Mick Mulvaney seems to have started off on the right foot; he studied anti-trust law at the University of North Carolina, getting his law degree in 1992. A decade and a half later he was elected to the South Carolina legislature, first the House and then the state Senate. In 2010— with an A+ rating from the fascist-oriented Club for Growth— he was elected to Congress in the big red wave, displacing Blue Dog John Spratt. A tea-bagger, he immediately made a name for himself as one of the most fiscally conservative members of Congress, eager to shut down the government to get his way, and was one of the founders of the fascist Freedom Caucus. He also made a name for himself for grotesque open corruption, announcing he wouldn’t even meet with lobbyists unless they first contributed to his campaign.
By the time he left Congress, he was generally considered one of the most radically right and extremist members, across the board. In 2016 he endorsed Rand Paul for president but Trump appointed him director of the OMB anyway. He was confirmed despite all 48 Democrats in the Senate (plus John McCain) voting against him. He immediately got busy trying to persuade Trump to kill Social Security and Medicare. He is generally considered the worst OMB Director in history and the budget ballooned out of all bounds while he served, primarily because of tax cuts for the rich and corrupt spending by Trump. Trump loved him for not blowing the whistle on him and also appointed him director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in order to have the bureau stop protecting consumers. He is also universally considered the worst director of the CFPB in its short history, as he did everything to destroy its mission just short of shutting it down. Corruption reined supreme on his watch. Trump was so delighted with Mulvaney’s natural penchant for corruption that, though Mulvaney had, in 2016, publicly said Trump was unqualified to be president, and called him “absurd and childish” and “a terrible human being,” he appointed him chief of staff in late 2018 after firing first Reince Priebus (who lasted 192 days) and then John Kelly (who lasted a year and 154 days). Mulvaney lasted a year and 89 days before Trump let him know he was fired in a tweet announcing that Mark Meadows would be replacing him.
Meadows took over on March 31, 2020. Like Mulvaney, Meadows was a tea-bagger, a Freedom Caucus founding fascist and a shut-down-the-government fanatic. Unlike Mulvaney, though, he was uneducated and is usually described by people who know him as ignorant and stupid. He owned a diner and then worked as a realtor. After the 2010 redistricting turned NC-11 deep red, Blue Dog scumbag Heath Shuler decided to retire and Meadows ran against Shuler’s Blue Dog chief of staff and beat him convincingly. Meadows was one of the most extremist members of Congress and ran an office legendary for sexual abuse of young female staffers for which Meadows was fined by the House Ethics Committee. He is generally corrupt and committed voter fraud in 2020 by registering to vote in a trailer park in which he didn’t live.
As chief of staff he was a disaster and is generally considered to be responsible for making the COVID pandemic worse in the U.S. than it should have been. He was also a key player in the coup and insurrection and was held in criminal contempt of Congress for refusing to cooperate with the J-6 Select Committee. Merrick Garland’s incompetent and horribly-run DOJ has declined to prosecute him. He started off cooperating with the select committee but Trump paid him a million dollar bribe to shut up. The money went to the sewer money Conservative Partnership Institute, which hired Meadows and made him partner.
And that brings us to this week— after a top Meadows staffer, Cassidy Hutchinson— testified on national TV and painted quite a picture of a detached and incompetent Meadows, in way, way over his head. Two days ago CNN anchor Kasie Hunt asked former White Houses comms staffer Stephanie Grisham if she agrees with Mulvaney that Pat Cippollone is more believable as a source of coup and J-6 goings on than Meadows. Grisham responded that she thinks Mulvaney “was a lot more charitable than I would be when it comes to Mark. I would believe my dog over Mark Meadows, so absolutely. I do want to say I believe with Mick completely about Pat. He is a man of integrity. I didn’t always agree with Pat also, I think it was the normal lawyers versus the PR person butting heads about what to do, but he is a man of integrity, and I saw him myself constantly shutting down bad ideas and telling the president that things shouldn’t go certain ways. Another thing that I saw quite a bit was the president wasn’t great to Pat. The president would tell him he was weak and he needed better lawyers, you know, and Pat stood firm and did what was best for the country. So, I believe that’s what he will do now.”
Unlike most of the Republicans who now recognize Trump tried prosecuting a coup, Mulvaney has at least said he wouldn’t vote for him again. He believes Trump is damaged goods and that Meadows betrayed the country. This morning CBS News reported that Mulvaney said that in his experience in the White House, Trump welcomed conflict among his advisers. He ‘would love to have people in a room who would fight with each other, who had differences of opinion.’ But in the final days of his presidency, Mulvaney— who was ousted from his job in March 2020— said he feared that model ‘simply broke down,’ and ‘the normal people were not there— that for whatever reason, it was only the crazies.’”
While the Capitol was under attack on January 6, Mulvaney had no insight into what was happening inside the White House.
…Mulvaney said he learned more about what happened from a text conversation with a friend who he said was inside the White House on January 6. Mulvaney said that conversation occurred while Hutchinson was testifying.
"I texted and I said, 'You know, if I listen to Cassidy closely, it sounds like Mark was either completely incompetent at the job or was having a nervous breakdown,'" Mulvaney said. "And the person texted back, it was a little bit of both."
In hearing Hutchinson's version of events, Mulvaney marveled at the "chaos in the building." He said what he heard represented nothing less than "a complete breakdown in the operation of the West Wing."
The job of chief of staff is, he said, "to tell the president stuff he doesn't want to hear."
Basically, Mulvaney has been saying he trusts Hutchinson’s testimony and that Meadows was unfit to be chief of staff. In a text exchange with a friend still in the White House on January 6 he says he wrote that if he listens to Cassidy closely, “it sounds like Mark [Meadows] was either completely incompetent at the job or having a nervous breakdown, and the person texted back it was a little bit of both. He said Meadows had “checked out [of the job] entirely” at the most critical moment.
