American Judas

How Mark Meadows betrayed his country with an ass-kiss

“Um hey, conscience! Haven’t seen you in a long time. But do you mind if I call you back? I’m busy betraying my country right now.”

In the literature of doing nothing, Edmund Burke’s notion – or the notion often misattributed to him since it’s never actually been located in any of his writing -  is by now a hallowed cliché: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”  Though if the Fake-News Burke were alive today, and sitting through the most recent of the January 6 hearings, I suspect he’d have to tack on an addendum. It’s not just “good men” doing nothing that allows evil to triumph. It’s Mark Meadows, too.

For as long as he’s been a public self-servant, the towel boy who served as Donald Trump’s fourth and last chief of staff has been a professional sleazebag. He’s no cartoon villain, mind you. If Meadows were a color, he’d be beige. Blessed with the pleasantly dishonest face of a swampland timeshare hustler, the former congressman, who once described himself  as being a “fat nerd” as a kid, rarely says anything funny or compelling, unlike his Lord & Savior Donald H. Christ. Yet he forever manages to be controversial without actually being interesting, the sinisterness equivalent of a white noise machine.

To get the full Meadows effect, one only need turn to the memoir of former Republican House Speaker John Boehner.  I say that as someone who nearly never reads political memoirs, as they tend to be horribly written, self-aggrandizing, and usually tell you things you already know or things you have no interest in knowing.  Besides, I used to think of Boehner as little more than an overly-tan guy who lost control of the suicide-bomber wing of his caucus, and who liked to divide his time between crying in public and playing golf.

But since he’s left Congress, Boehner has shaped up as something of an honest broker, which means he probably got out just in time, since Congress is no place for honest men (see Paul Gosar, Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene and the rest of the new breed of culture-war lunatics, who along with their leftwing counterparts in The Squad, Boehner describes as being mere “political terrorists, peddling chaos and crisis so that everyone keeps paying attention to them.”)

Boehner first met Meadows, “a founder of the so-called Freedom Caucus,”  when Meadows was running for Congress in North Carolina in 2012, “back in the days when Mitt {Romney} was the next great conservative hope, before the rabble-rousers decided he wasn’t a big enough lunatic for their liking.” Boehner campaigned for him, Meadows won, “and that’s when he became my problem….one of the very first things he did to thank me for campaigning for him was to vote against my reelection as Speaker.”  Meadows and his Freedom Caucus co-conspirators, in Boehner’s telling,  decided he “was a left-wing accommodationist or something.”

When the coup failed (perhaps Meadows was just taking batting practice for January 6 some years later), Boehner was told Meadows wanted to meet with him one-on-one. Boehner assented. Meadows came to his Capitol office, sat down on the couch across from Boehner, and they talked for a second or two. Then things got weird, as it is worth letting Boehner tell at length:

He had dropped off the couch and was on his knees. Right there on my rug. That was a first. His hands came together in front of him as if he were about to pray. ‘Mr. Speaker, please forgive me,’ he said, or words to that effect. I was so startled I can’t remember exactly what the hell he was saying. For a moment, I wondered what his elite and uncompromising band of Freedom Caucus warriors would have made of their star organizer on the verge of tears, but that wasn’t my problem. I hadn’t expected any sort of apology, and I really hadn’t expected to see a man huddled on the rug at my feet. So I did the only thing that came to mind. I took a long, slow drag of my Camel cigarette. Let the tension hang there a little, you know? I looked at my pack of Camels on the desk next to me, then I looked down at him, and asked (as if I didn’t know) ‘For what?’ Yeah, I said, I’d forgive him. But I knew he was carrying a backpack full of knives – and sooner or later, he’d try to cut me again with them. Which, of course, he did. (Boehner cashed out a short time later.)

Susan Glasser, who along with her husband Peter Baker, has written an upcoming book on the Trump presidency and its violent conclusion,   additionally lanced the Meadows boil  in The New Yorker, confessing that while reporting her book, she was often stumped by Meadows’ sometimes inscrutable duplicity. Entranced by his Oval Office access, Meadows would show off the call log on his iPhone to a reporter, just to prove he was speaking with “VIP POTUS.”  Yet it was unclear, Glasser writes, whether “he was one of the responsible adults around Trump trying to land the plane safely,” or whether he was “one of the hijackers.” He acted less like “a gatekeeper than a door opener” for every crank and conspiracy theorist who wanted to see Trump.  As one Republican in the White House’s orbit told Glasser, “Meadows was basically a matador. He’s sort of just let in anybody and everybody who wanted to come in.”

