Donald Trump broke the White House china and our democracy: ‘They’re not here to hurt me’
At this point, anyone who isn’t calling what happened a year ago on Jan. 6 the failed coup of a presidential traitor either belongs to one of the world’s few remaining uncontacted tribes or only watches Fox News.
According to the scorching sworn testimony of Cassidy Hutchinson, who was an aide to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, to the Jan. 6 committee on Tuesday, President Donald Trump knew in advance that the crowd at that morning’s rally had shown up heavily armed.
Yet the man who once said “I am your president of law and order” didn’t care about either one. Instead, he wanted to call off security measures and let “my people” march on the U.S. Capitol.
Unlike so many former White House colleagues more than twice her age, 25-year-old Hutchinson has both fortitude and a fully developed conscience.
Through an intermediary, the former president sent her a message on the eve of her deposition: “He wants me to let you know that he’s thinking about you. He knows you’re loyal, and you’re going to do the right thing when you go in for your deposition.” The term for this kind of vile and unveiled warning is witness tampering.
Yet Hutchinson did do the right thing anyway, telling the congressional committee that she’d heard the president say, “I don’t f—ing care that they have weapons. They’re not here to hurt me. Take the f—ing [metal detectors] away. Let my people in. They can march to the Capitol from here.”
Trump’s people seem to love it when he talks and acts like Tony Soprano.
And that the insurrectionists were there to harm Vice President Mike Pence did not trouble him.
On that day, Hutchinson heard Meadows say that Trump “doesn’t want to do anything” to turn back a mob chanting that Pence should be hanged for following the Constitution.
“He thinks Mike deserves it” for refusing to single-handedly overturn the election that Joe Biden had won, though Pence had no right to do so.
Hutchinson’s testimony also exposed behavior that wasn’t criminal but, for the millionth time, tells us everything we need to know about the former president’s nature.
Trump was upset when he saw that Attorney General Bill Barr had told the Associated Press that the Department of Justice had found no evidence of widespread election fraud in 2020. So he chucked his lunch at the wall in the White House, leaving a steward to pick up the shards of his shattered porcelain plate.
Hutchinson helped the valet wipe ketchup off the wall, she told the committee.
And no, she said, that was not the only time that he’d thrown china or ripped off a tablecloth in pique.
There are beautiful, irreplaceable pieces of historic crockery in the White House, so you have to wonder if aides were subbing in IKEA dinner plates to limit the damage from the toddler in chief.
But if people are even more deserving of respectful treatment than the rarest antiques, and they are, then one of the surest markers of character is how we treat those whose job it is to serve dinner.
That Trump repeatedly screamed at White House valets as he threw cheeseburgers and china is in no way surprising. And that he doesn’t care about anyone else’s feelings or safety clearly appeals to his truest of true believers.
But if we let him walk free after staging a coup that only failed because some of his own people wouldn’t go along, then we will have so lowered our standards that raising them ever again will be difficult.
We’ve had presidents who were criminal and corrupt, racist and revanchist, plus one who had a sexual encounter in a bathroom off the Oval. Yet Trump bests all of them in his unalloyed lack of principle.
If he’s not prosecuted, we have no reason to expect any better behavior in the future. And in that case, we will have only ourselves to blame.
This story was originally published June 29, 2022 at 5:00 AM.