Our book, Divided We Stand, looks at the 2020 election and the January 6 insurrection. Some Republican leaders -- and a measurable number of rank-and-file voters -- are open to violent rebellion, coups, and secession. Trump and his henchmen were involved in violent intimidation.
Washington is run by aides, or at least it runs on the work of aides: the gofers, the schedulers, the advisers, the consiglieres, the speechwriters, the deputy assistant whatevers, the advance teams, the surrogates and spokespeople, the bag men and body men and boss whisperers, the young women who arrange everything and get credit for nothing. The aide is just out of frame, or blurry in the background, or seated against the wall of the conference room. Head down, taking notes, sending texts. Crafting a plan, a response, a lunch order. The aide’s responsibilities can be vast or pinpoint, consequential or quotidian. But even at a lower rank, even with modest experience, an aide has a source of formidable power: proximity. The aide sees and hears and knows, because they are, simply, around.
“Principal aide” was how Cassidy Hutchinson, 25, was described by Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) Tuesday during the sixth hearing of the Jan. 6 select committee. Cheney used her opening remarks to situate Hutchinson at the nexus of power, calling her “a familiar face on Capitol Hill” whose desk was “several steps down the hall from the Oval Office.”
“Ms. Hutchinson,” Cheney said, “was in a position to know a great deal about the happenings in the Trump White House.”
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In 1973, Alexander Butterfield — an assistant to Richard M. Nixon’s first chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman — told the Senate Watergate Committee about the president’s audiotapes. Multiple former White House aides interviewed for this article name-checked Butterfield as an analog to Hutchinson.
Nixon “wanted Haldeman to be more a thinker, to be the follow-through guy on things that were important to the president that needed to get done,” Butterfield told the director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in 2008. “And there was a lot of minutiae to the other stuff, administrative minutiae, and I took that on. I had about 28 separate jobs …”
Hutchinson had many, too, it seems. Her workload in the final weeks of the Trump presidency, she implied from her testimony, ranged from receiving officials’ objections to the commander in chief’s urges to wiping lunch debris off the wall of the Oval Office dining room after Trump allegedly threw a tantrum.