And so, on the one hand, Meadows would tell concerned White House colleagues privately during Trump’s florid post-election conspiracy theory phase, a phase Trump’s not yet emerged from: “Trust me, I’m gonna get the president there, he’s gonna drop this issue. Just kind of give him time to mourn and grieve, and then he’s going to come around.”  While with the other hand, Meadows was texting Ginni Thomas, Clarence’s nutter wife who pushed election fraud almost as hard as the My Pillow guy, telling her, “This is a fight of good versus evil. Evil always looks like the victor until the King of Kings triumphs. Do not grow weary in well doing. The fight continues. I have staked my career on it.”

“He would lie to people’s faces,” one White House official told Glasser and Baker.  Former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham, who was pushed out by Meadows, called him, “one of the worst people ever to enter the Trump White House,” saying that on a one-to-five scale of awfulness, “I’d give Mark Meadows a twelve.” Glasser writes that others called him “an absolute disaster” who played to “all the President’s worst instincts.” While a former Republican leadership aide, in the kind of obloquy usually reserved for Ted Cruz, told journalists Anna Palmer and Jake Sherman  that Meadows was  the most dishonest person they ever met at the Capitol, “convicted criminals included.”

Which loops us back around to Tuesday’s installment of the January 6 hearings. Its newest star witness was one of Meadows’ most trusted aides, Cassidy Hutchinson, a brave and heretofore mostly-unknown 26-year-old who, even if she’s likely finished in Republican politics and will have no shortage of death threats for the next several months or years, could at least enjoy  a future as an ASMRtist with her reassuring poise and dulcet tones.  Most media types, of course, were scandalized by the holy-shit details of her testimony:  her hearing from other staffers that Trump lunged for his Secret Service agent when the latter refused to drive him to the Capitol as the riot was kicking off, Trump throwing his lunch against the wall leaving a ketchup drizzle, Trump telling staffers to ditch the magnetometers (mags)  that were detecting all manner of weapons, because Trump – always a size-matters type - wanted to pack the crowd for his Stop the Steal pregame speech whether they were armed to the teeth or not.  As Hutchinson claimed to have heard firsthand in the offstage tent before the Capitol invasion, Trump said something to the effect of “'I don't effing care that they have weapons. They're not here to hurt me. Take the f’ing mags away. Let my people in, they can march to the Capitol from here."

But what was just as striking, if less sexy, were the actions taken by Hutchinson’s boss, Mark Meadows. Or rather, his complete lack of apparent action, according to the aide who rarely left his side.  While previous chiefs of staff – think John Kelly – would’ve likely tried to play Trump-tamer as Trump essentially unleashed the MAGA hordes to bring bedlam on Congress as they certified the election (five people ultimately died, around 150 officers were injured),  Meadows seemed distracted in Hutchinson’s telling, like he’d rather have been off playing Wordle.

Trump, of course, is his own untameable beast –  it’s no accident he had four chiefs of staff in four years.  But you’d think a more civic-minded chief might snap-to during a once-in-American-history event in which his boss’s supporters were trying to overthrow the government that Trump himself was still nominally head of.  And yet, time and again, in Hutchinson’s testimony, Meadows appears to be distracted, disengaged, and asleep at the switch – just another passenger on the crazy train.

Cassidy Hutchinson, testify!

While the rioters were moving in, there was Meadows sitting in his office, scrolling and typing on his phone. As Hutchinson testified:

I said, ‘you watching TV, Chief?’ He was like, ‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘the rioters are getting really close. Have you talked to the President?’ And he said, ‘No, he wants to be alone right now,’ still looking at his phone. So I started to get frustrated because, you know, I sort of felt like I was watching……. a bad car accident that was about to happen where you can’t stop it, but you want to be able to do something…….I remember thinking at that moment, Mark needs to snap out of this and I don’t know how to snap him out of this, but he needs to care.

Then there’s White House Counsel Pat Cipollone barreling down the hallway not long afterwards, barking at Cassidy, inquiring whether Meadows was in his office, shaking his head when told that he was. As Hutchinson tells it:

I remember like glancing and he’s still sitting on his phone. And I remember Pat saying to him something to the effect of, ‘The rioters have gotten to the Capitol, Mark. We need to go down and see the President now.’ And Mark looked up at him and said, ‘he doesn’t want to do anything, Pat.’ And Pat said something to the effect of………‘Mark, something needs to be done or people are going to die and the blood is going to be on your f’ing hands.’

