Enough

by Cassidy Hutchinson

Mark would publish a book recounting that the president had tested positive for the virus the day of the Barrett announcement, September 26. He and the president had disregarded the result, blaming it on a faulty test.

I stopped watching it when I heard Dad sniffle and begin to talk. I didn’t want to hear what he had to say. In a way, I preferred his cruelty. I was proud of the life I was building, but I couldn’t risk contaminating that life with the confusing, conflicted reality of my past. He had never shown up before, I reminded myself.

stopped watching it when I heard Dad sniffle and begin to talk. I didn’t want to hear what he had to say. In a way, I preferred his cruelty. I was proud of the life I was building, but I couldn’t risk contaminating that life with the confusing, conflicted reality of my past. He had never shown up before, I reminded myself.

the shame I felt was not Dad’s fault, nor was it Mom’s. I was desperate to fit in the world that I had worked hard to become a cherished member of, but below the surface I felt displaced and undeserving. I did not know how to marry the two worlds I ...

I asked if they could park four of the vehicles in the shape of a square, and explained that the chief needed to have a quick meeting with someone out of sight. They were reluctant at first and questioned why Mark couldn’t just meet the person where staff were congregated. “The chief of staff needs to have a private meeting,”

The farther we got from the stage, the more the event felt like a fair rather than a campaign rally. Attendees were eating food they’d brought with them and listening to music. Children were running around playing tag. Some had their faces painted.

but they were all wearing hats and ski masks. Brian introduced himself and explained that we would bring them to the chief. I spun around and started pushing through the crowd to make a path for the group a good distance behind me.

The staffer said he could lose his job if he let people in without proper credentials. “You will lose your job if you don’t let them through. I promise you that.”

“Oh, don’t look so frightened.” He dropped his arm. “I just want to thank you for working so hard. It’s quite difficult to find someone as loyal as you.”

Even though I don’t know what Mark had been meeting with Bobulinski about, I could no longer ignore the suspicious activity that he, Trump, and others in the administration seemed to be engaged in. I had done what they had asked of me, not questioning it, but now I started to put together all the moments like this one that didn’t add up. I could not shake the feeling that I had been entangled in something far more complex and secretive than I had initially realized.

meant to him that such powerful people showed his daughter so much kindness. This was a once-in-a-lifetime experience for someone like him, and he apologized for acting as if he were meeting his favorite celebrity, and for not dressing in fancier clothes. He worked a night shift and had wanted to skip the rally, but his daughter had begged him to go. He laughed and showed me the dirt under his fingernails. “You must be so fed up having to put up with folks like us, telling us how grateful you are for our support,” he said. “But you’ll never understand how you just changed my little girl’s life. You’ll never understand,” he repeated.

I, too, had grown up in a blue-collar family. I was not the most intelligent or most politically connected person at the White House. Rather, the values imparted to me from my childhood were the reason that I stood in front of him that day. I wanted to tell him that I still had my first American flag pin, that the memory of my uncle giving it to me was deeply ingrained in my memory.

wandering through the crowd. I paused to take a long look at many of the attendees. Thick clouds of breath puffed from their agape mouths, and their eyes were glazed over from waiting in sub-zero temperatures all day. They did not notice the deepening rattle in the president’s voice, or that his adult children wore outfits worth more than their yearly income. Instead, they were mesmerized and emboldened in the presence of the president.

People placed wagers on how many electoral college votes the boss would win, and hurled insults at the Biden family. Weeks filled with galas and parties for the second inauguration were discussed. The president’s children ordered bottles of champagne for the plane. Glasses clinked and champagne spilled onto the carpet as people chanted “Four More Years!”

I had never been so physically and mentally exhausted in my life, and I was already worried about driving home. But something had shifted in me the night before when I saw Mark interact with Tony Bobulinski, and my unease deepened throughout the day.

felt heavy with shame that I had been pulled into the center of the political universe, mostly by my own doing. I did not belong on Air Force One, drinking champagne or musing over ball gowns I could not afford. I was consumed with fear that my past had infiltrated the life I was building. I felt that I had betrayed the world that had made me, and I began to grapple with the question of who I truly was amidst this sea of power and privilege.

I thought about the little girl and her father in North Carolina. Through her eyes, I saw my own life. I started talking out loud. “She has as much right to a job like mine. She has to work hard. She has to be a fighter. Maybe we did that for her today. Maybe we changed her life.”

Mark and I finally caught it immediately after the campaign ended and we were each placed in a ten-day quarantine. Alone at my apartment with CNN quietly playing on my TV,

As a dedicated and faithful Southern Baptist, Mark had never drunk an alcoholic beverage in his life—until mid-November 2020.

consumed his first alcoholic beverage in the presence of Russ Vought, a dedicated and faithful Mormon, in the morning hours during a consequential period of American history.

