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Tears, Screaming and Insults: Inside an ‘Unhinged’ Meeting to Keep Trump in Power
Even by the standards of the Trump White House, a meeting on Dec. 18, 2020, that was highlighted Tuesday by the Jan. 6 committee was extreme.In taped interviews, witnesses described a meeting in which President Donald J. Trump’s outside advisers proposed an executive order to have the military seize voting machines in crucial states Mr. Trump had lost.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesThe meeting lasted for more than six hours, past midnight, and devolved into shouting that could be heard outside the room. Participants hurled insults and nearly came to blows. Some people left in tears.Even by the standards of the Trump White House, where people screamed at one another and President Donald J. Trump screamed at them, the Dec. 18, 2020, meeting became known as an “unhinged” event — and an inflection point in Mr. Trump’s desperate efforts to remain in power after he had lost the election.Details of the meeting have been reported before, including by The New York Times and Axios, but at a public hearing on Tuesday of the Jan. 6 committee, participants in the mayhem offered a series of jolting new details of the meeting between Mr. Trump and rival factions of advisers.“It got to the point where the screaming was completely, completely out there,” Eric Herschmann, a White House lawyer, told the committee in videotaped testimony. “I mean, you got people walking in — it was late at night, it had been a long day. And what they were proposing, I thought was nuts.”The proposal, to have the president direct the secretary of defense to seize voting machines to examine for fraud and also to appoint a special counsel to potentially charge people with crimes, had been hatched by three outside advisers: Sidney Powell, a former lawyer for Mr. Trump’s campaign who promoted conspiracy theories about a Venezuelan plot to rig the voting machines; Michael T. Flynn, the national security adviser Mr. Trump fired in his first weeks in office; and Patrick Byrne, the former chief executive of Overstock.com.On the other side were Pat A. Cipollone, the White House counsel; Mr. Herschmann; and Derek Lyons, the White House staff secretary.The arguing began soon after Ms. Powell and her two companions were let into the White House by a junior aide and wandered to the Oval Office without an appointment.They were there alone with Mr. Trump for about 15 minutes before other officials were alerted to their presence. Mr. Cipollone recounted receiving an urgent call from a staff member to get to the Oval Office.“I opened the door and I walked in. I saw General Flynn,” he said in a videotaped interview the committee played at the hearing on Tuesday. “I saw Sidney Powell sitting there. I was not happy to see the people who were in the Oval Office.”Asked to explain why, Mr. Cipollone said, “First of all, the Overstock person, I’ve never met, I never knew who this guy was.” The first thing he did, Mr. Cipollone said, was say to Mr. Byrne, “Who are you?” “And he told me,” Mr. Cipollone said. “I don’t think any of these people were providing the president with good advice.”Mr. Lyons and Mr. Herschmann joined the group. “It was not a casual meeting,” Mr. Lyons told the committee in videotaped testimony. “At times, there were people shouting at each other, hurling insults at each other. It wasn’t just sort of people sitting around on a couch like chitchatting.”Sidney Powell’s videotaped testimony, in which she said White House advisers had “contempt and disdain for the president,” was shown during Tuesday’s hearing.Doug Mills/The New York TimesMs. Powell, in her videotaped interview, described Mr. Trump as “very interested in hearing” what she and her two cohorts had to say, things that “apparently nobody else had bothered to inform him of.”Mr. Herschmann said he was flabbergasted by what he was hearing.“And I was asking, like, are you claiming the Democrats were working with Hugo Chavez, Venezuelans and whomever else? And at one point, General Flynn took out a diagram that supposedly showed IP addresses all over the world and who was communicating with whom via the machines. And some comment about, like, Nest thermostats being hooked up to the internet.”When the White House officials pointed out to Ms. Powell that she had lost dozens of lawsuits challenging the results of the 2020 election, she replied, “Well, the judges are corrupt.”“I’m like, everyone?” Mr. Herschmann testified. “Every single case that you’ve done in the country that you guys lost? Every one of them is corrupt? Even the ones we appointed?”Ms. Powell testified that Mr. Trump’s White House advisers “showed nothing but contempt and disdain for the president.”The plan, the White House advisers learned, was for Ms. Powell to become the special counsel. This did not go over well.