Preview before tonight’s #Maddow live interview, read Robert Draper article:
#CassidyHutchinson, now 26, dropped out of sight last year after she testified in damning detail in a nationally televised cmte hearing about Trump’s actions during & after… #Jan6, 2021. Facing blistering #SocialMedia attacks from #Trump & #threats from his supporters, she retreated from DC & cut off contacts w/her fmr WH world.
“I would like not to be a hermit,” she said. But, she added, “I am not a victim in any of this. I did what I did & I knew what I was getting myself into.”
If anything, becoming a #target of the #right after publicly disclosing what she had learned in the #WhiteHouse was perhaps the least surprising thing that #Hutchinson had encountered over the past 3yrs.
Some of her most vivid testimony to the #Jan6 cmte was her description of an enraged #Trump hurling his plate of lunch across the room after hearing AG #BillBarr say he saw #NoEvidence of widespread #fraud in the #2020election.
“I grabbed a towel & started wiping the ketchup off of the wall to help the valet out,” #Hutchinson testified.
Both in print & in the conversation in her high rise, #Hutchinson described a journey down a #political rabbit hole that might have tested the #psychological stamina of a more seasoned operative. It was one in which loyalty to #Trump surmounted all else, to the point where WH staffers routinely laid “leak traps” in hopes of discovering who was feeding info to #media. Once #Meadows asked Hutchinson if she’d “take a bullet” for the president. (Perhaps in the thigh, she nervously joked in reply.)
For all its obsession w/ #secrecy, the #Trump WH was also strangely unpoliced, she writes, particularly in the waning days of the admin. On Jan 15, 2021, #Hutchinson encountered #MikeLindell, the #conspiracy-minded My Pillow entrepreneur, roaming the building unescorted, declaring, “We can still win.”
…But what most defined #Hutchinson’s swift ascent & sudden estrangement were her 2 superiors, #Meadows & #Trump. Coming from a working-class & politically disengaged family in Pennington, NJ, Hutchinson was a college sophomore when she first attended a Trump rally in April 2017.
“I was maybe 6 rows from the stage,” she recalled, “& I was surrounded by all these people I felt I could relate to.” That included the president, whose coarse & boastful rhetoric sounded to her like her father, a self-employed landscaper & aficionado of “The Apprentice,” #Trump’s long-running reality show.
Even today, #Hutchinson seems somewhat at pains to understand how she fell so deeply in the sway of a president she now describes as “#dangerous to our #democracy.”
To Jonathan Karp, the president of Simon & Schuster, which is publishing “#Enough,” #Hutchinson’s continued inner #conflicts are understandable: “This book is about #trauma, & about trying to #overcome trauma. And it was written in the white heat of the moment.”
Cassidy #Hutchinson: from politically disengaged college sophomore in 2017 to aide to the White House Chief of Staff in 2020.
I wonder what her bosses saw in her that merited such a meteoric ascent. Probably what Rudy was looking for under her skirt, the damn incompetent pervy morons.
#Trump Risked Lives During #COVID19 For the Trumpiest Of Reasons
Originally, as you recall, it was believed that Trump didn’t want to wear a mask because it made him look less macho than he wanted. That was the urban legend for a while. But #Hutchinson reveals that the real reason is that he didn’t want to smear his makeup. This is just like when he didn’t want to go out in France, to visit a WWII memorial, because it was raining and he didn’t want to get his hair wet.
> Expanding on an excerpt from her new memoir, the White House aide turned Trump whistleblower tells PEOPLE why she won't feed into the "vitriol" that has taken hold of American politics in recent years
The Totally Not Boring Story of the Most Normal Republican Presidential Candidate
Asa Hutchinson was a GOP star. Then came Donald Trump.
In another era, Asa Hutchinson — whose resume includes stints as a Congressman and U.S. attorney, leading roles at the DEA and Homeland Security, and two terms as a popular red-state governor — would have been a shoo-in for the first debate of a Republican primary, if not an instant contender for the nomination.