It was the plan all along
There was a reason Mark Meadows and Donald Trump were “unconcerned,” as Cassidy Hutchinson testified yesterday, when police lines broke on January 6 and Trump’s followers began battering the Capitol trying to get in. A violent assault on the Capitol was the plan all along, or had been at least since December 14, after electors had met and cast their ballots in the states and reported the results to the National Archives. Trump was out of options. Violence was all he had left.
The next step was certifying those ballots, counting them, and declaring the winner of the presidential election at a joint session of Congress on January 6. Trump’s plan to get Jeffrey Clark to send letters to states, beginning with Georgia, falsely asserting that the Department of Justice had found irregularities in the votes in battleground states, and the DOJ was recommending that the state legislatures meet and appoint their own slates of Trump electors, had been shot down at the late night meeting in the Oval Office when practically the entire top rank of the DOJ had threatened to resign if Clark was appointed.
That was only days before January 6. Already in the Willard Hotel, across Lafayette Park from the White House, a so-called war room had been established to oversee the events that would take place on the 6th, beginning with the speech on the Ellipse followed by the march on the Capitol and the violent assault that would take Trump’s army inside. Mark Meadows wanted to go to the Willard to join the war room in progress on the night of January 5, but was disabused of the idea by, yes, Cassidy Hutchinson. He called into the war room meeting instead.
Attempts had been made in the run up to the Ellipse rally by Pat Cippollone and others in the White House to get speech writers to take the lines about going to the Capitol, among others, out of Trump’s speech, without success. Riling up the crowd with lies and sending them to the Capitol was written into the speech days ahead. Trump apparently didn’t decide that he wanted to go to the Capitol himself until that morning, but when he did, he tried to take control of the presidential limousine himself and assaulted his own Secret Service agent when he was told there wasn’t enough security and he was returning to the White House.
In the West Wing, as cable news showed images of his followers violently attacking Capitol police and breaking into the Capitol, Trump sat calmly in the Oval Office dining room watching it happen. Mark Meadows was a few dozen yards down the hall in his own office “on his phone,” as Ms. Hutchinson put it.
Neither man was shocked because the assault on the Capitol was going just as it had been planned.
I think when the hearings reconvene that we’re going to hear and see evidence of coordination between Trump or his close associates like Rudy Giuliani and possibly his own sons with Proud Boys and Oath Keepers in the days immediately before the assault. The entire leadership of both groups are presently behind bars, held without bail, pending trials on charges of conspiracy to commit sedition against the government of the United States. The indictment of the Proud Boys revealed that more than one of them has flipped and has given evidence against his fellow Proud Boys leaders.
Multiple people in Trump’s close orbit are in the same place the Proud Boys have found themselves, facing multiple years in prison. Somebody is going to flip.
Unless a corrupt leader has the country’s military behind him, coup attempts don’t work. The Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers and a few wrung-out drunken lawyers aren’t enough to bring down a government, even when the president of the United States is the one leading them.
After the hearings, right-wing commentators and Trump loyalists went after Cassidy Hutchinson with a vengeance. What she had described – a grown man throwing temper tantrums, Trump attacking his own Secret Service agents trying to get them to take him to the Capitol – was so pathetic, something had to be done to discredit her. Trump himself, of course, immediately claimed "I hardly know who this person, Cassidy Hutchinson, is, other than I heard very negative things about her (a total phony and “leaker”).
Hemingway famously wrote that you go bankrupt in two ways: “Gradually, then suddenly.”
Trump, no stranger to bankruptcy, has left the gradual stage.
For me, the news is that Merrick Garland and his DOJ no longer seem to be comatose and MIA. The seizure of John Eastman’s electronic devices is big news.
The publicly known evidence of this Jan. 6 criminal conspiracy around Trump is becoming a flood. (Lord knows how much evidence is still under wraps)
The question is no longer, “Was there a wide-ranging criminal conspiracy in the West Wing and in Congress to block Biden’s victory and retain Dumpster as President,” because that question is answered. All that’s left is for the legal beagles to do their work. The only real question which remains: “Is Merrick Garland’s DOJ going to do its job and indict these jokers.”
I'm trying to imagine the outcome if trump had made it to the Capitol. The mob would have been in a frenzy. Thousands more would have entered the building in search of Pence, Pelosi, and anyone else they deemed a "traitor." More people would have died.