She’s on the cover of major newspapers everywhere. Her impeccable hair and makeup and pre-apology apology have already become iconic this early summer.
It wasn’t a powerful 63-year-old former aide to the presidency who sat on the witness stand. Neither was the millionaire lawyer and former White House legal adviser, 56. Both were in the eye of the January 6 storm, one adding fuel to the fire, the other trying to put it out with buckets.
It was the most subordinate young woman, who was 24 years old on the day of the Capitol invasion, who showed her face and sang like a canary, incriminating the trumposphere left and right. Cassidy Hutchinson didn’t wake up with the bloody head of a horse in bed, like the movie producer who dared to disobey Don Corleone in “The Godfather.” But in addition to anonymous threats, the Trump mob has sent direct messages to the former adviser to Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff, a lively January 6 orgy handler whose chances of wearing an orange jumpsuit have increased in the last 24 hours.
We know that the former employee and constant shadow of Meadows received at least one of the messages placed on the screen at the end of the hearing in which she testified, on Tuesday (28), in the committee investigating the invasion.
In a shrewd message to those still trying to shield the orange Don, Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney pointed out that the Mar-a-Lago chief’s foremen have contacted witnesses summoned by the committee suggesting they not cooperate, to remain “in the good graces” of the chief.
Cheney didn’t even have to say the words, but any American knows the cliché of the gangster who extorts by saying “your restaurant is so beautiful, what a shame if anything happened to him.” The words are “witness corruption,” a federal crime that carries up to 20 years in prison.
Hutchinson, whose first name means chastity, has a track record that would make those wallowing in the mud that has become the American far-right envy. In her tender years, she worked for Steve Scalise, the con-man deputy and white supremacist fan boy. She worked for Senator Ted Cruz, a crook and first-time sidekick in Trump’s effort to undermine the vote count in the 2020 election.
And in following Meadows to the White House, the girl showed that she aspired to descend into the sewer of Trumpism, with her worktable a few feet from the Oval Office. Of course, Trump took immediate distance and said he “barely knew” Cassidy Hutchinson, ubiquitous at times when the coup was plotted.
The most criminal president in US history always reverts to the cliché of the sexist British poet of the 18th century: “Hell knows no fury like that of a rejected woman.” Trump took to social media to say that the former employee wanted a spot on the team at Mar-a-Lago, but he personally vetoed it.
Cassidy Hutchinson expressed virginal horror at what she saw in the White House 18 months ago. She has buried her chosen career, will need security and will pay dearly for defense attorneys.
His soft presence could re-emerge behind closed doors, before a popular jury that must decide whether to recommend new January 6 indictments. A case of bravery? Who knows? But without her testimony, an astonishing and frightening moment in the history of the republic might not have been revealed.
