Donald Trump’s White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows wanted a presidential pardon. He had facilitated key stages of Trump’s attempted 2020 coup, linking the insurrectionists to the highest reaches of the White House and Congress.
But ultimately, Meadows failed to deliver what Trump most wanted, which was convincing others in government to overturn the 2020 election. And then his subordinates, White House security staff, thwarted Trump’s plan to march with a mob into the Capitol.
Meadows’ role has become clearer with each January 6 hearing. Earlier hearings traced how his attempted Justice Department takeover failed. The fake Electoral College slates that Meadows had pushed were not accepted by Congress. The calls by Trump to state officials that he had orchestrated to “find votes” did not work. Nor could Meadows convince Vice-President Mike Pence to ignore the official Electoral College results and count pro-Trump forgeries.
And as January 6 approached and the insurrection began, new and riveting details emerged about Meadow’s pivotal role at the eye of this storm, according to testimony on Tuesday by his top White House aide, Cassidy Hutchinson.
Meadows had been repeatedly told that threats of violence were real. Yet he repeatedly ignored calls from the Secret Service, Capitol police, White House lawyers and military chiefs to protect the Capitol, Hutchinson told the committee under oath. And then Meadows, or, at least White House staff under him, failed Trump a final time – although in a surprising way.
After Trump told supporters at a January 6 rally that he would walk with them to the Capitol, Meadows’ staff, which oversaw Trump’s transportation, refused to drive him there. Trump was furious. He grabbed at the limousine’s steering wheel. He assaulted the Secret Service deputy, who was in the car, and had told Trump that it was not safe to go, Hutchinson testified.
“He said, ‘I’m the f-ing president. Take me up to the Capitol now,’” she said, describing what was told to her a short while later by those in the limousine. And Trump blamed Meadows.
“Later in the day, it had been relayed to me via Mark that the president wasn’t happy that Bobby [Engel, the driver] didn’t pull it off for him, and that Mark didn’t work hard enough to get the movement on the books [Trump’s schedule].”
Hutchinson’s testimony was the latest revelations to emerge from hearings that have traced in great detail how Trump and his allies plotted and intended to overturn the election. Her eye-witness account provided an unprecedented view of a raging president.
Hutchinson’s testimony was compared to John Dean, the star witness of the Watergate hearings a half-century ago that led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon for his aides’ efforts to spy on and smear Democrats during the 1972 presidential campaign.
“She IS the John Dean of the hearings,” tweeted the Brooking Institution’s Norman Eisen, who has written legal analyses on prosecuting Trump. “Trump fighting with his security, throwing plates at the wall, but above all the WH knowing that violence was coming on 1/6. The plates & the fighting are not crimes, but they will color the prosecution devastatingly.”
Meadows’ presence has hovered over the coup plot and insurrection. Though he has refused to testify before the January 6 committee, his pivotal role increasingly has come into view.
Under oath, Hutchinson described links between Meadows and communication channels to the armed mob that had assembled. She was backstage at the Trump’s midday January 6 rally and described Trump’s anger that the crowd was not big enough. The Secret Service told him that many people were armed and did not want to go through security and give up their weapons.
Trump, she recounted, said “something to the effect of, ‘I don’t f-ing care that they have weapons. They’re not here to hurt me. Take the mags [metal detectors] away. Let the people in. They can march to the Capitol from here.
As the day progressed and the Capitol was breached, Hutchison described the scene at the White House from her cubicle outside the Oval Office. She repeatedly went into Meadows’ office, where he had isolated himself. When Secret Service officials urged her to get Meadows to urge Trump to tell his supporters to stand down and leave, he sat listless.
“He [Meadows] needs to snap out of it,” she said that she told others who pressed her to get Meadows to act. Later, she heard Meadows repeatedly tell other White House officials that Trump “doesn’t think they [insurrectionists] are doing anything wrong.” Trump said Pence deserved to be hung as a traitor, she said.
Immediately after January 6, Hutchinson said that Trump’s cabinet discussed invoking the 25th Amendment to remove a sitting president but did not do so. She also said that Meadows sought a pardon for his January 6-related actions.
Today, Meadows is championing many of the same election falsehoods that he pushed for Trump as a senior partner at the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI), a right-wing think tank whose 2021 annual report boasts of “changing the way conservatives fight.”
His colleagues include Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who pushed for Trump to use every means to overturn the election and leads CPI’s “election integrity network,” and other Republicans who have been attacking elections as illegitimate where their candidates lose.
Hutchinson’s testimony may impede Meadows’ future political role, as it exposes him to possible criminal prosecution. But the election-denying movement that he nurtured has not gone away. CPI said it is targeting elections in national battleground states for 2022’s midterms, including Arizona, Georgia, Florida, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.
Trump did not give Meadows a pardon. But in July 2021, Trump’s “Save America” PAC gave CPI $1 million.
Steven Rosenfeld is the editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has reported for National Public Radio, Marketplace, and Christian Science Monitor Radio, as well as a wide range of progressive publications including Salon, AlterNet, The American Prospect, and many others.
Start your day with National Memo Newsletter
Know first.
The opinions that matter. Delivered to your inbox every morning
President Joe Biden traveled to Wisconsin on Wednesday to announce a new multibillion-dollar project by Microsoft, which stands in contrast to a notorious failure of local economic development in the state during the Trump administration. In response, Fox News’ purported “straight news” coverage accused Biden of “trying to troll” the public and otherwise dismissed the new project.
