We must watch the ongoing hearings into what happened in Washington on January 6, 2021, not to hear more detail about Trumps’ malfeasance—we already know plenty about that—but to hear about the acts of courage some of those around him displayed that day and in coming forward now to testify. Two men have taken the Fifth rather than testify; none of the five women crucial to this investigation have sought this coward’s way out.
Today’s testimony was delivered in calm and thoughtful tones by Cassidy Hutchinson, chief aid to Chief of Staff Mike Meadows. A committed Republican and a team player, it clearly gave her no pleasure to buck the male hierarchy and come forward with her testimony.
She saw and heard, or overheard, about everything that happened in the West Wing of the White House on January 6th as well as long before and afterwards. She saw Trump’s temper tantrums, regular occurrences when he was thwarted by his staff; he threw plates against the wall, resulting in food running down. Begged by his staff and his children to say something to stop the rioting, having been informed that members of the mob had refused to go through security and were heavily armed with every kind of weapon, including spears fastened to the ends of rifles, he refused, and even when he was told of the chants, “Hang Mike Pence!” he observed that Pence perhaps deserved it.
But most striking was Huchinson’s account of Trump’s determined effort to get to Congress in order to join the mob, which he called “My people.” Told by many members of his staff, including security, that he should not go, he nevertheless got into his armored vehicle and told the driver to take him to the Capitol, while an aid urged him to return to the West Wing. When the driver, unnamed in Hutchinson’s testimony but surely one of the lowest members on the White House totem pole, turned back toward the White House, Trump reached over the seat and grabbed the steering wheel.
The driver said, “Take your hands on the wheel.” Those are the words that should have been said by many “important” members of his staff and the Republican Party during Trump’s disastrous reign.
Trump then attacked the man sitting beside him who had been urging him to turn back.
“Take your hands off the wheel.” If his Cabinet and Congress had done more than consider, following January 6th, invoking the 25th amendment to the Constitution which allows for the removal of a president who is clearly unfit due to mental illness or some other disability, we would have been spared the last ten days of Trump’s presidency and the slew of pardons he began immediately giving to the miscreants who had taken part in this miserable affair.
But they lacked the courage of the five women who have been crucial to this investigation, most recently, Cassidy Hutchinson.
Leave a Reply