New insights into Trump's state of mind on January 6 chip away at doubts

Donal Trump greeting supporters at a rally in June. He has benefited from uncertainty about what he was thinking on the day of the Capitol riot. Photo / Rachel Mummey, The New York Times

Former President Donald Trump has weathered scandals by keeping his intentions under wraps, but recent testimony paints a stark portrait of a man willing to do almost anything to hang onto power.

He was not speaking metaphorically. It was not an offhand comment. President Donald Trump had every intention of joining a mob of supporters he knew to be armed and dangerous as it marched to the Capitol. And there had even been talk of marching into the House chamber himself to disrupt Congress from ratifying his election defeat.

For 1 1/2 years, Trump has been shielded by obfuscations and mischaracterisations, benefiting from uncertainty about what he was thinking on January 6, 2021. If he truly believed the election had been stolen, if he genuinely expected the gathering at the Capitol would be a peaceful protest, the argument went, then could he be held accountable, much less indicted, for the mayhem that ensued?

But for a man who famously avoids leaving emails or other trails of evidence of his unspoken motives, any doubts about what was really going through Trump's mind on that day of violence seemed to have been eviscerated by testimony presented in recent weeks by the House committee investigating the Capitol attack — especially the dramatic appearance last week of a 26-year-old former White House aide who offered a chilling portrait of a president willing to do almost anything to hang onto power.

More than perhaps any insider account that has emerged, the recollections of the aide, Cassidy Hutchinson, demolished the fiction of a president who had nothing to do with what happened. Each revelation was stunning on its own: Trump knew that weapons were in the crowd as he exhorted supporters to "fight like hell," and even tried to stop anyone from disarming them. He was so determined to join the mob at the Capitol that he lashed out at his Secret Service detail for refusing to take him. And he was so nonchalant about the bedlam he had unleashed that he suggested Vice President Mike Pence might deserve to be executed for refusing to overturn the election.

But when added together, the various disclosures have produced the clearest picture yet of an unprecedented attempt to subvert the traditional US democratic process, with a sitting president who had lost at the ballot box planning to march with an armed crowd to the Capitol to block the transfer of power, brushing aside manifold concerns about the potential for violence along the way.

"The innocent explanations for Trump's conduct seem virtually impossible to credit following the testimony we have seen," said Joshua Matz, who served as a lawyer for House Democrats during both of Trump's impeachment trials in the Senate. "At the very least, they powerfully shift the burden to Trump and his defenders to offer evidence that he did not act with a corrupt, criminal state of mind."

And so nearly 2 1/2 centuries after the 13 American colonies declared independence from an unelected king, the nation is left weighing a sombre new view of the fragility of its democracy — and the question of what, if anything, could and should be done about it.

To the extent that there may be a turning point in that debate, Hutchinson's testimony proved decisive for some who had been willing to give Trump the benefit of the doubt or had been uncertain that the committee had gathered enough evidence about the former president's state of mind.

Solomon L. Wisenberg, a former deputy independent counsel under Ken Starr, called her account "the smoking gun" making a case "for his criminal culpability on seditious conspiracy charges." Mick Mulvaney, who served as Trump's third White House chief of staff, said he had been defending him, but learning that Trump knew some in the crowd were armed and still encouraged it to go to the Capitol "certainly changes my mind," he told Fox News.

David French, a conservative critic of Trump, had been sceptical the committee would produce sufficient evidence. "But Hutchinson's sworn testimony closes a gap in the criminal case against Trump," he wrote on The Dispatch, a conservative website. Two law professors, Alan Z. Rozenshtein of the University of Minnesota and Jed Handelsman Shugerman of Fordham University, likewise opposed prosecution until seeing Hutchinson, writing on the Lawfare blog that she changed their minds because she provided "proof of intent."

The hearings, which will continue after Congress returns July 11 from its holiday recess, have presented only the prosecution's side of the story. With Trump's acquiescence, Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California, the House Republican leader, opted against appointing anyone to the select committee after Speaker Nancy Pelosi rejected a couple of his original selections, leaving the panel composed entirely of Democrats and two Republicans deeply critical of the former president.

Neither Hutchinson nor any of the other witnesses who have testified have been cross-examined. Their testimony has often been presented in short edited clips rather than in their entirety, and no contrary testimony has been offered publicly. In a courtroom, if it ever came to that, the case against Trump would be tested as it has not been so far.

"The committee's presentation has been a purely political exercise, deceptively edited," said Jason Miller, who served as a political adviser to Trump during and after the election.

