<\/p>\n
Cassidy Hutchinson<\/b><\/p>\n
Blowing the fucking doors off the Beast<\/b><\/p>\n
June 28th<\/sup> 2022<\/p>\n Bryan Zepp Jamieson<\/p>\n zeppscommentaries.online<\/p>\n When the announcement came, just 24 hours prior, that the January 6th<\/sup> Select Committee was going to have an unexpected public meeting today, it was safe to assume that they had found something big. While not as legally damning as some of the testimony in prior sessions, it was nonetheless riveting, and while a fair bit of it was he-said she-said and thus of little use at trial, I suspect a great deal of further evidence awaits in the wings.<\/p>\n Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony was pretty amazing. It\u2019s not often a President tries to force the Secret Service to allow heavily armed men into the area where he is giving a speech on the grounds of “They aren’t here to hurt me!”. Never heard of a president trying to grab the steering wheel of the presidential limo to override security mandates, or throwing his lunch against the wall of the White House.<\/p>\n I had always assumed that when Trump returned to the White House rather than leading his coalition of neo-Nazis, conspiracy theorists and dingbats to conquer Congress, it was just Trump being a coward and leaving others out hanging in the wind while he ran to safety.<\/p>\n It turns out, according to Hutchinson, that this was far from the case. Trump was furious, and having a complete tantrum when the Secret Service refused to allow him to take part in an armed assault on Congress. He screamed, he cursed, he threw his happy meal against the walls of the executive dining room (Hutchinson relates how she helped a hapless valet to clean the ketchup stains from the wall) and he even tried to throttle the Secret Service agent who was driving \u201cthe Beast\u201d, i.e., the Presidential limo.<\/p>\n There\u2019s an old Jim Croce song that comes to mind here: \u201cYou don\u2019t tug on Superman\u2019s cape, you don\u2019t spit in the wind, you don\u2019t pull the mask of the old Lone Ranger and you don\u2019t [paraphrasing a bit here] fuck with the Secret Service.\u201d The idea of bloated, aged, out-of-shape Donald Trump trying to throttle a guy who could probably hog-tie him in ten seconds flat is both silly and horrifying.<\/p>\n Trump shouted, \u201cI’m the fucking president! Take me up to the Capitol now!\u201d But the driver had his orders. Protect the country, protect the President. It probably never occurred to his bosses that the decision was actually to protect the country from the President.<\/p>\n Trump was probably hoping to envision a triumphant meeting with Pence and the Congress, one similar to the one a triumphant Hitler had with von Hindenberg and the Reichstag in January 1933 where he wrested unearned power from a weakened and demoralized opposition. Or at least, some demented Riefenstahl version of that event that he probably held near and dear.<\/p>\n Gleichschaltung, <\/em>or Nazification, <\/em>would be sure to follow. <\/em>Think I\u2019m kidding? Trump for years kept a copy of Hitler\u2019s \u201cMy New Order\u201d in his bedside stand. He was (and probably still is) a great admirer of Hitler, and considered the collection of speeches a primer on how to go about amassing and sustaining power. <\/em>America may never really know how close to a fall into the horrors of Nazism it came that day.<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cPlease make sure we don’t go up to the Capitol,” White House counsel Pat Cippollone <\/em>had <\/em>told Hutchinson on the morning of Jan. 6. “‘We’re going to get charged with every crime imaginable if we make that movement happen.'”<\/em> That<\/em> is why the Secret Service drove a kicking and screaming Trump to the West Wing rather than Congress. Cippollone probably did Trump a big favor. Had <\/em>Trump<\/em> waddled onto the House for in a dramatic recreation of Hitler and von Hindenburg, flanked by the Qanon shaman and all the rest of the crazies, he probably would have been hanged or shot by now.<\/em><\/p>\n One of the most striking moments came when Hutchinson related how a frantic and desperate Trump tried to get the Secret Service to permit people armed with AR-15s and other weaponry into the area immediately in front of where he gave his January 6th<\/sup> speech. “I don’t fucking care that they have weapons. They’re not here to hurt me,” Trump said, according to Hutchinson. “Let my people in, they can march to the Capitol from here. Let the people in, take the mags away.”<\/p>\n They weren\u2019t there to hurt Trump. But they were there to hurt someone. If they can prove Trump said that, it might be the single most self-incriminating thing he said that day.<\/p>\n I had been wondering why the Committee suddenly sprung Hutchinson on the public the way they did. Her testimony, lurid as it was, wasn\u2019t anything that couldn\u2019t have waiting until the Committee had its next scheduled session sometime around mid-July. Presented with little corroborating evidence, it wouldn\u2019t rise to the level of admissibility, although I\u2019m sure there is corroborating evidence, and lots of it.<\/p>\n There are seven primaries today, including in Wyoming, where Liz Cheney is widely expected to be primaried. There\u2019s nothing Republicans hate more than politicians who put country ahead of party, so she\u2019s probably toast. Several pundits suggested that the session was timed to influence the primaries, but that\u2019s nonsense. The political fallout from the meetings takes several days to percolate out into broad public consciousness, and it\u2019s unlikely that 10% of those voting today would have known about the events of today\u2019s session when they voted.<\/p>\n I suspect that the real reason for the rush was that hundreds of Trump supporters wanted Hutchinson dead before she could testify. It may have been problematic keeping her alive for three or four weeks as scalded-cat outrage from Trump galvanized the People Who Aren\u2019t Here to Hurt Trump to go out and do plenty of hurt to the target that Trump clearly feared.<\/p>\n Now that she has testified, most of Trump\u2019s more rabid brownshirts might realize that the cost\/benefit ratio of shooting this twenty-five year old woman would no longer work in their favor. That, and the public knows who she is now, and they can\u2019t quite risk attacking a figure that public. She should be reasonably safe now. Besides, between gays, teachers, town councils and all the traditional enemies of Nazism, Trump\u2019s brownshirts have many others to threaten and intimidate.<\/p>\n