Staying for the Last Act

On Cassidy Hutchinson, Delay, and the Breaking of a Tether

Photo by Fabrizio Coco on Unsplash

I had to take a road trip this week. Not a pleasant one. Of course, for me, time in the car is rarely pleasant. It’s just not something I ever relished. When I lived in California, I abstained from driving altogether and used public transportation, which in Los Angeles I found to be very good—and, frankly, relaxing. I started driving again in 2013, after moving back to Louisiana. Being stuck in a car has a way of forcing you to stay with thoughts—and voices—you’d normally abandon.

Well, this week’s road trip took me into Texas, where the first thing you notice, coming out of Louisiana, is how good the roads are. On the drive back to Baton Rouge, I listened to one of the audiobooks in my Libby app—Cassidy Hutchinson’s Enough. I had started it a few weeks ago and took a break out of frustration. Well, I mean, come on, the girl chose to become a Republican, and then she chose to work in the Donald Trump White House, and then she planned to work for his post-presidential team in Palm Beach. And it took what seemed like forever for her to finally ditch MAGA world (“the family”) and fully cooperate with the January 6 Committee. There were so many parts to her story that truly tried my patience. And yet….on the road, I kept listening—until I had to take a break and treat myself to Bob Dylan—and then I continued on Cassidy’s journey, and you know, I started to get it.

I saw the structure of her story. The frustration is the design. The book makes you inhabit the delay.

She wrote it linearly, so of course you’re going to be frustrated and annoyed for three quarters of it. You’re not going to understand, until the last act, just how deeply she was duped by the cult of Trumpism. Even while she started to wake up, she found herself tethered to it in ways that are frankly terrifying and creepy. She was smart enough to read the shady writing on the wall; she saw Mark Meadows burning documents, even saw him carrying classified material out of the White House. Yet she hung on—still planning to accept Trump’s offer to work for his team post-presidency at Mar-a-Lago. She justified it as him needing her. “He needs good people.” As if it was her job to save him. Trapped by obligation disguised as loyalty.

She felt in her gut that something was wrong, and she knew she was (initially) committing perjury to the House committee investigating January 6, 2021, yet the tether held. What finally broke the spell? It was a phone call she had with her friend Sam. He told her to look at herself in the mirror. Did she like who she was looking at? Could she live with that person for the rest of her life?

It’s been hard (and frustrating and annoying) to watch good people get roped and used by Donald Trump. That whole anti-establishment kick he was on about in 2016—the politically incorrect, the rebel, the “drain the swamp” rhetoric—seduced a lot of people. I remember this guy I saw on YouTube—late in 2016. He talked about his experience freeing himself from a cult, and then he confessed that he thought the Democratic Party had become a cult. He got pulled into the MAGA movement believing that he was escaping a cult. These are real people. You can say they’re dumb, and maybe some of them are, but a lot of them just seem to be emotionally broken. I say that with compassion.

The guy on YouTube misread MAGA for freedom. Cassidy is smart. Exceptionally smart. The thing about Trump is that, however uneducated and crude, he is clever. He knows how to manipulate people. Even as he was plotting to hang onto power, he got Cassidy to feel sorry for him. She thought proximity to power was responsibility.

I noticed a similar dynamic between Cassidy and her dad. Her dad clearly has mental health issues. His behavior in her story is often inexplicable and baffling. But he’s her dad. She loves him. More to the point, she longs to be loved by him. Even as he was hurting her, it pained her to have to stand up to him. She also felt responsibility to help him, inverting the parent-child contract as so many children in dysfunctional families do.

Elizabeth Grey’s article, “Cassidy Hutchinson and Swearing Off Daddy,” is excellent and I agree with her analysis.

By the time I finished the book, Elizabeth Grey’s analysis felt inevitable.

I recognize how strong and natural the tether was to her dad, how painful it must be to watch helplessly while someone you love self-destructs; and I also recognize how Mark Meadows and President Trump played on her emotions. Constantly. Every time she expressed doubts, she was appealed to for loyalty and aid. At one point, her mother begs her to stop thinking she can fix Trump or even that it’s her responsibility to fix him.

We can’t fix someone else. We can’t fix our parents. We can’t fix the hubris-blinded characters in our lives. We can only fix one person—the Woman in the Mirror.

There was another moment in her story that mattered just as much as the mirror. Hutchinson found her historical counterpart. Reading about Watergate, she recognized herself not in the presidents or the power brokers, but in Alexander Butterfield—the aide who revealed the existence of the Nixon tapes. Butterfield wasn’t a crusader. He wasn’t a rebel. He was an institutional figure who answered a question honestly, and in doing so made history intelligible. Cassidy read the story of Butterfield in Bob Woodward’s 2015 book, The Last of the President’s Men. She read it in one sitting. Then she reread it. The recognition of her place in the structure mattered. It placed her fear, her delay, and her eventual testimony inside a lineage. She wasn’t alone, and she wasn’t unprecedented.