The author Chris Whipple, who has interviewed dozens of White House chiefs of staff, said that Cassidy Hutchinson’s shocking testimony before the House January 6 committee has made it abundantly clear that Mark Meadows is by far the “worst” White House chief of staff in history.
In the wake of Hutchinson’s damning testimony about her former boss’ inaction around the Capitol riot, Whipple argued that not even Richard Nixon’s Watergate cronies compare.
“It used to be a fairly stiff competition for the worst chief of staff in history, but Meadows absolutely owns it,” Whipple told Insider in a Thursday interview about Trump’s fourth chief of staff.
Hutchinson, a former top aide to Meadows, painted a jaw-dropping portrait of her boss appearing nonplussed by an insurrection unfolding just blocks away, an attack stoked by President Donald Trump’s campaign to overturn the election.
“The rioters are getting really close. Have you talked with the president?” Hutchinson told the committee she asked Meadows as the riot was unfolding.
According to Hutchinson, Meadows replied: “‘No, he wants to be alone right now.'”
Hutchinson further described repeated attempts to convince one of the most powerful people in America’s government that he should be concerned about a violent attempt to storm the Capitol, where Meadows served four terms in the House.
“I start to get frustrated because I sort of felt like I was looking at a bad car accident about to happen where you can’t stop it but you want to be able to do something,” she said. “I remember thinking in that moment, ‘Mark needs to snap out of this and I don’t know how to snap him out of this but he needs to care.'”
Meadows’ muted response to the violence will become the lasting image of his legacy, Whipple said.
“I used to think the defining lasting image of Mark Meadows would be mugging for Don Trump’s Jr.’s video camera in the tent at the Ellipse right before Trump went out to incite a mob to attack the Capitol,” Whipple said. “I now think the defining image of Meadows is the guy sitting on the couch in the White House chief’s office scrolling through his phone while a violent mob attacks Capitol Police that day.”
During her testimony, Hutchinson often portrayed Meadows as sitting on his couch and scrolling through his phone. In one instance, she said, Meadows didn’t look up as he mused that “things might get real, real bad on January 6.”
Calling Meadows the worst chief in history means elevating Trump’s final chief over H.R. Haldeman, Nixon’s chief of staff during the Watergate burglary and the subsequent attempts to cover it up. Haldeman, who served 18 months in prison for his role, dubbed himself Nixon’s “son of a bitch.”
Mark Meadows struggled in an admittedly tough role, Whipple said
Whipple said that after Hutchinson’s testimony it’s even more clear that Meadows was far worse than Haldeman. The extent of what the public knows about Meadows’ conduct has only grown since the January 2021…
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