That quotation, revealed at yesterday's January 6 Committee hearing, is from Cassidy Huthinson's video testimony. She and Mark Meadows had encountered President Trump after he learned that the Supreme Court had rejected a Texas suit to overturn the 2020 election. The president was "raging" at the decision, Hutchinson noted, in a "typical anger outburst." [Passage found at 00:47:02 at hyperlink below]
The president said something to the effect of, “I don’t want people to know we lost, Mark. This is embarrassing. Figure it out. We need to figure it out. I don’t want people to know that we lost.”
Donald Trump was rattled. A stubborn fact, which in his eyes cast him as a loser, threatened his self-image, an image he desperately wished the public would not glimpse. That was untenable. Of course Mark Meadows did not "figure it out." The high court's decision had been publicly announced. The source of Trump's embarrassment, a ruling (one of a long string of judicial defeats) that rejected claims of fraud and demands to throw out the election results, couldn't be hidden from view.
If this single setback embarrassed Trump, imagine how humiliating his November 2020 defeat had been.
It is hardly an original observation to note that Donald Trump's unique personality shaped his presidency in ways never before seen in the Oval Office. But it is still remarkable. Consider: the man's insecurity, his desperate need for constant affirmation, his refusal to accept an outcome that he frantically wished not to be -- this explains so many things that early on (as we were getting to know Trump) we regarded as comically baffling, but that eventually led to a crisis for our democracy.
When we watched the man assert that Hillary Clinton's popular vote total surpassed his own only because of millions of illegal votes cast, we could hardly take it seriously. When we watched him push his press secretary to insist -- against the plain evidence of our eyes -- that the crowd at his inauguration surpassed the size of the crowd at Obama's inauguration (and at every other president's in history), we laughed.
We had no inkling of what was to come. We could hardly have foreseen an insurrection four years later, not from this boastful, needy personality, who had such a sketchy understanding of government (and little apparent interest).
Yet consistent with our experience of the past seven years, the scene Hutchinson describes suggests that Trump's peculiar psychological makeup -- his craving for reassurance -- was foundational to his premeditated, multifaceted, lawless planning, begun many months before November 2020, to overturn the results of the presidential election. Donald Trump could not bear to acknowledge defeat, to be labeled in his own mind, and in the view of others, a loser.
The man, as he parries with opponents, offering justifications and defenses and throwing out lies that are convenient at the moment, often fails to consider what he will say the next day. He can't maintain a consistent, coherent story that holds together because, most often, he isn't thinking beyond whatever immediately confronts him. One day, the FBI planted the documents. The next day, the documents belong to him. The day after that, who knows what will pop into his head and out of his mouth.
Many months before Biden thumped him at the polls and in the electoral college, that prospect terrified Trump. The thought of being a loser was so agonizingly insupportable, he began setting the stage to fend off that reality by hook or by crook. His planning to dispute the election results was months in the making. He would go to any lengths to evade what was to come. Rejecting the rule of law and trampling underfoot our democratic institutions were inconsequential to him. He could not, would not accept an electoral failure. He was driven to squelch that eventuality.
He's still at it.
"This is embarrassing. Figure it out." Figure it out, he did. A way to prop up his tender psyche, to deny what is clearly the case. He has succeeded in great measure, having brought a third of the country along with him. Although he lost the election and failed to overturn this outcome, he convinced his MAGA base that he had won. This salve to the man's fragile ego has come at great cost to the country, which has watched election denial become the credo of the Republican Party that Trump leads.
What a strange, twisted path to an authoritarian threat to a great nation. Born of one man's pitiful, incessant craving for reassurance.