THE BIG LIE: According to Cassidy Hutchinson, Jim Jordan has knowledge of almost or possibly everything related to the January 6 COUP. Jim Jordan must abide by the two congressional subpoenas that he has not followed, and it is essential for him to do so as the public seeks… pic.twitter.com/RghnpFaygl
— Popular Liberal 🇺🇸 (@PopularLiberal) October 8, 2023
The tweet above crossed my path, reminding me I’ve meant to talk about Cassidy Hutchinson’s book tour — specifically, about how her (now ended) devotion to Trump was sparked by growing up with an intermittently absent / abusive father. Monica Hesse, in the Washington Post [unpaywalled gift link]:
Cassidy Hutchinson’s parents had separated only recently when her father sent her a text saying he’d left her a present. He hadn’t handled the split well, the former White House aide writes in her new memoir, “Enough,” but there he was, telling her there was a surprise in the mailbox of the New Jersey home where she lived with her mom. Teenage Cassidy went out and retrieved “something weighty wrapped in aluminum foil.” She unwrapped the package at the kitchen sink and found two deer hearts, “still warm and dripping with blood.”
Was the gift a threat? A performance? Was it the only convoluted way that a man like him — a hunter untrusting of government and hospitals and appendix removals and “wimps,” in his daughter’s telling — knew how to express love? Hutchinson doesn’t plumb the event too deeply in the book, in which the bloody heart gift is just one in a series of kooky behaviors from her complicated dad. But if you’re reading “Enough” not as a political potboiler but as a character study in what a nice girl is doing in a place like this, then, boy, the deer heart is going to haunt you for days…
I cannot count the number of times, during the Trump administration, that I looked at the young women surrounding him — the Hope Hickses and Alyssa Farahs and Sarah Matthewses — and wondered what in God’s name they were doing there. John F. Kelly, Mark Meadows, you could understand. They must have decided they could either steady the ship or party on down with it — and if the latter happened, hey, they had their entire careers in the rearview mirror. But when you’re a 20-something woman, what about Trump’s mangy persona or misogynist tendencies made you decide to serve at the pleasure of this president?
“Enough” is most interesting when it serves as a case study to answer that question. Hutchinson didn’t come from money. She didn’t go to Harvard. She was wait-listed from her dream school, which wasn’t even an Ivy but a decent liberal arts college in rural Pennsylvania. She ended up at Christopher Newport University, a fine institution in Virginia that you will be forgiven if you’ve barely heard of. She didn’t have a buffet of family-connection job offers awaiting her upon graduation. She got a little lucky with a college boyfriend whose family let her live with them rent-free in the D.C. area so she could work unpaid internships. But otherwise — this was a young American who got patriotic stars in her eyes the first time she visited Washington as a child, and who decided then that she’d do what it took to work there as soon as she graduated college. It was her bad luck that the White House administration coinciding with her job eligibility was an absolute toilet bowl.
“Enough” is a profile in courage, but it’s equally a profile in panic. A profile in realizing that the toilet is never going to flush you out into an open ocean of possibility; that you just work in a toilet now. You are 24 years old, caught in the middle of something far bigger than you, and it turns out all your mentors are snakes.
In the background of all of this is Hutchinson’s father. Her descriptions of him paint a picture of a needy, aggrieved man who delighted in mocking weakness and thrilled at considering himself a “warrior,” who demanded Hutchinson’s fealty while offering jeering and insults in return. If this sounds an awful lot like someone else in her life (and ours), it won’t surprise you at all to hear that “The Apprentice” was her dad’s favorite television show. Her father, Hutchinson writes, “fixated” on Trump and on the important business lessons he felt the man was sharing with the country.
A daddy metaphor feels a little on the nose here. But reading this book about Hutchinson’s bid at redemption makes you wonder about how ours might go, as we careen toward 2024 and the likelihood that most Republicans are sanguine with the idea of restoring Trump to the White House, despite what Hutchinson and others have told us about what it was like in there with him in charge. Legions of young graduates need to decide where to direct their résumés and their loyalty. The future may be advertised as a gift. But it feels like the country is standing at the kitchen sink, unwrapping a wad of aluminum foil, dreading whatever is inside.
I know this has been said before, but: Trump himself grew up with an abusive father, part of a deeply dysfunctional family. A childhood like this induces a form of PTSD, and its survivors have a well-known tendency to end up as abusers themselves… or as enablers, who seek out abuser who will make them feel safe, inside the kind of horrorshow where they’re comfortable as performers, unlike the wimps and weaklings who don’t understand What It Takes. HRC was right to talk about ‘deprogramming’ MAGAt legislators, because of course the only way to break a cycle of abuse is to help its survivors understand there is a better way to live.
Sunday Night Open Thread: Embracing TFG As A Trauma ResponsePost + Comments (161)