Former Republican Rep. Barbara Comstock is the latest among high profile female politicians in the US to speak out against the men in former President Donald Trump’s administration.
“I guess cleaning up Trump’s mess — ketchup and all — is assumed to be women’s work!” Comstock, told Politico.
Comstock, a former Virginia Republican, made her latest comments in response to last month’s testimony made by several of Trump’s former female aides who testified before a panel investigating the January 6 Capitol attack.
One of the women who testified was former Trump White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, who told the panel that her former boss had thrown his lunch against the wall when he learned that Attorney General Bill Barr had denied any evidence of widespread election fraud. Trump has denied Hutchinson’s accounts.
Hutchinson told the panel that in December 2020, around the time Barr’s comments were publicly disclosed, she saw a White House valet in the dining room, changing a tablecloth.
“I first noticed there was ketchup dripping down the wall and there was a shattered porcelain plate on the floor,” Hutchinson said.
“The valet had articulated that the president was extremely angry at the Attorney General’s AP interview and had thrown his lunch against the wall.”
Hutchinson told the panel she helped the valet by grabbing a towel and wiping the ketchup off the wall.
“He said something to the effect of, ‘He’s really ticked off about this. I would stay clear of him for right now,'” she said.
"Develop enough courage so that you can stand up for yourself & then stand up for somebody else."—Maya Angelou
Words to live by. Proudly standing by & with these women against Trump. Country over Party.https://t.co/jG4ze21shi— Olivia of Troye (@OliviaTroye) July 13, 2022
Hutchinson also recounted a number of incidents when she was aware of Trump either throwing dishes or flipping the table cloth during fits of rage in the White House.
Trump later responded to Hutchinson’s testimony on Truth Social.
“Her Fake story that I tried to grab the steering wheel of the White House Limousine in order to steer it to the Capitol Building is ‘sick’ and fraudulent, very much like the Unselect Committee itself,” he wrote.
“Wouldn’t even have been possible to do such a ridiculous thing. Her story of me throwing food is also false…and why would SHE have to clean it up, I hardly knew who she was?”
Several former aides have recently spoken out against Trump, including former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham, former communications director Alyssa Farah Griffin, ex-deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews, and ex-Trump national security official Olivia Troye.
Troye, 45, a former top aide to former Vice President Mike Pence, described the experience of coming forward as “lonely.”
“… part of it for me was to make sure that they knew that even though it feels lonely – they bully, they intimidate, they want to make you feel like there’s no one left in the world, that’s kind of the point – for me it was important for them to know I wasn’t going to waver on them and there would be others,” she said.
Barbara Comstock has praised the women who have publicly testified.
“I’ve had women friends contact me to say they want to support these women because they are the kind of stand-up women we’d all like to have as staff and hope we were as staff or members. And they know it can be lonely when you stand up,” she said.
Comstock has continued the public criticism of Trump and his administration — this week, she denounced Trump’s senior male aides for refusing or dragging their feet to speak with the panel.
In April, former White House counsel Pat Cipollone appeared before the panel, though for weeks after, he was asked back to make additional testimony. In late June, lawmakers were finally able to have him subpoenaed.
Last week, a range of US media outlets including New York Times reported that the panel had finally reached a deal to interview Cipollone.
Comstock insisted that he had to be “…dragged to testify after Cassidy.”
The panel’s top Republican, Committee vice chair Liz Cheney, said she was “moved” by the actions of unnamed “young women.”
At speech at the Ronald Reagan presidential library earlier this month, Cheney said it was “…young women who seem instinctively to understand the peril of this moment for our democracy, and young women who know that it will be up to them to save it.”
“And I have been incredibly moved by the young women that I have met and that have come forward to testify in the January 6th Committee,” she said.
“Some of these are young women who worked on the Trump campaign, some worked in the Trump White House, some who worked in offices on Capitol Hill, all who knew immediately that what happened that day must never happen again.”
Image: J. Scott Applewhite / AP Photo