Well, after first announcing that the January 6 congressional hearings would only take place in the month of June, then announcing new hearings for July, they just announced Monday that there was going to be a hearing called on Tuesday the 28th, on the basis of “newly received information.”
By 6 am Eastern time it was announced that the main witness was one Cassidy Hutchinson, an aide to Trump Organization Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.
Today Hutchinson testified, along with many other funny things, that Donald Trump, once and future Viceroy for Russian North America, heard that the Republican protestors on January 6 had weapons, and told Meadows’ staff, “I don’t f’ing care if they have weapons, they’re not here to hurt me.” He was apparently not happy that the Secret Service were screening people for weapons. When he heard about violence at the Capitol, he “almost had a lack of reaction.” Hutchinson said that when Trump was in the limo after his speech (where he said he wanted to join the march to the Capitol), a Secret Service agent who was at the wheel told her that Trump tried to lunge for the wheel to grab it from him. She testified that White House lawyer Pat Cipollone said that one reason the staff was against going to the Capitol with the mob is that Trump and his aides could be charged with “every crime imaginable.” She also corroborated Liz Cheney’s statement that when Trump heard the mob wanted to hang Mike Pence, he said “Mike deserves it.”
Hutchinson also said, “There were several times throughout my tenure with the chief of staff that I was aware of either him (Trump) throwing dishes or flipping the tablecloth to let all the contents of the table go onto the floor and likely break or go everywhere.”
I frankly don’t see any cause for surprise or alarm. Donald Trump is a flaming asshole. Quelle surprise. Lyndon Johnson was a flaming asshole. And he didn’t do anything bad besides, well, start a war in Vietnam while creating a giant redistribution program that combined to give us an inflationary economy that we are still living with. But even if you don’t like Johnson’s programs, at least he didn’t institute them to make the ex-head of the KGB happy.
This does give evidence, as if we needed it, that we need to scrap the Electoral College or at least modify the method of tallies, because the result that the Founding Fathers were so afraid of – that an unqualified demagogue could appeal to the gullible masses to get undeserved power – was only possible because that institution allowed Trump to get critical states and win on that basis even though he never won a popular majority. If the vote had been a national popularity poll, then you would have gotten Hillary Clinton, which really would have been the lesser evil. I mean, a lesser evil on the level of Asmodeus vs. Cthulhu, but the Devil has less slime and tentacles.
If nothing else, these January 6 hearings are gonna make Liddle Donnie’s campaign ads for 2024 SO much funnier.
“Hi! I’m Liddle Donnie Trump! I’m a screaming baby-man who can barely spell his own name, and I want YOU to give me back the nuclear weapons codes!!”
The real punch line is that that appeal works for so many people.