“I don’t think Sidney Powell would say that I thought it was a good idea to appoint her special counsel,” Mr. Cipollone testified. “I didn’t think she should be appointed anything.”Mr. Cipollone also testified that he was alarmed by the insistence of Ms. Powell and the others that there had been election fraud when there was no evidence. “When other people kept suggesting that there was, the answer is, what is it? At some point, you have to put up or shut up. That was my view.”Mr. Herschmann described a particularly intense moment. “Flynn screamed at me that I was a quitter and everything, kept on standing up and standing around and screaming at me. At a certain point, I had it with him, so I yelled back, ‘Either come over or sit your f-ing ass back down.’”Cassidy Hutchinson, a top aide to Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, could hear the shouting from outside the Oval Office. She texted a deputy chief of staff, Anthony M. Ornato, that the West Wing was “UNHINGED.”After the meeting had started, Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, was called in by the White House advisers to argue against Ms. Powell. Eventually the meeting migrated to the Roosevelt Room and the Cabinet Room, where Mr. Giuliani found himself alone at one point, something he told the committee he found “kind of cool.”Finally, the group ended up in the White House residence.Ms. Powell believed that she had been appointed special counsel, something that Mr. Trump declared he wanted, including that she should have a security clearance, which other aides opposed. She testified that others said that even if that happened, they would ignore her. She said she would have “fired” them on the spot for such insubordination.Mr. Trump, she said, told her something to the effect of: “You see what I deal with? I deal with this all the time.”Eventually Mr. Trump backed down and rejected the outside advisers’ proposal. But early the next morning, Dec. 19, he posted to Twitter urging his supporters to arrive at the Capitol on Jan. 6, the day that a joint session of Congress was set to certify the Electoral College results.“Be there, will be wild!” he wrote. More
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What Happened on Dec. 18 at ‘the Craziest Meeting of the Trump Presidency’?
Digging into the aftermath of the 2020 election, members of the Jan. 6 committee on Tuesday focused on a meeting between former President Donald J. Trump and outside advisers that devolved into what they described as a chaotic confrontation over a desperate attempt to overturn the election.Drawing from testimony from former Attorney General William P. Barr and others, the committee described in detail a hastily organized meeting in which advisers proposed an executive order to have the military seize voting machines in crucial states Mr. Trump had lost.“On Friday, Dec. 18, his team of outside advisers paid him a surprise visit in the White House that would quickly become the stuff of legend,” said Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland. “The meeting has been called unhinged, not normal, and the craziest meeting of the Trump presidency.”According to the panel, in the weeks before the meeting in December, several of Mr. Trump’s advisers including Mr. Barr and Pat Cipollone, the former White House counsel, had publicly and privately dismissed the possibility of wide-scale voter fraud, and urged Mr. Trump to concede. Mr. Barr made a public announcement on Dec. 1 to affirm that he had not found significant evidence of fraud.Just four days before the meeting, on Dec. 14, the Electoral College met to certify the election results, which in a taped interview Mr. Barr told the committee “should have been the end of the matter.”But on the evening of Dec. 18, several of Mr. Trump’s outside advisers, including Sidney Powell and Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser, came to Mr. Trump to urge him to consider the plan to seize voting machines.As the meeting grew heated, Mr. Cipollone told the committee that other plans were discussed, including to grant Ms. Powell a security clearance and name her special counsel, putting her in charge of Mr. Trump’s legal effort to contest the election results.The meeting lasted hours, moving from the Oval Office to other areas of the West Wing before ending in the presidential residence, according to the committee. And arguments broke out throughout the evening, including “challenges to physically fight,” Mr. Raskin said.In a taped interview presented on Tuesday, Derek Lyons, a former White House staff secretary, said, “At times, there were people shouting at each other, hurling insults at each other — it wasn’t just sort of people sitting around on a couch like chit-chatting.”The panel