(Dobbs) A Cancer On The Presidency: Then And Now

Can Donald Trump's enablers ignore what an aide swore to today?

She is the John Dean of Donald Trump’s presidency: Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to Trump’s chief of staff— who is also arguably his chief of collaborators— Mark Meadows.

I was in the hearing room 49 years ago when Dean, Richard Nixon’s White House lawyer, told the Senate Watergate Committee, “there was a cancer growing on the presidency.”

All of us who were there— journalists, senators, and everyone else— knew that this was a knife in the Nixon presidency. Public opinion took a sharp turn.

Now it’s Trump’s turn.

Testifying today to a hastily scheduled hearing of the January 6th Committee, Hutchinson blew the lid off the facade of the sociopath who spent four years in the Oval Office. And I don’t use the term “sociopath” lightly. When you look it up, you find one definition that says, someone who “tends to lie, break laws, act impulsively.” Another defines it as a person who “persistently has difficulty engaging appropriately with social norms.”

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you one Donald J. Trump.

A man who cares for the welfare of no one and nothing, except himself.

Hutchinson dropped her bombshells not only about Trump’s (and Meadows’s) callous disregard for the calamity unfolding at the Capitol— Meadows didn’t even lift his face from his phone when Hutchinson tried telling him how serious it was getting— but about their increasingly obvious complicity in the insurrection, and about the president’s bizarrely reckless behavior as he fought to join his fanatical followers there.

She reported to Congress what she either saw firsthand, or heard from credible firsthand witnesses.

•. That when she was involved in White House meetings to plan the January 6th rally, she heard the names of two far-right groups as part of the discussions, the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers.

•  That after Rudy Giuliani told her four days before the rally that “We’re going to the Capitol” and she reported his remark to her boss Mark Meadows, Meadows’s knowing response was, “There's a lot going on, Cass, but I don't know, things might get real, real bad on January 6."

•. That when Trump was told that some of his supporters at the January 6th rally had weapons, he said something to the effect of, “I don't F-ing care that they have weapons. They're not here to hurt me’.”

•. That Trump even tried to protect his people trying to get into the rally with guns and knives, urging his staff to “take the f-ing mags away,” meaning magnetometers, better known as metal detectors.

•. That she heard Meadows say that Trump did not think the insurrectionists were doing anything wrong and that maybe Vice President Pence “deserved” the violent calls to hang him.

Then she got to the juicy stuff.

•. That four weeks after the election, when Attorney General William Barr publicly declared that the presidency had not been stolen from Trump, someone told her the president “threw a plate against the wall” and when she went down to look, “there was ketchup dripping down the wall and there's a shattered porcelain plate on the floor." 

•. That Trump’s deputy chief of staff reported to her that when the Secret Service told the president it wasn’t safe to take him from the rally to the Capitol, he was “so enraged… that he lunged to the front of his presidential SUV and tried to turn the wheel, screaming, ‘I’m the F’ing President. Take me up to the Capitol now’." Then, according to the deputy, Trump “reached up toward the front of the vehicle to grab at the steering wheel,” using his other hand to “lunge” at the Secret Service agent in charge. 

Just think of it: this maniacal man was President of the United States. This unstable sociopath, who would lunge for the steering wheel, had the nuclear button in his hands.

What John Dean also told the Senate Watergate Committee about Richard Nixon’s presidency was, “It was important that this cancer be removed immediately because it was growing more deadly every day.”

Now, that pretty much describes the cancer that is Donald Trump: “more deadly every day.” More deadly, because it still metastasizes through millions of myopic Americans.

Nixon was smarter than Trump. Eventually Nixon called it quits.

Trump only doubles down.

His latest, even before Cassidy Hutchinson finished dropping her bombshells, was on his insipid but insidious social media site “Truth Social”: “A total phony and leaker,” he called her, “Bad news.”

If you’re Donald J. Trump, you bet she is.

There is no guarantee though that any of this will matter. 

Estimates are that three out of every four American homes tuned in at some time to those Watergate hearings. The January 6th Committee had its best audience for the first primetime hearing: 20 million Americans. The next best was 10 million for the second hearing, and the numbers— at least until today— haven’t gotten higher. 

However, none less than Fox News had this headline this afternoon on its website after Hutchinson was done: “Trump lunged at Secret Service agent who said he couldn’t go to Capitol on January 6: aide.”

Even Fox News couldn’t ignore it. We’ll see if Trump’s other enablers do.

We’ve still got months before the next election to let the real face of Donald Trump sink in. And maybe, maybe, there’s even more to come.

Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies and politics at home and international crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.