Photo: TOM BRENNER/REUTERS
Former Trump White House staffer Cassidy Hutchinson has already revealed some of the more insane details from her time in former president Trump’s inner circle. In June 2022, Hutchinson, who was an aide to chief of staff Mark Meadows, testified before the House January 6 committee that Donald Trump had wanted to lead rioters to the Capitol before Secret Service denied him. But now she’s got a book out, Enough, that features many more allegations of absurdity from the most chaotic White House in history. Here are some of the most eye-opening.
In June 2020, as COVID-19 cases spiked in the heartland, Trump held an indoor rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in an attempt to right the reelection campaign that had been sidetracked by the historic crisis. Against the advice of public-health officials, Trump went ahead with the rally, and six campaign staffers tested positive on the day of the event. Over the following weeks, COVID-19 cases in the area tripled. One of the hundreds to test positive was Herman Cain, the former Federal Reserve Bank member and 2012 GOP contender, who died a little over a month after the rally.
While Trump said at the time that he didn’t think that Cain got COVID-19 at his superspreader rally, Meadows knew the likely score. “We killed Herman Cain,” he told Hutchinson. The White House chief of staff then asked her for Cain’s wife’s phone number. (Meadows denied the allegation in a statement to CNN.)
In the year before the vaccine was available, the Trump White House relied on testing to keep COVID-19 out of the workplace — a strategy that kind of worked until it didn’t. But according to Hutchinson, they never really cared much about good virus-prevention hygiene. After Trump lost the election, Hutchinson claims that people Trump wanted to meet with in the Oval Office were let inside even if they tested positive.
Hutchinson writes that after the US Supreme Court declined to hear a lawsuit filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton that was full of lies and false claims about the election, Trump pushed Meadows: “Why didn’t we make more calls? We needed to do more … We can’t let this stand.”
Trump continued, “I don’t want people to know we lost, Mark. This is embarrassing. Figure it out.”
The first detail to be made public from Hutchinson’s book was the allegation that Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani groped her backstage at the Stop the Steal rally that immediately preceded the Capitol riot:
“I find Rudy in the back of the tent with, among others, John Eastman,” she continues. “The corners of his mouth split into a Cheshire cat smile. Waving a stack of documents, he moves towards me, like a wolf closing in on its prey.
“‘We have the evidence. It’s all here. We’re going to pull this off.’ Rudy wraps one arm around my body, closing the space that was separating us. I feel his stack of documents press into the small of my back. I lower my eyes and watch his free hand reach for the hem of my blazer.
“‘By the way,’ he says, fingering the fabric, ‘I’m loving this leather jacket on you.’ His hand slips under my blazer, then my skirt,” Hutchinson writes.
Giuliani, who is facing criminal charges for his efforts to overturn the election and an unrelated civil suit alleging sexual misconduct, has denied the allegation.
In the days after the Capitol riot, when Trump finally conceded that he would not remain in office, Mark Meadows began clearing out his office — relying more on his fireplace than traditional banker’s boxes. According to Hutchinson, Meadows’s wife showed up at the office telling her to stop lighting the fireplace for her husband because “all of his suits smell like a bonfire.”
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