showed evidence suggesting that the meeting ended around midnight, without agreement among participants on how to proceed.But committee members used the hearing on Tuesday to suggest that as Mr. Trump apparently grew frustrated with the lack of options to contest the election results during the meeting in December, it was in that moment that he turned to his supporters, encouraging them to come to Washington on Jan 6.Just over an hour after the meeting was said to have ended, Mr. Trump tweeted at 1:42 a.m. on Dec. 19 that it was “statistically impossible” for him to have lost the election. In the tweet, he also urged supporters to gather in Washington to demonstrate, drawing dozens of responses from people sharing plans to occupy the Capitol building and photos of weapons they said they planned to bring.“Be there, will be wild,” the tweet said. More
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Witnesses Recount Trump Advisers’ Attempt to Overturn the Election
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Trump’s Jan. 6 Behavior Weighing on Republicans Ahead of 2024
Donald J. Trump’s behavior in the days leading up to the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, was viewed by 75 percent of likely Republican presidential primary voters as the president “just exercising his right to contest the election,” while 19 percent said he “went so far that he threatened American democracy,” according to a New York Times/Siena College poll.But among Republicans who said they wouldn’t back the former president in the 2024 primary, 32 percent said he was a threat to democracy, suggesting that contingent could form the base of Mr. Trump’s opposition.For those primary voters who wouldn’t back Mr. Trump, 59 percent said Mr. Trump was just contesting the election. However, 21 percent said Mr. Trump’s behavior included serious federal crimes, compared with 3 percent of Mr. Trump’s core supporters who said the same.The poll also showed that 86 percent of Mr. Trump’s Republican primary voters believed Mr. Trump was the legitimate winner of the 2020 election. One-third of the Republican anti-Trump voters said the same.Still, while Mr. Trump has described election integrity as the country’s most pressing concern, just 3 percent of the Republican respondents named it as the nation’s top problem.Travis Reinink, a Republican voter in Nevada who participated in the poll, said President Biden’s victory was illegitimate and that he viewed the House investigations into Mr. Trump’s behavior as “one-sided.” Still, he said recent testimony from former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson “opened my eyes to some stuff.”Mr. Reinink said he would vote for Mr. Trump in a rematch of the 2020 contest.“I know that he was very brazen,” Mr. Reinink said. “But Trump is who he is, and he’s not going to change. It’s one of the things I both like and dislike about him.” More
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When Republicans Backed Herschel Walker, They Embraced a Double Standard
As I wrote in this newsletter in March, the phrase “the soft bigotry of low expectations,” coined by George W. Bush when he was a presidential candidate, pithily captures a wisdom that’s difficult to discount, regardless of one’s political stripe. But its emergence as a critique of the educational establishment has meant that it’s generally thought of as a charge from the right.There are times, though, when the right might consider attending to the proverbial log in its own eye, few more obvious and disturbing than the elevation of the ex-football star Herschel Walker, a Black man, as the Republican Party’s candidate in this year’s Georgia Senate race.To start, Walker is fact-challenged: His campaign removed a false claim from its website that he graduated from college. He has falsely claimed to have worked in law enforcement. The lucrative chicken processing business he has reportedly claimed to own is apparently neither especially lucrative nor owned by him. In a local TV interview this year, he said, implausibly, “I’ve never heard President Trump ever say” that the 2020 election was stolen.As Maya King reported this week for The Times, “After repeatedly criticizing absent fathers in Black households,” Walker “publicly acknowledged having fathered two sons and a daughter with whom he is not regularly in contact.”It is hardly uncommon, however, for people running for office to have messy pasts. And in theory, someone could be an effective senator while, like Walker, questioning the theory of evolution: “At one time, science said man came from apes, did it not?” he asked in March. “If that is true, why are there still apes? Think about it.” Or even while, as he did two years ago, offering the take that there existed a “dry mist” that “will kill any Covid on your body” that “they don’t want