‘Did You Not Realize You Were In a Cult?’ The View Presses Cassidy Hutchinson On Why She Didn’t Abandon Trump Sooner
Cassidy Hutchinson, who served as the star witness against former President Donald Trump and his administration’s most senior officials during the January 6 hearings before Congress, has written a book, Enough, about how what ended her loyalty to Trump. She’s making the press rounds to talk about her experience, and in an emotional conversation on ABC’s The View, Hutchinson was asked by co-host Sunny Hostin why she would follow Trump to Mar-a-Lago even after what she had witnessed on January 6.
After Hostin recounted an excerpt from Enough that described Hutchinson’s mother as “crying” and wanting to separate herself from Trump while she packed her bags to follow him to Florida, Hutchinson described what was going on in her head and how she was feeling:
I was in this confused fog of a divided loyalty, but knowing what I wanted, but not feeling empowered to sort of break away from that. Specific to actually moving to Florida with him after, and again, in my hindsight now, I realized that this is not normal. I should not have been thinking like this, but I did genuinely put a lot of the blame on myself, on the people that had surrounded the president, because I felt that it was our job to advise him. It was our job to stop him from making bad decisions. He made those decisions because he had people around him advising him to do so. I now see that it is… That is not the case at all. He made those decisions. He’s a grown man and he made decisions to overrule our democratic rule of law. And it is not the staff around him. So looking back and upon reflection, I should not have felt that way. But I felt that loyalty to him still because I wanted him to still be surrounded by good people. And I thought that I could be a decent voice around him.
Which is what prompted co-host Whoopi Goldberg to ask Hutchinson flat-out: “Did you not realize you were in a cult?” The word “cult” is thrown around a lot when talking about Donald Trump and his MAGA base (and his advisors), and co-host Sara Haines chimed in to point out that this is exactly what happens in cults:
Look at church cult leaders. You read these books about the slow degradation of tearing down the individual to build the leader. It happens. It’s a mind… thing.
Co-host Joy Behar piped in to lighten the mood a bit, asking Hutchinson if her loyalty to Trump was about “daddy issues”:
Were there daddy issues? I mean, a lot of these people feel like they have daddy issues. … But a lot of them are following Daddy. Like, “Tell me what to do, Daddy.”
To her credit, Hutchinson didn’t ignore the question, but replied:
I can’t speak for other people on that but I will say, yes, he is charming. He has that personality that can bring you in. But it’s more about the power of Donald Trump’s movement. And Donald Trump wasn’t just born yesterday. He didn’t just appear in 2015.
Watch the video above via ABC.