Yet even outside the confines of the hearing room, Miller and others in Trump's camp have mainly attacked the committee or tried to chip away at pieces of the testimony rather than produce much of a defence of the former president's actions or an alternate explanation for his state of mind.

In his social media posts, Trump denied asking that armed supporters be allowed at his rally. "Who would ever want that?" he wrote. "Not me!" He focused more of his energy on castigating Hutchinson in scathing personal terms ("whacko," "total phony") and concentrated on one small aspect of her testimony, namely whether he lunged for the wheel of his presidential vehicle when his Secret Service detail refused to take him to the Capitol on January 6.

Throughout his time in politics, Trump has survived one scandal after another because people in authority felt unable to read his mind. Investigators could not prove that he intended to break the law when he authorised hush money to silence a pornographic film actress or when he provided false valuations of his properties to lenders or when he sought to impede the inquiry into Russia's election interference. Fact checkers similarly documented tens of thousands of false statements he made while in office, but were reluctant to declare that he knowingly lied.

"He learned from Dad, Norman Vincent Peale and especially Roy Cohn that you can get away with almost anything if you never back down and insist long enough and loud enough that you're right, and he held onto that right up to the final ride" back to the White House, said Gwenda Blair, his biographer, referring in turn to Fred Trump; the author of The Power of Positive Thinking; and the chief counsel in the Army-McCarthy hearings, who became a mentor to Donald Trump. For Trump, "he was being completely consistent with the way he has acted his entire life."

Anthony Scaramucci, a longtime associate who served briefly in the White House before breaking with Trump, has talked in the past about Trump's power to interpret reality in whatever way suited him. But Scaramucci said he had concluded that Trump understood perfectly well that the election was not stolen and that his actions on January 6 to overturn it were illegitimate.

"I do believe that President Trump knows that the whole thing that he is doing is a ruse," Scaramucci said. "On more than one occasion throughout the campaign" in 2016, "he would turn to me and others and say funny things like, 'Why can't people realise what you guys realize about me, that I am playacting and full of it at least 50 per cent of the time?' That sort of joking. So he knows that this is all a lie."

What the hearings have demonstrated with an array of witnesses drawn almost entirely from the president's own allies and advisers is that if Trump did not know, he certainly had every reason to. One adviser after another, including two successive attorneys general and multiple campaign officials and lawyers, told him there was "no there there," as one put it, when it came to widespread election fraud. Yet he persisted in spinning wild tales of conspiracies.

While Attorney General Merrick Garland must weigh many factors before deciding whether to bring a case, including whether it is in the national interest to charge a former president, Hutchinson's account of Trump's actions leading up to and on January 6 provided the building blocks for a possible prosecution by demonstrating that he and his advisers understood they were playing with fire.

While Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, claimed in a memoir that Trump had only been "speaking metaphorically" when he vowed to march to the Capitol, in fact he had discussed it for days. Hutchinson first learned of the plan on January 2 when Rudy Giuliani, the president's personal attorney, told her Trump would go to the Capitol and would "look powerful."

Alarmed, she found Meadows, her boss. "It sounds like we're going to the Capitol," she said. Meadows did not look up from his phone but made clear he understood the peril. "Things might get real, real bad on January 6," she remembered him telling her.

On the morning of January 6, she listened as Meadows was warned that some Trump supporters gathering for a rally on the Ellipse had weapons. Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel, warned that Trump should not go to the Capitol. "We're going to get charged with every crime imaginable if we make that movement happen," he said, according to Hutchinson.

Trump was undaunted. Waiting in a tent to address the crowd, he brushed off worries about violence. He criticized the Secret Service for screening supporters with magnetometers, standard procedure for a presidential event, and demanded that they be removed. "They're not here to hurt me," he said. "Take the f-ing mags away. Let my people in."

Addressing the crowd, he declared that he would go with them to the Capitol. But when he climbed into his armoured vehicle, the Secret Service refused to take him, citing his own security. According to what Hutchinson said she was later told by Anthony M. Ornato, a deputy White House chief of staff, Trump erupted in rage and demanded to go there.

They returned to the White House instead, where Trump stewed about being thwarted. As he watched television images of his supporters rampaging through the Capitol, he agreed with those in the crowd calling for Pence to be hanged.

Indeed, according to Hutchinson's testimony, he was on the side of the mob. As she heard Meadows put it, "He doesn't think they're doing anything wrong."

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: Peter Baker
Photographs by: Rachel Mummey
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