to talk about.”The problem with Walker is how glaringly unfit he is for public office apart from all that.Asked whether he would have voted for President Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure bill, Walker objected that it was “totally unfair” to expect him to answer the question because he hadn’t yet seen “all the facts,” apparently unaware that one would expect him to have formed an opinion via, well, following the news. Asked, on the day of the Uvalde massacre, about his position on new gun laws, Walker seemed unclear that candidates are expected to at least fake a basic familiarity with the issues, responding, “What I like to do is see it and everything and stuff.”Days later on Fox News, he went into a bit more detail in a verbal bouillabaisse that almost rose to the level of performance art, saying:You know, Cain killed Abel. You know, and that’s a problem that we have. And I said, what we need to do is look into how we can stop those things. You know, you talked about doing a disinformation, what about getting a department that can look at young men that’s looking at women, that’s looking at their social media? What about doing that, looking into things like that, and we can stop that that way?This isn’t a mere matter of verbal dexterity. He’s not just a political neophyte getting his sea legs as a public speaker — in recent months, we’ve watched Eric Adams, the New York City mayor, going through that. Walker isn’t just gaffe-prone, as Biden has been throughout his career. He isn’t someone underqualified and swivel-tongued, like the former governor and current congressional candidate Sarah Palin, who still gives the impression of someone who could have learned on the job. Walker doesn’t appear to have the slightest clue about, or interest in, matters of state, and gives precious little indication that this would change.Here’s where I’m supposed to write something like, “Walker makes Donald Trump look like Benjamin Disraeli by comparison.” But it’s more that Trump, who has endorsed Walker, is pretty much as clueless. Trump’s speeches are riveting — at least to his devotees — and certainly more practiced, but given how recently we’ve seen what happens when someone who would lose an argument with a cloud is placed in a position of grave responsibility, it’s rather grievous to see Republicans now do this with Walker.So why are they doing it?You could say that the issue here is less racism than strategy. The incumbent Democratic senator, Raphael Warnock, is Black, and Georgia Republicans presumably hope that a useful number of Black voters who might otherwise default to supporting him will be swayed by another Black candidate with a famous name, regardless of his lack of credentials. Banking on public naïveté isn’t necessarily a racist act, but the optics here are repulsive: It’s hard to imagine Republicans backing a white candidate so profoundly and shamelessly unsuited for the role. It presents a double standard that manifests as a brutal lack of respect for all voters, Black voters in particular.Serious figures have served in Congress’s upper house, from Henry Clay to Lyndon B. Johnson, Margaret Chase Smith to Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama to Tim Scott. And now, potentially, Herschel see-it-and-everything-and-stuff Walker? This amounts to the same kind of insult that comes from the left when elite schools lower admissions criteria in order to attract more Black students — a kind of pragmatism forged in condescension. Some call that bigotry. I would quibble about the definition, but only that, and not loudly. Walker as a candidate for the United States Senate is water from the same well.Have feedback? Send me a note at McWhorter-newsletter@nytimes.com.John McWhorter (@JohnHMcWhorter) is an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University. He hosts the podcast “Lexicon Valley” and is the author, most recently, of “Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.” More
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Trump Loses Support of Half of GOP Voters, Poll Finds
As Donald J. Trump weighs whether to open an unusually early White House campaign, a New York Times/Siena College poll shows that his post-presidential quest to consolidate his support within the Republican Party has instead left him weakened, with nearly half the party’s primary voters seeking someone different for president in 2024 and a significant number vowing to abandon him if he wins the nomination.By focusing on political payback inside his party instead of tending to wounds opened by his alarming attempts to cling to power after his 2020 defeat, Mr. Trump appears to have only deepened fault lines among Republicans during his yearlong revenge tour. A clear majority of primary voters under 35 years old, 64 percent, as well as 65 percent of