This sort of alleged harassment is not surprising at a White House led by a man who bragged that when he saw women he liked he could “grab them by the pussy” and whom a federal jury recently found responsible for sexually abusing writer E. (In a statement, a Giuliani adviser called Hutchinson’s assertion a “disgusting lie.”)Ĭassidy Hutchinson: Trump is greatest threat to our democracy “I feel his frozen fingertips trail up my thigh,” she writes. She writes that, during a convening at Camp David, Gaetz stopped by a cabin he believed was hers and tried to get her to escort him back to his own cabin, saying he was “lost.” Gaetz told MSNBC that he didn’t remember these incidents and claimed to have briefly dated and then remained friends with Hutchinson, who said, “I never dated Matt Gaetz.” Later, she alleges, in the middle of Trump’s pre-riot rally on January 6, Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani groped her. At a dinner one night during her early days as an intern in Congress, Hutchinson writes that former House Speaker John Boehner admonished her for drinking a cranberry vodka and touched the ends of her hair: “Dark liquor or red wine only from now on. Many of the men around her are paternalistic or creepy. The people she worked for in both Congress and the White House were uniformly male. At the Office of Legislative Affairs, she recounts being the only woman on the team. Much of that material is familiar - it made up the bulk of the testimony that made her famous - and yet there’s much new here as well that helps explain both Hutchinson’s choice to stay and adds detail to the lengths Trump and his team went to in their efforts to overturn the 2020 election (efforts for which many of the book’s main characters, including Trump and Meadows, have been indicted, pleading not guilty).įrom the start, Hutchinson found herself in a mostly-male world where casual sexism thrived. For a political memoir, her politics are largely absent, other than a sense that she sees herself, now at least, as a sort of Mitt Romney-John McCain Republican, wary of ideologues like Meadows despite her loyalty to him as her boss.īut it’s fair to say that most readers haven’t picked up “Enough” to better understand Hutchinson they’ve come for the front-row seat into the meltdown of the Trump administration that her loyalty earned her. She recalls that “The Apprentice” was one of his favorite shows and that Trump was his hero, but never really explains how she then became a Trump loyalist. Tapper compares Hutchinson leaving Trump administration to ‘leaving a cult’ ![]() The stories of her childhood are punctuated with traumatic episodes centering on her father, who taunts her while she’s pinned under a four-wheeler as a terrified young child, and later, after he and Hutchinson’s mother divorce, leaves a package containing a “gift” of what Hutchinson describes as “two deer hearts, still warm and dripping with blood.” Still in her mid-20s, Hutchinson may be a bit too young - and a bit too close to her life-changing decision to testify against the former president and his team - to offer the sort of insight into her own motivations that usually fuels a memoir. In a book that exposes the corrosive and corrupt inner workings of the Trump White House, which valued loyalty to Donald Trump above all else, Hutchinson’s own sense of loyalty proves to be her central flaw.Īt least, the flaw she is most willing to put on the page. Her memoir may be titled “Enough,” but despite repeated warnings that she is embedded with some of the least trustworthy people in politics, it takes quite a long time for Hutchinson to reach her breaking point - a point that only comes after she has been abandoned and betrayed by nearly everyone she had come to trust. Matt Gaetz in his place (“He chuckled and brushed his thumb across my chin,” she writes about an interaction with Gaetz after the first House impeachment vote she would later work to block his communication with the White House.)īut when it came to working in the West Wing as a staffer for then-Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and being a regular presence in meetings with the president, things unfold differently. ![]() She takes charge of schedules and contacts with a devoted work ethic and preternatural confidence, repeatedly putting a boundary-crossing Rep. Ted Cruz’s Senate office and finally in the Office of Legislative Affairs in the Trump White House. Steve Scalise in the Republican House leadership office, then briefly in Sen. That sort of spine reappears now and then as Hutchinson, who rose to insta-fame in the summer of 2022 for her explosive testimony before the January 6 committee, hurtles into politics during her summers in college.Ī first-generation college student at her second-choice school, Hutchinson quickly finds herself interning for Rep.
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