Former President Donald Trump criticized former senior White House adviser Cassidy Hutchinson on a far-right platform, but one of his biographers claims that all of his remarks were simply projections.
“This lady yesterday, there’s something wrong with her,” Trump said on Wednesday. “Is there something wrong? The woman is living in a fantasy land. She’s a social climber if you call that social. She has serious problems. Mental problems. But for this girl to sit there and just, I think, make up stories, and I, again, hardly know who she is.”
When photos and videos show otherwise, Trump has been found trying to discredit former top advisers by asserting that he doesn’t even know them. He infamously referred to George Papadopoulos, his adviser on foreign policy, as nothing more than a “coffee boy” while in fact he was tasked with planning trips for Trump abroad and representing the campaign to foreign operatives, as per Bloomberg.
Hutchinson, like Papadopoulos, has been pictured with Trump and is well-known in the Trump community. Photos of her aboard Air Force One and wherever chief of staff Mark Meadows traveled were shown by the House Select Committee prior to their hearing with her.
“Well, we always expected Trump world to try and discredit her, and they are not disappointing us in that regard,” Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) told NBC News on Sunday. “I thought her testimony was credible. She has nothing to gain by stepping forward and telling the truth. And Trump’s world has everything to lose by the truth. So they are doing their best to try and attack her, to discredit her.”
Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio has written books about Trump using these tactics and explained on CNN that it’s “straight out of the playbook.”
“I’m reminded of the saying that the character is destiny so we’re now seeing play out Donald Trump’s destiny based on his character and Ms. Hutchinson’s destiny playing out based on her character and we know that in the wings with Pat Cipollone and we’re going to try to see where his character leads him,” D’Antonio explained.
“Yes, Donald Trump has always done this and the strange thing is that it has worked for him. It has allowed him to attract only the most loyal people who are afraid of him. It has allowed him to bully people into submission.”
D’Antonio said that it’s interesting that Trump actually employs the same words to criticize people.
“He always says that people are crazy,” the biographer explained. “People are seeking to raise their profile. People are just making up stories. Well, who does that remind you of? Who does it remind you of when he says someone is making up stories or trying to raise their profile or even being a little bit crazy. It reminds us of one former president.”
People who are familiar with Trump have been asked about what they have seen of the former president’s behavior and whether what Hutchinson is claiming is accurate.
“It sounds like the person that he imagined himself to be,” said D’Antonio about Trump’s behavior. “So this is a fellow who told me he’s the hero in his own comic book, that he loves to fight all kinds of fights, even physical fights. The record doesn’t show he’s really done that.”
Michael Cohen, a former lawyer, said on CNN that he has never witnessed Trump actually fight anyone, not even as a child. In Ivana Trump’s book, more than 20 women have made allegations of rape, sexual assault, and harassment. Trump even bragged about sexually abusing women in a video.
“I think it’s unlikely that he would somehow make his way across the beast and grab the steering wheel, but I think it’s the kind of story people would tell about him,” said D’Antonio. “The part that is credible to me is the idea he insisted on going to the Capitol himself.
Now we can only tremble at the thought of what would have happened if he had done that. I think the outcome would have been very different. The idea that he imagined being the president that would take over the car, and force it to go up to the Capitol, is how he would have thought about himself. But it’s not what I expect he did.”