those with at least a college degree — a leading indicator of political preferences inside the donor class — told pollsters they would vote against Mr. Trump in a presidential primary.Mr. Trump’s conduct on Jan. 6, 2021, appears to have contributed to the decline in his standing, including among a small but important segment of Republicans who could form the base of his opposition in a potential primary contest. While 75 percent of primary voters said Mr. Trump was “just exercising his right to contest the election,” nearly one in five said he “went so far that he threatened American democracy.”Overall, Mr. Trump maintains his primacy in the party: In a hypothetical matchup against five other potential Republican presidential rivals, 49 percent of primary voters said they would support him for a third nomination.Republican Voters on Their Preferred Candidate for PresidentIf the Republican 2024 presidential primary were held today, who would you vote for if the candidates were: More
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Raskin Brings Expertise on Right-Wing Extremism to Jan. 6 Inquiry
The Democrat from Maryland has been delving into the rising threat of white nationalism and white supremacy for five years. He will lead the inquiry’s hearing on the subject on Tuesday.WASHINGTON — When Representative Jamie Raskin enters a Capitol Hill hearing room on Tuesday to lay out what the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack has uncovered about the role of domestic extremists in the riot, it will be his latest — and potentially most important — step in a five-year effort to crush a dangerous movement.Long before the Jan. 6, 2021, assault, Mr. Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, had thrown himself into stamping out the rise of white nationalism and domestic extremism in America. He trained his focus on the issue after the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., five years ago. Since then, he has held teach-ins, led a multipart House investigation that exposed the lackluster federal effort to confront the threat, released intelligence assessments indicating that white supremacists have infiltrated law enforcement and strategized about ways to crack down on paramilitary groups.Now, with millions of Americans expected to tune in, Mr. Raskin — along with Representative Stephanie Murphy, Democrat of Florida — is set to take a leading role in a hearing that promises to dig deeply into how far-right groups helped to orchestrate and carry out the Jan. 6 assault at the Capitol — and how they were brought together, incited and empowered by President Donald J. Trump.“Charlottesville was a rude awakening for the country,” Mr. Raskin, 59, said in an interview, rattling off a list of deadly hate crimes that had taken place in the years before the siege on the Capitol. “There is a real pattern of young, white men getting hyped up on racist provocation and incitement.”Tuesday’s session, set for 1 p.m., is expected to document how, after Mr. Trump’s many efforts to overturn the 2020 election had failed, he and his allies turned to violent far-right extremist groups whose support Mr. Trump had long cultivated, who in turn began assembling a mob to pressure Congress to reject the will of the voters.Supporters of President Donald J. Trump at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.Jason Andrew for The New York Times“There were Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, the QAnon network, Boogaloo Boys, militia men and other assorted extremist and religious cults that assembled under the banner of ‘Stop The Steal,’ ” Mr. Raskin said, referring to the movement that spread Mr. Trump’s lie that the 2020 election had been stolen from him. “This was quite a coming-out party for a lot of extremist, antigovernment groups and white nationalist groups that had never worked together before.”It has long been known that the mob was energized by Mr. Trump’s Twitter post on Dec. 19, 2020, in which he called for his supporters to come to Washington for a rally on Jan. 6 that would “be wild.” Mr. Raskin and Ms. Murphy plan to detail a clear “call and response” between the president and his extreme supporters.“There’s no doubt that Donald Trump’s tweet urging everyone to descend upon Washington for a wild protest on Jan. 6 succeeded in galvanizing and unifying the dangerous extremists of the country,” Mr. Raskin said.Mr. Raskin has hinted at disclosing evidence of more direct ties between Mr. Trump and far-right groups, though he has declined to preview any. The panel plans to detail known links between the political operative Roger Stone, a longtime ally of Mr. Trump’s, the former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, and the extremist groups.Key Revelations From the Jan. 6 HearingsCard 1 of 7Making a case against Trump. More
