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Clarence Page: Willful blindness is no excuse for Trump’s coup attempt

Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on

The other side included Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor who argued dozens of unsuccessful court challenges to Biden’s election; Sidney Powell, notorious spreader of wacky conspiracy theories; and Mike Flynn, who briefly served as Trump’s national security adviser and later pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about conversations he had with Russia’s ambassador to the United States. Trump pardoned him in 2020.

Trump liked that team. Like Evillene, the ferocious Wicked Witch in “The Wiz” who didn’t want to hear “no bad news,” Trump gravitated toward the kooky coup seekers because, unsurprisingly, they told him what he wanted to hear.

Up against that wall of disinformation, Cassidy Hutchinson, a courageous young aide to Trump’s then-chief of staff Mark Meadows, emerged as the most dramatic and, in many ways, illuminating surprise of the hearings.

Her insider’s secondhand view of Trump’s throwing-food-at-the-wall behavior caught the most media attention. But more devastating were her allegations that Trump knew ahead of time that the day could turn violent and sought to encourage the violence.

Friends of Trump tried dutifully to discredit her, but not very successfully, especially after her account was backed up in later sworn testimony by her principal source, the very “normal” former White House counsel Pat Cipollone.

Increasingly the Jan. 6 fiasco sounds like the coup that couldn’t get its story straight.

 

Former White House national security adviser and United Nations ambassador John Bolton, who had his own falling-out with Trump, seemed to agree on CNN.

In a quote that belongs in the “Saying the Quiet Parts Out Loud” file, Bolton ridiculed Team Trump’s caper, saying, “As somebody who has helped plan coups d’etat — not here but, you know, other places — it takes a lot of work, and that’s not what (Trump) did.”

Understood. It also takes a lot of work to avoid a coup. Team Trump’s Jan. 6 caper shows how not to do it — and warns us about others who might try.

(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)

©2022 Clarence Page. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.


(c) 2022 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

 

 

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