Or there was Meadows, after discussing the “Hang Mike Pence” chants with Trump and Cipollone, when he and Cipollone reconvened a short time later, Cipollone saying, according to Hutchinson:

Mark, we need to do something more. They’re literally calling for the Vice President to be f’ing hung. And Mark had responded something to the effect of, ‘You heard him, Pat. He thinks Mike deserves it. He doesn’t think they’re doing anything wrong.’ To which Pat said something {like} ‘This is f’ing crazy, we need to be doing something more.’

There were plenty of additional instances of Meadows’ negligence, alluded to either by Hutchinson or the committee, who was privy to plenty of Meadows’ text messages before he stopped cooperating, attempting to hide behind Trump’s executive privilege even as the House slapped him with criminal contempt of Congress, making Meadows the first chief of staff since Watergate and the first former member of Congress to notch that dishonor.  I won’t belabor all the other negligence points, except to say that even Fox’s Laura Ingraham and Donald Trump Jr. were imploring Meadows to get Trump to act and send his hooligans home. You know you’ve entered an ethical abyss when Laura Ingraham and DJT Jr. are your voices of conscience.

And yet, tick down the Wikipedia list of Meadows’ priors, and he wasn’t always such a man of inaction. Why, there’s Meadows launching the Freedom Caucus, and amending his official House biography that had misled about his Bachelor of Arts degree (he’d only earned an associate degree), and covering up the COVID-positive status of White House staffers (including his own), and committing voter fraud when he and his wife were registered to vote in a mobile home in North Carolina where they didn’t live, and being present when Trump tried to intimidate the Georgia Secretary of State (on tape!) to come up with enough votes for him to overturn Georgia’s election, or pushing cockamamie conspiracy theories to the Justice Department about how Italy used military technology to tamper with our voting machines, or joining the Conservative Partnership Institute, which features on its website a photo of an oleaginous Trump shooting a thumbs up sign amidst a gaggle of bushy-tailed young activists eager to get to work on things like the CPI’s “Election Integrity Network” (irony alert!).

So, you know, sometimes Meadows is a busy beaver. He doesn’t just play on his phone while the Capitol is getting sacked. Which, if we’re being honest, might’ve not being playing at all. Meadows might have been conducting the Important Work of State, like say, Googling the breaking strength of various knots in case the MAGA mob ever actually got around to hanging Mike Pence.

And  besides, what Meadows was doing that day was detailed in his crappy, unreadable, post-presidency book, The Chief’s Chief.  Refusing to buy it, I checked it out of the library, squirreling it away to my car with the same hot shame I’d experience if I’d checked out, say, The Illustrated History Of Bronies  or How To Use Kegel Exercises to Beat Incontinence.

Though perhaps “detailed” is too strong a word. There are almost no details at all. January 6 – the seminal event of Trump’s presidency, the one historians will talk about hundreds of years from now - merits a mere four-and-a-half pages. Pages with blisteringly candid admissions, such as: “When {Trump} mounted the podium that afternoon, it was not ranting demands that came out of his mouth; if anything, he was more subdued than usual, simply stating his points and letting the crowd know that he was not going to give up on America, or on them.”

By contrast, Meadows gives Joe Biden’s goat-rodeo-pullout from Afghanistan twelve pages.  Because that’s the kind of self-reflective straight shooter Meadows is.  Hey, let the chips fall wherever, he must say to himself when he’s not on his phone.  Even if, when America called, his phone was busy.

But one thing we know – even if he won’t talk to the committee – is where he stands on Donald Trump (who called Meadows’ book’s characterization of Trump’s COVID episode “fake news.” Meadows  quickly scurried to a television camera so he could agree with the boss.)  It turns out – and this will surprise you – Meadows is still for Trump.  Here, let him tell it:

President Trump, or ‘the boss’ as we always called him in the White House, {stop with the zany nicknames, you rascal!} has a wicked sense of humor, and traveling with him is never boring. But I also do it because I truly believe he is the leader of the conservative movement in this country, and whatever he does next, I will be there to support him.

It all puts me in mind of another aphorism, this one attributed to Ben Franklin: “The trouble with doing nothing is not knowing when you’re finished.”  And so, when it comes to doing nothing about how Donald Trump betrayed America with his actions on January 6 and afterwards, Mark Meadows has a lifetime of hard work ahead of him.