Endgame nears for Trump as chaotic cadre unravels

Something changed about half-way through the latest of the US Congressional hearings investigating the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol.

We all know that then-president Donald Trump was pushing things every which way to disrupt the outcome of the presidential election held two months earlier. He said as much. His contention was that the election had been stolen from him, and that he was working to rectify that injustice.

Testimony at the January 6 congressional hearings have offered new insight into Donald Trump’s calamitous final days in the White House.Credit: AP

But the testimony delivered by an assistant to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows made it clear something more disturbing was going on. It will likely be an inflection point.

The title “White House Chief of Staff” is a grandiose one. It brings to mind gruff and canny Leo McGarry, from The West Wing. But in the calamitous final days of the Trump administration, all that were left in the actual West Wing were the dregs of the Republican Party. Before he hooked up with Trump, Chief of Staff Meadows was a congressman from North Carolina who was so far to the right he spent most of his time lobbing political hand grenades at moderate Republicans. The picture of him painted by his close assistant Cassidy Hutchinson – at the time of the insurrection a 24-year-old party functionary – was a dire one: of a hangdog, feckless enabler who knew a disaster was coming and did nothing to stop it.

Trump, Rudy Giuliani and others had a plan to create a national crisis in Washington the day the US Congress was scheduled to certify the election. It would begin with a rally outside the White House.

Then US president Donald Trump and his White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, right, talk outside the Oval Office in 2020.Credit: AP

Cassidy Hutchinson, former aide to Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, gives evidence at the congressional hearings into the January 6 Capitol riot.Credit: AP

Holding a rally isn’t, by itself, illegal. But we now know Trump and his advisors from the Island of Misfit Toys were working on several fronts to corrupt the certification process. The rally had a nefarious, brutal part to play. Trump would send the attendees to march on the Capitol, and folks in the west wing knew it. (“It’s going to be real, real bad,” Hutchinson quoted a mournful Meadows saying, four days before the fateful insurrection.)

How bad? Hutchinson testified that, when Trump heard that security screenings were taking weapons from rally attendees, his response was to try to order the Secret Service to remove metal detectors from the gates to his rally.

That puts a dark cast on Trump’s exhortations to the crowd to head for the Capitol – and his following tweets excoriating vice president Mike Pence, who became a focus of the crowd’s violence.

Legal experts have fallen over themselves listing the specific serious crimes Hutchinson’s testimony gave evidence to. It feels like we have slipped into an endgame. What will Donald Trump do now?

Unfortunately for him, the House committee is not operating in a vacuum. The US Department of Justice, which is under the purview of Joe Biden, not Congress, is investigating these issues as well: Last week, the department seized the phone of John Eastman, a lawyer who had been the source of many of the unhinged legal theories Trump was pushing; and raided the home of Jeffrey Clark, the man who served for a few weeks as his acting attorney general. (And it’s likely that the department had already secretly subpoenaed material on the pair from various communication providers.)

Trump has dodged so many investigations thus far it’s foolish and wishful to think this one will do the job. But his options at this point seem few. He can deny and deny and deny, say, that he knew about weapons on the National Mall, but investigators can easily find and talk to the people who can confirm Hutchinson’s story. (It’s a felony to lie to the FBI; beyond that, the justice department can force people to testify truthfully by offering them immunity.)

Trump can also keep claiming it’s all a conspiracy – another of his tiresome mantras. This will be duly amplified by his friends at Fox News. But of course, all of the most damaging testimony thus far has come from a conspiracy of … the motley crew he himself chose to run his administration.

The very fact that Trump did nothing that day to halt the assault on the Capitol should have been enough to make him a pariah. Now we are reduced to worrying whether the assault was part of his plan from the start. (Similarly, it’s a scandal in itself that groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, at the Capitol early and ready for mayhem, were also providing personal security for Roger Stone, the longtime political trickster and Trump crony whom Trump pardoned after he received multiple felony convictions stemming from his interference in the Mueller investigation.) But the reality might be much worse: at this point it would be surprising to learn that these armed groups were not an explicit part of the president’s plan to take back power.

The committee has said it will deliver at least one more presentation, focusing on what exactly Trump did the day of the attack, and then deliver a final report, presumably before the fall midterm elections, in which the Democrats may lose their majority. (And Republican Liz Cheney, the committee’s vice chair, might lose her seat.)

The position of Trump and his cronies is beginning to feel a bit cultish. Not “yelling and screaming and irrational” cultish, but “doomed and ready for the end” cultish. That’s a sobering thing to say. But of course they have all brought it on themselves. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer group of people.