Y'all, I've read a fair amount of Trump crony memoirs (and also Condoleezza Rice's). These people fascinate or confound me. Rice's book [https://lowereastsidelibrarian.info/reviews/rice/extraordinaryordinarypeople] was compelling,  sympathetic, and confounding, as is Hutchinson's. However, Hutchinson, unlike Rice, is a political n00b who was in her early to mid twenties when much of the book transpired. Despite her lack of experience, and what is a bizarre "enough" line (though it's shared by many others writing in the Trump confessional oeuvre) Hutchinson has a story to tell. She served as lead staffer to Mark Meadows, Trump's fourth and final (so far) Chief of Staff and was in a lot of rooms. She didn't get there by accident; clearly she was an extremely good stage manager (that's a job title that makes sense to me--impeccably organized, thinking steps ahead, catering to adult children (theater artists, as opposed to politicians, but similar), and singularly focused on The Show).

She also really seems to love American democracy, even though she aided and abetted many nefarious Trump presidency goings on, including some Covid-era shit that literally killed people (masks: they're about optics! At one point Trump told Covid positive attendees to take their masks off because he'd just had it and was invulnerable, and Hutchinson was there for it).

There are some points when she's pretty clearly lying or lying by omission (not about things that were done, more things that she knew), but she's cagey and self-protective in a world where no one was looking out for her. She was raised working class, and her father sounds mentally ill and abusive at best.

One thing that struck me was her adoration of Alex Butterfield, who was in a similar position to hers, but in the Nixon administration. Butterfield's testimony actually brought down the Nixon presidency, back when ethics mattered to Republicans. At one point in the Bob Woodward book about Butterfield (which Hutchinson read three times before deciding for sure to testify), The Last of the President's Men, where Butterfield indicates that he had no regrets about his role in the Nixon White House (and enabling the miscarriage of justice), nor in his whistleblowing after the fact (he doesn't like the term "whistleblow"). So...like, he's proud of having served the president and glad that he didn't lie about what he'd done...? And Hutchinson seems to feel the same? 

I think Hutchinson is going to go far and do a lot more damage before she's done, but that she'll stick to her own bizarre moral compass while doing so.