Today’s ‘smoking gun’ testimony: Trump was fine with smoking guns as long as they weren’t aimed at him.

J. Scott Applewhite/AP Photo

Cassidy Hutchinson, former aide to Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, testifies before the January 6th Committee, June 28, 2022, on Capitol Hill.

Now we know why the January 6th Committee wanted to hold a previously unscheduled hearing today: More devastating and weighty testimony has never been heard before in an official proceeding on these shores. John Dean’s sworn statements to the Watergate Committee about Richard Nixon’s misdeeds must now take a back seat to the testimony that former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson delivered earlier today.

As the closest aide to Mark Meadows, Trump’s fourth and final White House chief of staff, Hutchinson was privy to Trump’s deranged determination to stay in office, which, she related, took the forms not just of his encouragement of a lethally armed mob to attack the Capitol, but his own attack on the head of his Secret Service detail when he refused to let Trump join them on the Capitol grounds.

Trump, she testified, was upset that some of the crowd assembled to hear him speak on the Ellipse on January 6th remained outside the rally grounds because they couldn’t get through magnetometers with their arsenal of weapons. “I don’t fucking care if they have weapons,” Trump told his security people and Hutchinson, “they’re not here to harm me.” Those weapons, he made clear, were intended for those in the Capitol, most appropriately for Mike Pence.

When staffers asked Trump later that day to condemn the rioters’ chant of “Hang Mike Pence,” Meadows told Hutchinson, she testified, that Trump “thinks Mike deserves it. He doesn’t think that they’re doing anything wrong.”

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.

Trump didn’t merely encourage violence on January 6th. He wanted to lead it, and he was violent himself.

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.

Such proceedings having progressed to the stage of witness intimidation, we now have to keep an eye out for jury tampering when the Trumpites go to trial.

And with each passing hearing, it’s getting harder and harder for the Department of Justice not to bring Meadows, Giuliani, and the whole fetid band of conspirators—not to mention Donald Trump himself—to trial. Sending an armed mob to the Capitol to deter the counting of electoral votes, attacking your own Secret Service detail in your determination to lead that mob, is the basis for a pretty good conspiracy charge, and a good deal more. Treason?

Whatever the eventual charge, if any, the hearings are making overwhelmingly clear to any whose eyes haven’t been blinded by Rupert Murdoch’s paid prevaricators that Donald Trump was and remains an enemy of the state, a clear and present danger to American democracy, and a deranged, violent sociopath. Okay, we knew that, but now we really know that.

Harold Meyerson is editor at large of The American Prospect.

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