There was catsup dripping down the wall
The incident of the catsup in the nighttime.
LIZ CHENEY: The physical altercation that Ms. Hutchinson described in the Presidential vehicle was not the first time that the President had become very angry about issues relating to the election. On December 1, 2020, Attorney General Barr said in an interview that the Department of Justice had not found evidence of widespread election fraud sufficient to change the outcome of the election.
Ms. Hutchinson, how did the President react to hearing that news?
CASSIDY HUTCHINSON: Around the time that I understand the AP article went live, I remember hearing noise coming from down the hallway. So I poked my head out of the office. I saw the valet walking towards our office. He had said, get the Chief down to the dining room. The President wants him. So Mark went down to the dining room, came back to the office a few minutes later.
After Mark had returned, I left the office and went down to the dining room and I noticed that the door was propped open and the valet was inside the dining room changing the tablecloth off of the dining room table. He motioned for me to come in and then pointed towards the front of the room near the fireplace mantel and the TV, where I first noticed there was catsup dripping down the wall and there was a shattered porcelain plate on the floor.
The valet had articulated that the President was extremely angry at the Attorney General’s AP interview and had thrown his lunch against the wall, which was causing him to have to clean up. So I grabbed a towel and started wiping the catsup off of the wall to help the valet out. And he said something to the effect of, he’s really ticked off about this.
I would stay clear of him for right now. He’s really, really ticked off about this right now.
He was also 74 years old right then so you’d think he would have had time enough to learn to control his temper but apparently not.
LIZ CHENEY: And Ms. Hutchinson, was this the only instance that you are aware of where the President threw dishes?
CASSIDY HUTCHINSON: It’s not.
LIZ CHENEY: And are there other instances in the dining room that you recall where he expressed his anger?
CASSIDY HUTCHINSON: There were — there were several times throughout my tenure with the Chief of Staff that I was aware of him either throwing dishes or flipping the tablecloth to let all the contents of the table go onto the floor and likely break or go everywhere.
It’s a funny thing: I happened to find a copy of Pete Souza’s Shade in a Little Free Library yesterday. It’s funny in a wicked way. The hook is to quote Trump or a news item about him and then one of Souza’s photos showing Obama doing something in a parallel context. He’ll have to do an updated version with a photo of Obama not pulling the tablecloth off the White House dining table.
Probably one of many hamberder tantrums. The Secret Nanny Service probably didn’t appreciate having to clean up after a three year old, fit throwing septuagenarian either. He probably missed something in childhood, like brain development. What an absolute disaster of a human being.
“He was also 74 years old right then so you’d think he would have had time enough to learn to control his temper but apparently not.”
How? He’s lived his entire existence inside a gilded bubble that showed him his own gold-tinted reflection. No one dared to suggest to him that he might be wrong about something. His most successful venture prior to his election campaign was, in fact, a reality TV series about him telling people who disagreed with him that they were fired.
By way of analogy, I’ve always believed that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq absolutely did not have functional WMDs, AND that Saddam himself absolutely believed he did. After all, when you’re the head of weapons research, and a man who feeds people feet-first into a wood-chipper tells you to develop biological and chemical weapons, even if you have a four-digit budget and an untrained staff, you don’t tell him, “We can’t.” Instead, you spend the money and the staff on setting up a good facsimile of an actual weapons lab–impressive with test tubes and different colored fluids and so forth–and then take him on a tour and tell him about how the American invaders will be utterly destroyed by the weapons he had you build, here in this lab, that absolutely isn’t a fake.
(And I’ll note, many of the reports that came out after the war in Iraq confirmed this take–there were labs, that sort of looked like someplace you might do weapons research, but the only actual WMDs found were the badly degraded ones we’d sold him a decade or two earlier.)
Trump may not have had access to a wood-chipper, but his people were obviously terrified of him destroying their professional lives, at least, and so he’s hardly ever been told, “No,” in his life. So, yeah, still very much a toddler in his ability to accept such an affront.
Not entirely inside the gold bubble. He’s had some exposure to actual human beings. Some people have told him he’s wrong about things. I mean yes, someone determined to be like that would certainly get plenty of help from circumstances like his, but I don’t think he was completely sealed off from any possible access to How Not To Be A Complete Shit. He chose to be what he is, and I blame him for it.
My understanding is that people going through dementia become bad tempered, even if they had been very even tempered for most of their lives. However, the impression I get is that Trump was bad tempered all his life, so I guess this isn’t evidence of him getting some sort of dementia like Alzheimer’s.
I think what I’ve seen is that Alzheimer’s manifests as bad temper in some people but not all…and yes, Bad Donald has had a filthy temper all his life, plus he’s a bully no matter what.