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Whistleblower and former aide Cassidy Hutchinson dishes the dirt – from crockery-based temper tantrums to sexual harassment – on the former president and his cast of underlingsEvery legal drama needs a surprise witness. Until June last year, the congressional hearings to investigate the attempted coup at the US Capitol in January 2021 were unsurprising: Democrats presented evidence that Trump had riled up the incendiary mob, to which Republicans responded with regurgitated abuse. Then into the room walked Cassidy Hutchinson, a Republican true believer who had worked as an aide to Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff. No one gasped, because the then 25-year-old woman was unknown, but her testimony, provoked by an uneasy conscience, quietly confirmed that Trump and his henchmen had knowingly lied about the outcome of the presidential election, then summoned loony militias from the backwoods and dispatched them, armed with bear spray and flagpoles sharpened into spears, to disrupt the certification of Biden’s victory.Hutchinson’s memoir adds many greasy, sleazy details to the more sanitised account she gave in Congress. Trump, she recalls, smashed plates in his dining room beside the Oval Office, squirting ketchup on the walls to express his exasperation. She observes Meadows illicitly incinerating bags of telltale documents that should have been passed to the government archives; his wife complains about the cost of dry-cleaning his suits to remove the stench from so many bonfires. And as Trump exhorts his horde to invade the Capitol, Rudy Giuliani, for whom the mayhem was like a double dose of Valium, leers at Hutchinson with jaundiced eyes and slides his hand up her thigh. Disillusioned and disgusted, she decides, as the title of her book tersely puts it, that she has had enough of the president and his thuggish praetorian guards. Continue reading...