A President Untethered

 

NEWS ANALYSIS

A President Untethered

 

In the final, frenzied days of his administration, Donald J. Trump’s behavior turned increasingly volatile as he smashed dishware and lunged at his own Secret Service agent, according to testimony.

 

Peter Baker

By Peter Baker

June 28, 2022

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/28/us/politics/trump-jan-6-behavior.html

 

WASHINGTON — He flung his lunch across the room, smashing the plate in a fit of anger as ketchup dripped down the wall. He appeared to endorse supporters who wanted to hang his own vice president. And in a scene laid out by a former aide that seemed more out of a movie than real life, he tried to wrestle away the steering wheel of his presidential vehicle and lunged at his own Secret Service agent.

 

Former President Donald J. Trump has never been seen as the most stable occupant of the Oval Office by almost anyone other than himself, but the breathtaking testimony presented by his former aide, Cassidy Hutchinson, at Tuesday’s House select committee hearing portrayed an unhinged commander in chief veering wildly out of control as he desperately sought to cling to power and egged on armed supporters to help make it happen.

 

The president that emerged from her account was volatile, violent and vicious, single-minded in his quest to overturn an election he lost no matter what anyone told him, anxious to head to the Capitol to personally disrupt the constitutional process that would finalize his defeat, dismissive of warnings that his actions could lead to disaster and thoroughly unbothered by the prospect of sending to Congress a mob of supporters that he knew included people armed with deadly weapons.

 

A president who liked to describe himself as a “very stable genius” was anything but that as Ms. Hutchinson observed in those final, frenzied days of his time in office. Hers was not a description that surprised many of those who worked for Mr. Trump and had seen him up close in the preceding four years, or for that matter, many who had known him in the decades that preceded his life in politics. But hearing her recount it all under oath, on live television, brought home how much Mr. Trump and his White House spiraled in its perilous last chapter.

 

“This is f-ing crazy,” Pat A. Cipollone, his White House counsel, declared at one point on Jan. 6, 2021, as Ms. Hutchinson recalled it, when Mr. Trump was busy castigating Vice President Mike Pence rather than trying to call off the attack on the Capitol.

 

Mr. Cipollone was not the only one who thought so. By Ms. Hutchinson’s account, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and other members of the Cabinet were so concerned about Mr. Trump’s behavior that they discussed invoking the 25th Amendment, used to remove a president deemed unable to discharge his duties.

 

Mr. Trump, who regularly accuses his critics of being “crazy” and “psycho,” bombarded his new social media site during the hearing on Tuesday with posts assailing Ms. Hutchinson and denying the most sensational anecdote she provided to the committee.

 

“Her Fake story that I tried to grab the steering wheel of the White House Limousine in order to steer it to the Capitol Building is ‘sick’ and fraudulent, very much like the Unselect Committee itself,” Mr. Trump wrote on his Truth Social website. “Her story of me throwing food is also false.”

 

A Secret Service spokesman said in a statement that the agency would respond on the record to the House committee about Ms. Hutchinson’s account of what happened in the armored car.

 

Secret Service officials who requested anonymity to discuss the potential testimony said that both Robert Engel, the head of Mr. Trump’s protective detail, and the driver of Mr. Trump’s sport utility vehicle were prepared to state under oath that neither man was assaulted by the former president and that he did not reach for the wheel. The officials said the two men would not dispute the allegation that Mr. Trump wanted to go to the Capitol.

 

Ms. Hutchinson did not witness the scene in the vehicle herself but said she was informed about it moments later by Anthony Ornato, the president’s deputy chief of staff and a former Secret Service agent, with Mr. Engel present in the room and not disputing it.

 

Either way, other veterans of the Trump White House who have broken with the former president said Ms. Hutchinson’s testimony resonated with their own experiences. Mr. Trump was prone to temper tantrums, slamming his hands down on his desk and screaming at advisers he considered insufficiently loyal. As Ms. Hutchinson said, his destruction of dishware during an outburst following the election was hardly the first time he had taken his wrath out on the White House china.

 

“His temper was scary. And swift,” Stephanie Grisham, who served as his White House press secretary and communications director and as Melania Trump’s chief of staff, said after the hearing on Tuesday. “He’d snap and almost lose control.”

 

She related a number of examples in her tell-all book published after she left office, and noted that when Mr. Trump descended into rage, his staff resorted to summoning an aide, nicknamed the Music Man, to play favorite show tunes they knew would soothe him, including “Memory” from the Broadway musical “Cats.”

 

Other presidents have exhibited erratic behavior behind the scenes, from Andrew Jackson to Lyndon B. Johnson. Richard M. Nixon threw an ashtray across the room upon learning of the Watergate break-in, and on another occasion was seen shoving his own press secretary. In the days of scandal that led up to his resignation, Nixon drank, talked to the paintings of past presidents and seemed so unstable that his defense secretary ordered generals not to carry out any orders he issued without checking with him or the secretary of state first.

 

Even so, it’s hard to imagine any other president accosting his own Secret Service agent, in a vain attempt to turn his vehicle toward the Capitol, so that he could march into the House chamber to object to his own election defeat.

 

“We never know everything that goes on behind closed doors at the White House, and presidential history is replete with boorish behavior,” said Jeffrey A. Engel, founding director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University. “But I’m hard pressed to think of any previous instance when a president physically assaulted, or even threatened, someone charged with keeping them safe.”

 

Mark K. Updegrove, president of the L.B.J. Foundation and author of “Incomparable Grace,” a new book about John F. Kennedy, said he was unable to come up with a historical comparison. Johnson and Nixon “could be volatile emotionally, but nothing approaching physical violence,” he said. “Like almost everything else with Trump, this is utterly unprecedented.”

