Former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson will do everything in her power to keep former President Donald Trump far away from the White House — with the exception of his upcoming appearances at a Washington, D.C. federal courthouse.
“I will do whatever it takes to make sure that Donald Trump is never near the Oval Office ever again — except the Prettyman Federal Courthouse in Washington D.C.,” Hutchinson said at TheWrap’s Power Women Summit on Tuesday during a conversation moderated by journalism professor and director of USC’s Annenberg Media Center Christina Bellantoni.
For Hutchinson, who is a conservative Republican, the upcoming 2024 presidential election goes beyond partisanship, as she noted that the fallout from Trump’s tenure has “greater consequences” that prevent the country’s leaders from debating productively on traditional Republican and Democratic issues.
“A vote for Trump is a vote for fascism; it’s a vote to start marching our country towards a dictatorship,” she said. “If we want to keep our constitutional republic and if we want to keep our democratic institutions in place, we need to have conversations with people to make sure that every vote goes to the candidate that promises to keep those institutions intact.”
While Hutchinson said there’s still a chance for another Republican hopeful to score the nomination, she warned that another Joe Biden and Trump ticket could “very well” happen again. If that should be the case, Hutchinson called on press and media outlets to responsibly cover the election, and avoid “amplifying rhetoric rather than reporting facts.”
“The press also needs to be conscious of Trump’s platform and not amplifying his vast disinformation — he is a big fan … of amplifying and proliferating poisonous conspiracy theories to the space, which there are good American people that have been severely damaged and misled by him,” she said. “The press really needs to pay attention and be conscious about that in this next election cycle because we saw what happened in 2016. No matter what people said, we can look at the popular vote but where the vote matters in 2020 was in the swing districts, he lost by a razor thin margin.”
After speaking out and providing testimony on Trump’s conduct regarding the Jan. 6 insurrection, Hutchinson feared retribution from her former superior, and witnessed Trump’s ruthlessness with her own eyes.
“Donald Trump invokes political violence on people, whether it was former staffers, whether they are judges,” she said. “He will inflict violence on anybody who stands in his way of obtaining power again.”
Hutchinson called her decision to come forward, which she details in her recently released memior “Enough,” “the hardest and easiest decision [she] ever made in [her] life.”
“Once I had made the choice to retain my own legal counsel, it was a very easy decision to me,” Hutchinson recalled. “We’re currently experiencing a complete destruction of our constitutional system right now, and we’re looking down the barrel, as it looks right now, at a potential second Trump administration. That cannot happen if we want our country to survive.”
After speaking out, Hutchinson recalled feeling embraced by several powerful women in politics, including outspoken Trump critic Liz Cheney, who recently suggested she was ruling out running in the 2024 election as a third-party candidate, as well as Alyssa Farah Griffin, who has warned of the dangers of electing Trump after serving as White House communications director during his administration.
“For the first time I’ve felt this overwhelming sense of female empowerment, and felt very comfortable as female in this environment,” Hutchinson said. “I think that we need to continue this trend, because men have been running this country and particularly the world for a very long time and it’s not going well.”
For all of TheWrap’s Power Women Summit 2023 coverage, click here.