“Mogul, moving elevator, ground-floor residence.” Mogul was Trump’s Secret Service code name. The president, who rarely left the residence before noon, was on his way to the Oval. That wiped the smile off Mark’s face. “Does that mean the president is on his way here?”

president and his legal advisors—led by Rudy and Sidney Powell, a former federal prosecutor—would file ninety “Stop the Steal” lawsuits. The slogan was in support of the president’s claims of a stolen election. The same day the news networks declared Joe Biden the president-elect, this group held a press conference about various legal challenges. They stood in front of a Philadelphia landscaping company building in a strip mall next to an adult entertainment shop and a crematorium.

Rudy rambled on about “one of my favorite law movies,” My Cousin Vinny, while streaks of what looked like motor oil

streamed down his face. Sidney Powell raised the dreaded specter of George Soros, and Jenna Ellis, another of Trump’s lawyers, likened their legal team to an “elite strike force.”

Everyone in the White House, including the president, was both fascinated and appalled by the spectacle. Like most Americans who watched it, I thought the lawyers were humiliating for the president, a sentiment he shared.

I felt strongly that he should concede the election, and I worried that we were surrounding him with people who fueled his most impulsive behaviors. I knew things could get out of hand, and fast.

In mid-November, Mark and I went to the Hill for various end-of-year policy negotiation meetings. We stopped by the office of Leader McConnell, who earnestly pleaded with Mark to tell the president not to meddle in the upcoming Georgia Senate runoff elections.

if Biden was inaugurated. I told him I’d heard from a few members and their staffs about openings in their offices and in the offices of incoming freshmen members, but there was also another job opportunity on my mind.

He joked that if the Democrats stole the election from us, he would probably need me to remain on his staff, since it would be difficult to find someone who knew the members like I did. Mark and I laughed,

While I had reservations about remaining in the president’s circle after January 20, there was something attractive about helping build his post-presidential operation. On one hand, I worried that moving away from Washington would tarnish the network I had spent the last few years building, and it might then be difficult to land a job on the Hill if I decided to return.

Dan Scavino and I were among the few stragglers in the West Wing that day. “Look around, Cass,” Dan said. “No one is here. No one sticks by the boss’s side when things get hard. It sucks. I feel bad for the guy.”

We’re here on Thanksgiving Eve, and now we’re entertaining Rudy’s cast of characters for a meeting without purpose.”

When everyone had filed into the Oval Office, the president instructed the masked guests to take off their masks. He assured them it was more important for him to see their beautiful faces, and he was not worried about contracting the virus. He explained that since he had recently had the coronavirus, his antibodies would protect him from

THE QUAD-SCREEN TV in the office showed CNN reporting that Attorney General Barr had acknowledged to the Associated Press that the Justice Department had found insufficient evidence of widespread voter fraud that would have changed the results of the election.

I stepped into the room and immediately saw a shattered plate to my right, and Heinz ketchup smeared on the fireplace mantel. I grabbed a tea towel from the pantry drawer and started wiping away the condiment.

“The president is really, really angry at the attorney general,” he said.

On December 8, the president’s de facto legal team came up with a Hail Mary lawsuit that had an attorney general—Ken Paxton, of Texas—challenge the election procedures of other states, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin. He believed that the Supreme Court would hear the case and side with him.

“Hey, Mark,” I began. “Does the president know about the meeting at the National Archives?” “No, he doesn’t,” he said. “I’ll probably tell him this afternoon. The president probably won’t be that happy with me about meeting with him, though. He doesn’t want us to work on a post-election plan yet.

Many attendees were encouraging the president’s election theft claims, and the event would open the floodgates to their direct access on campus.

When John Ratcliffe, the director of National Intelligence, stopped by the office with his daughter toward the end of the ball,

“He acknowledges he lost, not that he wants to concede, but he acknowledges he lost the election,” John said.

“Then he’ll immediately backpedal,” he continued, “or call the next day and say he didn’t lose the election and I should call Mark. Mark has more information. I’m a little worried Mark’s not giving him good advice.”

Mark might be “in that phase of telling people what they want to hear. But,” I added, “I don’t know everything that’s ...

sympathized with my colleagues who mourned our second term, but privately, I was relieved we had reached what seemed like the last impasse.

I wanted the chaos to subside so that we could prepare for the next phase of our careers, and encourage the president to leave with his dignity intact.

I was irritated that Mark gave the president false hope. Of course, that’s what the president wanted to hear, but he was damaging the country by concocting false rationales for perpetuating a fight that was now certainly a lost cause.

While other staffers slowed down in anticipation of the Christmas break, my responsibilities ramped up in mid-December. Mark practically ordered the majority of the staff to go home to spend the holidays with family. I thought maybe he was trying to protect them.

Mark asked for General Services Administration (GSA) staff to light a fire in his office fireplace first thing every morning. He kept a pile of firewood

throughout the day added logs to keep the fire burning. When I went into his office to deliver lunch or a package to him, I would sometimes find him leaning over the fire, feeding papers into it, watching to make sure they burned, and placing logs on top of the ashes.

The Presidential Records Act requires staff to keep original documents and send them to the National Archives. All copies and personal papers were supposed to go into burn bags to be properly disposed of. Mark knew these procedures. Even if he was burning copies, he was still toeing a fine line of what should be preserved, under the law.