 

One who might know would be John Dean, the White House counsel whose own testimony during the Watergate era helped bring down Nixon. “Cassidy‘s testimony makes clear that Trump is prone to tantrums, like an undisciplined child,” he said after the hearing. “I can’t tell from her testimony if they’re controlled or uncontrolled. I suspect at his age they’re controlled tantrums.”

 

Mr. Trump’s mental state was a regular issue throughout his four years in office and the notion of declaring him unfit to serve through the application of the 25th Amendment came up inside his own administration even in its early months.

 

Bookshelves were filled with volumes speculating about his psychological health. His speech patterns were analyzed for signs of dementia. His own niece, Mary L. Trump, a clinical psychologist, declared that he had “so many pathologies” and “demonstrates sociopathic tendencies.” At one point during the 2020 campaign, he took a cognitive test to prove his mental acuity, reciting in order, “Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.”

 

Making a case against Trump. The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack appears to be laying out evidence that could allow prosecutors to indict former President Donald J. Trump, though the path to a criminal trial is uncertain. Here are the main themes that have emerged so far:

 

An unsettling narrative. During the first hearing, the committee described in vivid detail what it characterized as an attempted coup orchestrated by the former president that culminated in the assault on the Capitol. At the heart of the gripping story were three main players: Mr. Trump, the Proud Boys and a Capitol Police officer.

 

Creating election lies. In its second hearing, the panel showed how Mr. Trump ignored aides and advisers as he declared victory prematurely and relentlessly pressed claims of fraud he was told were wrong. “He’s become detached from reality if he really believes this stuff,” William P. Barr, the former attorney general, said of Mr. Trump during a videotaped interview.

 

Pressuring Pence. Mr. Trump continued pressuring Vice President Mike Pence to go along with a plan to overturn his loss even after he was told it was illegal, according to testimony laid out by the panel during the third hearing. The committee showed how Mr. Trump’s actions led his supporters to storm the Capitol, sending Mr. Pence fleeing for his life.

 

Fake elector plan. The committee used its fourth hearing to detail how Mr. Trump was personally involved in a scheme to put forward fake electors. The panel also presented fresh details on how the former president leaned on state officials to invalidate his defeat, opening them up to violent threats when they refused.

 

Strong arming the Justice Department. During the fifth hearing, the panel explored Mr. Trump’s wide-ranging and relentless scheme to misuse the Justice Department to keep himself in power. The panel also presented evidence that at least half a dozen Republican members of Congress sought pre-emptive pardons.

 

Trump’s rage. Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to Mr. Trump’s final chief of staff, delivered explosive testimony during the panel’s sixth hearing, saying that the president knew the crowd on Jan. 6 was armed, but wanted to loosen security. She also revealed that Mr. Trump, demanding to go to the Capitol, tried to grab his vehicle’s steering wheel from a Secret Service agent.

 

Some advisers came to the conclusion that Mr. Trump deteriorated after losing the election to Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Nov. 3. Former Attorney General William P. Barr, whose public statement on Dec. 1 that there was no evidence the election was stolen prompted Mr. Trump to attack his lunch, told the House committee that the president seemed increasingly unbalanced.

 

“I thought, boy, if he really believes this stuff, he has lost contact with — he’s become detached from reality,” Mr. Barr testified.

 

The reality conveyed by Ms. Hutchinson, a top aide to Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, became more disturbing on the day that Congress convened to count the Electoral College votes confirming Mr. Trump’s defeat. He lashed out and gave every indication that he knew the crowd of supporters he had gathered on the Ellipse included some bent on violence. Told that some trying to attend his rally were armed, he snapped that the Secret Service should remove its magnetometers and let them in.

 

“You know, I don’t f-ing care that they have weapons,” Mr. Trump said in Ms. Hutchinson’s telling of the episode. “They’re not here to hurt me. Take the f-ing mags away. Let my people in. They can march to the Capitol from here. Let the people in. Take the f-ing mags away.”

 

The fact that he then told them to march to the Capitol, knowing they were armed, did not daunt him in the least, as far as she could tell.

 

He wanted to go with them and told the crowd that he would, even though advisers had pronounced it a phenomenally bad idea. “We’re going to get charged with every crime imaginable” if he headed to the Capitol, Mr. Cipollone had warned a few days earlier.

 

When Mr. Trump climbed into the armored presidential sport utility vehicle after his speech on the Ellipse, the Secret Service began to take him back to the White House, prompting him to erupt. “I’m the f-ing president. Take me up to the Capitol now,” he ordered.

 

Robert Engel, the lead agent, told him he had to go back to the West Wing. At that point, according to the account Ms. Hutchinson later heard, the president reached up toward the front of the vehicle to grab at the steering wheel. Mr. Engel grabbed his arm. “Sir, you need to take your hand off the steering wheel,” the agent reportedly said. “We’re going back to the West Wing. We’re not going to the Capitol.”

 

According to the version relayed to Ms. Hutchinson, Mr. Trump then used his free hand to lunge toward the agent at his clavicle. But it did not make a difference.

 

The president was taken back to the White House, where he watched the action of the rest of the day on television — upset not at the violence unleashed in his name but at its failure to change the election outcome.

 

Zolan Kanno-Youngs contributed reporting.

 

Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent and has covered the last five presidents for The Times and The Washington Post. He also is the author of six books, most recently "The Man Who Ran Washington: The Life and Times of James A. Baker III."  @peterbakernyt • Facebook