Donald Trump’s desperation to get to the Capitol gives away that he thought it was all over for him anyway
When Cassidy Hutchinson testified today that Donald Trump grabbed the wheel of his limo in an attempt at getting to the Capitol on January 6th, it revealed that Trump was looking to lead the insurrection personally. Given that he also knew that some of his supporters were armed, he was looking to lead an armed insurrection. That makes him guilty of seditious conspiracy and more. But it also reveals something else.
Trump had to know that if he went to the Capitol while his own people were battling with the police to try to take the building, there was a very good chance Trump could have ended up dead. Trump is elderly and at times struggles to walk. If he’d entered the fray at the Capitol – particularly if he’d tried to go inside the Capitol – he could easily have gotten unintentionally trampled by his own crazed supporters.
There would have been no practical way for the Secret Service to protect Trump during all of this, even if they had been willing to accompany him into the mob or into the Capitol – which is surely part of why the Secret Service refused to take him there. But Trump was demanding to go anyway, and even tried to physically force his way there, even knowing that there was a good chance he’d have died amid the chaos.
Trump was literally trying to bet his life by attempting to go to the Capitol. Are we really supposed to believe that Trump was so embarrassed by the prospect of being a one-term President, he’d rather get trampled to death by a mob of his own crazed supporters?
The only reason for Trump to have taken such a mortal risk was that he truly believed that if he were forced out of office, his life would be over with anyway. At the time, Manhattan DA Cy Vance seemed well on his way to criminally indicting Trump for numerous financial crimes, which at Trump’s age would have sent him to prison for life. Trump must have thought he had nothing left to lose. Trump couldn’t have known that Vance’s successor would delay the indictment for a year and a half for still-unknown reasons.
So it’s not a stretch to suggest that Donald Trump wanted to personally lead his angry armed mob into the Capitol, regardless of the physical danger to himself, because he expected to spend the rest of his life in prison anyway. The joke is on Trump, because he still hasn’t been indicted on financial charges in New York, but now he’s in the process of being indicted for election crimes in Georgia – and it now seems nearly a given that the DOJ will end up indicting him for having criminally conspired to take the Capitol.
