On January 7, 2020, I wrote a post entitled "Trump the Coward". Here's an excerpt:
If I knew anybody who was part of the riot yesterday, the first thing I'd ask him is why wasn't Trump with you when you made your assault? He said that he would parade with you the capitol, but instead he went back to the safety of the White House to watch the event on TV. It was great entertainment until his lawyers started to scare him that he might be legally liable for inciting a riot.
Think how much more successful your insurrection would have been if he marched into the capitol with you. But that would require that he take a risk that he simply wasn't willing to make. He wanted you all to take the risk, and if you succeeded in "stealing back the election", so to say, that would be great for him, but you failed, and it didn't take long for him to back away from you as fast as possible.
If he's so worthy of your devotion, why did he condemn the violence and say that everybody who broke the law should be prosecuted?
That's how it looked then. I assumed that Trump never intended to go to the Capitol with the mob because it was too risky. But now it's clear that he really, really wanted to go, that his going was a part of the plan all along. And it's clear that the only reason that he didn't go was because his secret service detail wasn't read in on the plan, so it didn't know that all those people with weapons were part of Trump's plot and thought they were protecting the president from them by refusing to take him to the Capitol.
We know now that the plot failed, but also that an important part of the plan was not implemented--Trump's leading the mob into the Capitol. So I have to give him props for being willing to put his body on the line, something I thought at the time was beyond him and his bonespurs. And as I wrote back then, there's good reason to think that the plot would have had a better chance of succeeding if he were there to lead the mob into the Capitol. Imagine the confusion. Would the police have resisted him and the mob following him into the Capitol at all? Would his personal presence with the mob behind him have intimidated Pence to refuse to certify the electoral count? We owe a debt to the Secret Service.
These hearings have been a strange experience for people like me because they don't tell a story I didn't already know. They are just filling in the details. Sure there are little things like the reason Trump didn't go to the Capitol that I got wrong, but the real story is much worse. The only way to be wrong about Trump is to underestimate how awful he is. We will learn nothing in coming weeks as more details become exposed that exonerates him or makes him look better. The only question is whether learning all this will matter. Will this information break the spell on the Trump supporting public as it broke the spell for Cassidy Hutchinson?
Her testimony was remarkable on so many levels. Who is this young woman? What was she--three years out of college? Why was someone so young so quickly promoted to a position of such importance? This wasn't an intern position. Could they no longer find anybody older and more experienced willing to take the job? Why was she so highly thought of and trusted by all those she interacted with from Pat Cipollone to Rudy Giuliani. Why would she presume to be taken seriously when tells Meadows, a man more than twice her age with decades of insider experience, not to go to the Willard Hotel plot meeting? Why would anybody confide in her or take her seriously in the way people seem to have? Again, why would she have been so trusted?
She is clearly, bright, competent, and well spoken. But more important I think is that she's a Conservative idealist, a true believer, who had not yet been made cynical. I wouldn't be surprised if it was her youth, her naïveté, and her idealism that made her so trustworthy in the eyes of her Machiavellian elders. Perhaps she reminded them of a younger version of themselves before politics killed their idealism. If she believed in what they were doing, then maybe they could believe in themselves. They were like Dads who wanted their innocent daughter to trust and believe in them, and as long as she did, all's right with the world. And she did, until she couldn't anymore.
I've been a teacher of young people in her age cohort for over thirty years, and I have taught many young conservative idealists like her. They are usually former military who have come back to get their degree, or they are kids in ROTC. They want a life of significance. They are looking for a noble calling, a life of service, and the military provides an avenue for them to achieve that. They have a maturity and a sense of moral purpose that most of their peers do not. There is something deeply admirable about them while at the same time something deeply tragic. Tragic because the earnestness of their idealism is precisely what makes them so manipulable by their cynical elders. How many young idealists have died in the unworthy wars waged by their elders?
The best and most spirited young people are idealists, but what matters more is what happens when their elders disappoint them. Do they become cynics or do they become wise. Cynicism is the disease of idealists who have come to think their ideals were delusional.Wisdom is idealism tempered by understanding how the real world works. Wisdom requires retaining one's ideals and moral commitments but becoming less absolutist about them. It requires retaining the capacity to do what's called for, no matter how difficult, when the situation demands it. Was Hutchinson wise beyond her years in this sense?
In Cassidy Hutchinson, we encounter a remarkable young woman who didn't enter the military, but she entered public service as a conservative idealist. She was not made cynical by what she learned in her encounter with the dirty reality of politics, but retained her ideals and her moral instincts in a robust enough way that enabled her to do what was called for, including giving her live testimony yesterday. To do so meant turning on the leaders of her tribe, people who liked and admired her, people like Meadows and Giuliani. Apparently she thought well of Trump and was proud of her role in supporting what he accomplished, but she could not stomach what she learned about him as a witness to the events surrounding J6. And that's what led her to testify publicly yesterday. Both Trump and Meadows disappointed her, and so she was able to overcome whatever compunction might have impeded her from telling what she knew about them.
On Monday night, before learning that Hutchinson would be today's witness, I had the impulse to watch a John Grisham movie. It was either The Firm or The Pelican Brief, and settled on the latter. It's the story of another young idealist in her mid-twenties played by Julia Roberts who had the courage to confront people with enormous power to do her harm. It is a story of Washington political intrigue but about different issues with different levels of violence. The Roberts character is being pursued by professional assassins to keep her quiet, and she is particularly good in this movie for giving us a feeling for how terrifying her situation was. It's clear to me that Hutchinson was under some threat, which was reinforced by Cheney's warnings about witness tampering at the end. I doubt Hutchinson had reason to fear being assassinated, but she has exposed herself in a way that required enormous of courage. When the dust settles and the movie is made of these events, I doubt Hutchinson's character will play a major role, but I suspect there are a behind-the-scenes events that remain yet invisible to us that would make a very compelling, Grisham-esque story.
In the movie there is a very Trumpy president played by Robert Culp, but the really sinister character is his chief of staff. Unlike the Chief in the movie, Meadows is not nearly so sinister or villainous. Meadows is rather a cypher, a zero, a banal yes man just doing as he's told, telling everyone what they want to hear. He is a man without either ideals or dark ambitions. He's just there in the midst of it all aware of it all and doing nothing one way or the other and by his enaction enabling these crimes.
And I wonder what the next step will be for Hutchinson? I want to think well of her, but I fear that what we might hear next about her is that she's working for Lindsay Graham or Jim Jordan. But perhaps her path will be more like that of Amanda Carpenter, another young Conservative idealist who earlier in her career worked for Ted Cruz. She's an intellectually honest one, though, who is now a never Trumper at The Bulwark.