Psychopath in Chief
The American Prospect
Psychopath in Chief
Today’s ‘smoking gun’ testimony: Trump was fine with smoking guns as long as they weren’t aimed at him.
by Harold Meyerson
June 28, 2022
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But Trump didn’t merely encourage violence on January 6th. He wanted to lead it, and he was violent himself. Following his speech on the Ellipse, he got into the presidential limo and insisted he be taken to the Capitol, to join with the rioters and we don’t know what else. Try somehow to keep the electoral votes from being tallied? Whatever his plan, he objected furiously when Robert Engel, the head of his Secret Service detail, told him that he couldn’t go to Capitol Hill; it simply wasn’t safe.
Trump’s response, as Tony Ornato, Trump’s deputy chief of staff for his personal security, told Hutchinson with Engel beside him, was to point out that he was “the fucking president,” seize the steering wheel to turn the limo toward the Capitol, and when Engel reached over to remove his hand from the wheel, to choke Engel to make him stop. Engel prevailed—fortunately, if you’re one of those who believes in democracy, the rule of law, and that sort of thing.
Such spasms of rage, apparently, were nothing new in the Oval Office. When Trump saw Attorney General Bill Barr’s interview with the Associated Press on December 1, 2020, in which Barr said the Justice Department had found no evidence of vote rigging or voter fraud that called into question Joe Biden’s victory, he hurled his lunch across the presidential dining room, smashing his dishes and covering the walls with ketchup. (Hutchinson helped clean up the mess.) On other occasions, she testified, he also broke dishes and yanked his tablecloth off his dining room table, scattering his meals to the four walls.
If Trump exhibited all the restraint of a two-year-old with a particularly messy diaper, Hutchinson’s immediate boss, chief of staff Meadows, exhibited a sangfroid to predictions and actual outbursts of insurrectionary violence that would put a corpse to shame. Told by security officials of the coming violence, warned by the White House counsels of the disastrous consequences of Trump’s inviting it, and given a running account of the mayhem at the Capitol on January 6th, Meadows seldom even looked up from his cellphone, said Hutchinson, who was with him almost continuously during those days. And as the riot progressed, and most of the muck-a-mucks of Trumpworld called either Trump or Meadows to implore Trump to put a stop to the violence at the Capitol, she added, Meadows’s suggestion was that Trump should blame antifa for the attack, though as things grew steadily more hairy, he eventually counseled Trump to gently suggest his armed legion should leave.
When Hutchinson concluded her jaw-dropping account with the revelation that both Meadows and Rudy Giuliani had asked Trump for pardons, her interrogator, Rep. Liz Cheney, revealed some messages the committee had received from actual, potential, and reluctant witnesses (and refuseniks as well), none of whose identities were disclosed. These witnesses and non-witnesses relayed the threats they’d received if they testified and told the truth about Trump. The former president, they were told, was reading everyone’s testimony for signs of betrayal, whether real or incipient.
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https://prospect.org/politics/psychopath-in-chief/
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