Every legal drama needs a surprise witness. Until June last year, the congressional hearings to investigate the attempted coup at the US Capitol in January 2021 were unsurprising: Democrats presented evidence that Trump had riled up the incendiary mob, to which Republicans responded with regurgitated abuse. Then into the room walked Cassidy Hutchinson, a Republican true believer who had worked as an aide to Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff. No one gasped, because the then 25-year-old woman was unknown, but her testimony, provoked by an uneasy conscience, quietly confirmed that Trump and his henchmen had knowingly lied about the outcome of the presidential election, then summoned loony militias from the backwoods and dispatched them, armed with bear spray and flagpoles sharpened into spears, to disrupt the certification of Biden’s victory.
Hutchinson’s memoir adds many greasy, sleazy details to the more sanitised account she gave in Congress. Trump, she recalls, smashed plates in his dining room beside the Oval Office, squirting ketchup on the walls to express his exasperation. She observes Meadows illicitly incinerating bags of telltale documents that should have been passed to the government archives; his wife complains about the cost of dry-cleaning his suits to remove the stench from so many bonfires. And as Trump exhorts his horde to invade the Capitol, Rudy Giuliani, for whom the mayhem was like a double dose of Valium, leers at Hutchinson with jaundiced eyes and slides his hand up her thigh. Disillusioned and disgusted, she decides, as the title of her book tersely puts it, that she has had enough of the president and his thuggish praetorian guards.
Her earlier glimpses of Trump are killingly candid, exposing the tough guy as a weakling, even a sissy. He disdained face masks during the pandemic because the stained straps drew attention to his second skin of bronzer. During the winter he required a valet to blow-dry the insides of his leather gloves, to ensure that his tiny fingers stayed warm; volunteering tips like a chatty beautician, he even advised Hutchinson to add some blond streaks to her dark hair. In a casual aside, she notes that Trump dislikes animals – a symptom of his quaking cowardice, and of his reluctance to confront creatures unimpressed by his inflated wealth and his equally puffed-up celebrity. Titanically petulant, he sought to overturn the US constitution because he felt “embarrassed” by his lost bid for re-election.
About herself, Hutchinson is less clear-eyed. Born to a working-class family in New Jersey, she was exposed during childhood to the alienation and festering resentment that eventually produced the Unabomber, QAnon and Trump’s Maga fanatics. Her father taught her to distrust anyone sporting a government-issued badge, and also anyone in a white coat: he once offered to perform an appendectomy on her with a pocketknife. On hunting trips he schooled her in what he called “the warrior spirit”, and toughened her by using turtles for target practice and feasting on the deer he shot.
Despite her college education, Hutchinson surrendered to Trump’s rants and was pleased to serve as his “loyal foot soldier”. Too late, she realised she had enrolled in a movement – or perhaps in a nihilistic death cult – whose aim was to foment chaos. First, she crashed a golf cart at Camp David when drunk, while one of her colleagues almost burned down a cabin at the presidential retreat. Then Meadows solemnly asked if she would take a bullet for Trump. “Yeah,” Hutchinson replied, adding after a pause that she’d prefer to take it in the leg. The cheeky proviso revealed that she was not the kind of diehard that Trump demanded.
At the end of the book, Hutchinson’s Trump-worshipping father sells his house and vanishes without trace. She is relieved to be rid of him; it doesn’t occur to her that he might be somewhere in the wilderness with the Proud Boys or Oath Keepers, limbering up for the next battle. After months in hiding, she re-emerges into society and buys herself a new friend – a cockapoo puppy, which she names George in homage to Washington, founding father of the currently foundering republic. I hope that George’s lapping tongue has comforted Hutchinson, but it will take more than a puppy’s licks to clean up Washington.
• Enough by Cassidy Hutchinson is published by Simon & Schuster (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