Biden traveled to Racine County to tout Microsoft’s $3.3 billion investment in a data center, which builds on other university partnerships and business projects the company has in the state. Notably, the data center will be constructed on land that was previously allocated for a factory to be built by Taiwanese electronics manufacturer Foxconn, in a deal pushed in 2017 by then-President Donald Trump and then-Gov. Scott Walker (R).
“Foxconn turned out to be just that,” Biden said Wednesday. “A con.”
The Vergereported in 2020 on the colossal failure of the Foxconn project. Though state and local governments spent at least $400 million on land and infrastructure, the factory never went into operation. And, far short of the 13,000 jobs that were promised, the company had hired fewer than 300 people by the end of 2019 and made a failed attempt to fill out its payrolls enough to qualify for state tax subsidies.
On the May 8 edition of MSNBC’s All In, host Chris Hayes said the Foxconn deal — along with many other Trump promises about saving jobs, reviving American manufacturing, or building important infrastructure — was “a big, glitzy announcement that turns into nothing.”
Hayes also revisited Trump’s remarks at a 2018 groundbreaking event in Racine County, in which he claimed the factory would be “the eighth wonder of the world.”
In Fox News’ telling, however, it was Biden’s event, rather than Trump’s failed promises on the Foxconn deal, that was politically suspect, and a cover-up for a supposedly failing economy to boot. (The American economy is objectively strong, despite the right-wing smear campaign to convince the public otherwise.)
Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.
- Biden touts new $3.3 billion Microsoft data center at failed Foxconn ... ›
- Biden lauds new Microsoft center on the same site where Trump's ... ›
- Foxconn mostly abandons $10 billion Wisconsin project touted by ... ›
- Foxconn plant, once touted by Trump as a 13,000-job juggernaut ... ›
- Trump promised giant Foxconn factory in Wisconsin that never ... ›
There is really only one signature legislative “achievement” from Donald Trump’s time in the White House: The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. He did other things while in office—bungling the pandemic, wrecking relationships with allies, insulting veterans—but when it comes to bills pushed through Congress and collecting Trump’s signature, there’s only one thing that stands out. A tax bill that emptied the nation’s coffers to pay off billionaires and corporate bosses.
Even at the time, it was clear that the bill would be extremely costly. Republican leaders claimed that the tax bill would generate growth and lead to “$1 trillion in additional revenue.” But the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the bill would actually cost the government $1.9 trillion before its cuts expired in 2025.
Now the CBO is back with a new estimate of what it would cost to keep Trump’s tax cut in place over the next decade, and that estimate is more than double the original cost. Keeping Trump’s tax cuts would cost a whopping $4.6 trillion and send the nation on a path to a level of deficit only seen during the Great Depression, World War II, and … Trump’s bungling of the pandemic.
Trump’s tax cuts are slated to expire in 2025, meaning that the winner of this election is going to determine whether the nation puts an end to this gravy train for billionaires, or extends it at a crushing cost to the average American. At his fundraiser that supposedly made $50 million in April, Trump told wealthy donors exactly what they wanted to hear: He plans to extend the tax cuts.
Not only has Trump’s plan generated a crushing deficit that only gets much worse over time, but it has also failed to stimulate economic growth as Trump and Republicans promised. A National Bureau of Economic Research study shows that the bill produced only a small fraction of the promised benefits. Far from generating revenue, as Republicans promised, corporate tax revenue dropped by $100 to $150 billion per year.
These effects are similar to what a Brookings analysis predicted in 2018: a small, short-term stimulus effect followed by negligible long-term benefits and a significant reduction in federal revenues.
What we know now is exactly what was projected then:
- Trump’s tax cut is heavily skewed to benefit a specific group of the extremely wealthy.
- Far from increasing tax revenues, or being revenue neutral, it has generated enormous deficits that threaten to drown the nation in debt.
- Despite having “jobs” in the title, the bill did not generate the waves of new investment that Trump promised.
President Joe Biden has already made it clear that he would not extend Trump’s plan and its crushing deficit. Instead, he has proposed a package that would see increases for those making over $400,000 a year, while cutting taxes for lower income Americans. Biden’s plan includes:
- Requiring billionaires to pay at least 25 percent of income in taxes.
- A corporate minimum tax of 21 percent that would end corporations paying nothing.
- Denying corporate tax breaks for multi-million-dollar executive compensation.
- Quadrupling the tax that corporations pay when they buy back their own stock.
The conservative American Enterprise Institute prepared an analysis of Biden’s plan in advance of the 2020 election and found that, rather than costing another $4.6 trillion, as Trump’s plan would, Biden’s changes would result in $3.8 trillion in revenue increases. It would also make the tax system more fair and progressive.
There are many reasons to reelect Biden in the fall; so many that tax policy may not be getting as much attention as it usually receives. But that $8.4 trillion difference in revenue over the next ten years is the difference between a government that is capable of responding to issues like the climate crisis and other new threats as they arise, and one that is designed only to set back and provide a constant stream of cash for those who need it least.
Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.
- Biden Economy Surpasses Goals Set By Trump ›
- 'Work Till You Drop Dead': GOP Budget Torches Social Security -- And IVF ›
- Five Shockingly Stupid (And Dangerous) Things Republicans Now Believe ›
- Florida Governor Lavished Trump Tax Break On Superyacht Marina ›