Mayhem fueled by meatballs and Diet Dr. Pepper: Jan. 6 and the buffoonery of evil
At least beyond the confines of the works of Stephen King, it’s difficult to take a monster completely seriously when it’s dressed as a clown. The disorienting juxtaposition of evil and buffoonery was a hallmark of Donald Trump’s presidency and its apotheosis on Jan. 6, 2021.
As the most recent House committee hearing on the subject detailed, the prelude to the national tragedy of that day was a farce.
On a December night at the end of the week when then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell finally acknowledged Joe Biden’s election, two Trump teams clashed in a Ragnarok of a White House meeting: on one side, the besuited, West Wing-dwelling professional enablers, those with comfortable careers and polite society to lose should they become associated with outright lunacy or violence; on the other, a feral faction more given to animal prints and pinkie rings, the one that somehow slipped past the gatekeepers with nothing but their determination to try anything for Trump because Trump was just about all they had.
Nothing exemplified the divide between the groups so well as the question White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, the leader of the establishment side, posed to one of the intruders: “Who are you?”
“I didn’t understand how they had gotten in,” Cipollone told the committee.
It’s easy to sympathize with the underdog interloper over the entitled insider in such a situation. But given that the man in question happened to be Patrick Byrne, the disgraced former chief executive of online discount furniture retailer Overstock.com, Cipollone’s question turned out to be a pretty good one.
Some of Byrne’s fellow trespassers, among them Sidney Powell, Michael Flynn and Rudy Giuliani, were better known to Cipollone and his fellow Americans. Nor were they strangers to the centers of power, having held positions of varying authority themselves: federal prosecutor, shortest-serving national security adviser, America’s mayor. By virtue of their own behavior, however, they all found themselves thoroughly and justifiably estranged from the official legitimacy of their opposites.
Perhaps the will to return to relevance accounted for the absurd lengths to which they eagerly volunteered to go for their leader. They were willing to fabricate fraud and other crimes. They seriously proposed seizing voting machines. They posited a vast and incomprehensible left-wing conspiracy involving internet-connected thermostats and Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez, who by most accounts died during the Obama administration.
But the suits were as cool to the climate-control conspiracies as the meeting was not just heated but, according to participants and observers, “out there” and “unhinged.” With memorable understatement, Cipollone described the who-are-you crew as “not providing the president with good advice.” Another White House lawyer, Eric Herschmann, put it more plainly: “What they were proposing, I thought, was nuts.”
Trump’s sympathies, however, clearly lay with Team Macadamia. Powell described the then-president as “very interested” in their presentation. He welcomed them not only into the Oval Office but, at some stage of the marathon meeting, into the White House residence, where he fed them — what else? — meatballs. And no one appreciated the meatballs as much as the furniture guy, who reportedly consumed them “nonstop.”
That many meatballs can put an insurrectionist in need of a tasty beverage to wash them down. Powell, who bears the significant distinction of being the most outlandish lawyer on a team that includes Giuliani, had just the thing: Diet Dr. Pepper, a can of which she swigged obtrusively during her testimony.
To be clear, I like soda as much as any American, but Diet Dr. Pepper is objectively the silliest possible choice. As Homer Simpson once put it, I’d rather have the crab juice.
When the meeting ended and Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows physically escorted Giuliani off the premises — just to be “sure he didn’t wander back,” as an aide put it — the circus would seem to have finally left town.
But the ringleader had other ideas. Less than two hours later, he posted his infamous “Will be wild” tweet, summoning a whole fleet of clown cars to the capital on Jan. 6. This time, Trump’s agents of disorder wouldn’t slip past the gatekeepers: He personally urged them to storm the gates.
The meeting that foreshadowed the insurrection was the Trump presidency in microcosm, a chaos that strolled into the center of our supposed order in big, floppy shoes. All the weird hair and makeup served to disarm an appropriately serious response, creating the impression that this was all so ridiculous that it couldn’t possibly be happening. But it did happen, it’s still happening and it could happen again.