At least, the flaw she is most willing to put on the page. Still in her mid-20s, Hutchinson may be a bit too young — and a bit too close to her life-changing decision to testify against the former president and his team — to offer the sort of insight into her own motivations that usually fuels a memoir. The stories of her childhood are punctuated with traumatic episodes centering on her father, who taunts her while she’s pinned under a four-wheeler as a terrified young child, and later, after he and Hutchinson’s mother divorce, leaves a package containing a “gift” of what Hutchinson describes as “two deer hearts, still warm and dripping with blood.”

She recalls that “The Apprentice” was one of his favorite shows and that Trump was his hero, but never really explains how she then became a Trump loyalist. For a political memoir, her politics are largely absent, other than a sense that she sees herself, now at least, as a sort of Mitt Romney-John McCain Republican, wary of ideologues like Meadows despite her loyalty to him as her boss.

But it’s fair to say that most readers haven’t picked up “Enough” to better understand Hutchinson; they’ve come for the front-row seat into the meltdown of the Trump administration that her loyalty earned her. Much of that material is familiar — it made up the bulk of the testimony that made her famous — and yet there’s much new here as well that helps explain both Hutchinson’s choice to stay and adds detail to the lengths Trump and his team went to in their efforts to overturn the 2020 election (efforts for which many of the book’s main characters, including Trump and Meadows, have been indicted, pleading not guilty).

From the start, Hutchinson found herself in a mostly-male world where casual sexism thrived. At the Office of Legislative Affairs, she recounts being the only woman on the team. The people she worked for in both Congress and the White House were uniformly male.

Many of the men around her are paternalistic or creepy. At a dinner one night during her early days as an intern in Congress, Hutchinson writes that former House Speaker John Boehner admonished her for drinking a cranberry vodka and touched the ends of her hair: “Dark liquor or red wine only from now on. And lose the ponytail.”

Others saw her as a potential conquest. She writes that, during a convening at Camp David, Gaetz stopped by a cabin he believed was hers and tried to get her to escort him back to his own cabin, saying he was “lost.” Gaetz told MSNBC that he didn’t remember these incidents and claimed to have briefly dated and then remained friends with Hutchinson, who said, “I never dated Matt Gaetz.” Later, she alleges, in the middle of Trump’s pre-riot rally on January 6, Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani groped her. “I feel his frozen fingertips trail up my thigh,” she writes. (In a statement, a Giuliani adviser called Hutchinson’s assertion a “disgusting lie.”)

This sort of alleged harassment is not surprising at a White House led by a man who bragged that when he saw women he liked he could “grab them by the pussy” and whom a federal jury recently found responsible for sexually abusing writer E. Jean Carroll in the 1990s (which Trump has denied). But it speaks to the environment where Hutchinson worked, where loyalty meant enduring harassment and deflecting disrespect, rather than challenging the broader system.

And make no mistake: though Hutchinson would ultimately break from the Trump loyalists, loyalty and trust were just as important to her during her time in the White House. She was drawn to powerful figures who praised her, from Meadows to now-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to Trump (a trio she describes as caught up in “one of the most complicated three-way relationships in contemporary Republican politics”). They, in turn, found her loyalty and insights useful, so much so that the young woman was quickly welcomed into what Trump reportedly called “the circle of trust.”

To Trump loyalists, Hutchinson is responsible for breaking that trust. But after the insurrection, she says she was quickly pushed out of the circle. In the closing days of Trump’s presidency, a period in which Meadows was reportedly burning so many documents in his office fireplace that his wife complained he smelled like a bonfire, Meadows cautioned her that both he and Trump had their doubts about her. “The president thinks you’re disloyal. That you’re a leaker.” They were the two worst accusations a Trump staffer could face. And while she denied speaking to the press, her usefulness was at an end. In the days that followed, Trump, Meadows and McCarthy all stopped speaking to her.

Hutchinson comes to her breaking point late, and she does so surrounded, for the first time in the book, by women. Alyssa Farah Griffin, who worked in the Trump White House as director of strategic communications, helps connect Hutchinson to Liz Cheney, the Republican representative who broke with her party to lead the January 6 committee (for which she was repaid with a defeat in her next primary election).

At their urging, and inspired by the legacy of Watergate whistleblower Alexander Butterfield, Hutchinson says “enough.” And while she was pushed to that precipice by the behavior of older, more powerful people — and held on to her loyalty far longer than most readers likely would have — it was ultimately her decision to jump, an act of courage that far more people far older and more secure failed to do.

Hutchinson still expresses a deep sense of loyalty, though now it is to people like Cheney, and to the long line of whistleblowers that she has joined. And while that may bring with it some blind spots of its own, it will serve Hutchinson far better than her misplaced loyalties in the Trump White House.

For more CNN news and newsletters create an account at CNN.com