Trump’s final scene didn’t go as per script

Once upon a time, long before Donald Trump began fabricating narratives about his prowess and personal history, he wanted to be a movie producer. He admired old-school Hollywood producers such as Darryl F. Zanuck and Cecil B. DeMille, and considered attending film school at the University of Southern California.
Trump’s father marched him into the family real estate business instead. But Trump never lost his fascination with showmanship or his fixation with occupying center stage. What he decided to do, he later told me, was to “put show business into real estate.”
So it was not surprising that Trump would be attracted to the presidency, or that when he actually won it he would try to inject Hollywood into the White House. And when he was kicked off that stage in November 2020, he was so wounded and power-mad that he invented a new narrative: Electoral fraud had deprived him of his victory, and he was entitled to respond by launching a coup.
So let’s go inside the presidential limousine on the afternoon of Jan. 6, 2021, hours before Congress was scheduled to certify the election results. We can seat ourselves next to Trump thanks to Cassidy Hutchinson, a White House aide, who recounted what happened in the limo during the fifth day of testimony overseen by the bipartisan congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the US Capitol.
Trump had just told the mob that he would march with them to the Capitol to protest the certification of the election. He knew things could get ugly; he and his aides had been warned of impending violence days before. The morning of the siege, Trump was informed that many in the crowd were carrying weapons, which had been detected and confiscated. (This upset Trump: “They’re not here to hurt me,” he said, ordering the magnetometers around the Ellipse removed. “Let my people in. They can march to the Capitol.”)
Sitting in his limo after his speech, Trump directed the Secret Service to take him to the Capitol. The agents refused, citing security concerns — thereby intruding on the theatrics Trump had so carefully engineered. “I’m the f-ing president, take me up to the Capitol now,” he insisted. They refused. He flew into a rage, trying to grab the steering wheel and lunging at the throat of one agent who stopped him. (On Tuesday evening the Secret Service pushed back on Hutchinson’s account, saying that Trump was angry agents wouldn’t take him to the Capitol but that he didn’t try to grab the steering wheel or lunge at an agent.)
Trump eventually returned to the White House, where he gloated over threats to former Vice President Mike Pence and took his time telling rioters sacking the Capitol to stand down.
Trump has a long history of exploding when he doesn’t get his way, as unhinged narcissists are wont to do. But Tuesday’s hearing put that behavior on national television. Hutchinson’s testimony also exposed Trump as acting like a mob boss. Aides without legal or moral rudders acquiesced; others asked him to observe the law, which he repeatedly declined to do.
Some law-abiding rationalists in his administration tried to make the perils of what Trump was doing plain to him. Still, he plowed ahead. Hutchinson said Trump’s former White House Counsel, Pat Cipollone, told the former president that “we’re going to be charged with every crime imaginable” — including obstructing justice and defrauding the Electoral Count Act — but Trump wanted to have things his way.
He still does. Representative Liz Cheney, one of the Republicans overseeing the committee’s work, presented evidence that Trump or his minions have apparently tried to intimidate witnesses asked to testify before the committee. —Bloomberg