Cassidy Hutchinson’s Testimony against Trump Is Devastating

Cassidy Hutchinson, a top aide to Trump’s White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, provided compelling testimony Tuesday that former president Donald Trump is singularly culpable for the Capitol riot.

The testimony in a session of the House January 6 committee — a session abruptly called, reportedly due to concerns about Ms. Hutchinson’s safety — was devastating because it was directly about the former president. The day’s lone witness pulled back the curtain that countless advisers and aides kept around the mercurial Trump for four years. There are significant questions about aspects of her account, particularly where it involved hearsay — things she had been told about the president’s actions, as opposed to the things she herself witnessed. We also have to reserve judgment, even allowing that she seems impressive, because the highly partisan, unapologetically anti-Trump committee merely presents its side of the story, and has gone to unseemly lengths to exclude cross-examination and alternative perspectives. All in all, though, Hutchinson showed the nation, moment by moment, what he was like on a day when, undeniably, Trump was at his worst.

It was worse than America thought. Even Americans with extraordinarily low expectations about the former president’s previously undisclosed, behind-the-scenes behavior during the hours when the riot unfolded.

Skillfully led through a prosecutor-style direct examination by committee chairwoman Liz Cheney, Hutchinson explained that Trump was like a wild beast at the Ellipse shortly before his gasoline-on-the-fire speech. The security personnel had set up magnetometers for entry into the area. That thinned the throngs proximate to the podium where he’d be speaking. Trump was ballistic because of the effect on “the shot” — the video image of his speech that would go out to the world. He wanted an overflowing crowd. He wanted to convey the impression, the reality, of a rabid mob furious that the election had been stolen, furious that Congress was poised to count the “fraudulent” electoral votes and pronounce Joe Biden the winner.