“I’m the f***ing president. Take me up to the Capitol now.”

So said then-President Donald Trump on January 6, 2021, if we’re to believe yesterday’s testimony by Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows. The Trump-deranged media ate it up. Even Fox News’s Bret Baier headed for the fainting couch. Again, if we’re to believe this heretofore anonymous junior staffer and her hearsay testimony, Trump also lashed out at his Secret Service detail, even lunging at one of his agents. Does this sound believable?

According to Hutchinson:

The president reached up towards the front of the vehicle to grab at the steering wheel. Mr. Engel grabbed his arm and said, ‘Sir, you need to take your hand off the steering wheel. We’re going back to the West Wing. We’re not going to the Capitol.’

Really? That’d be a pretty athletic move for a big guy like President Trump, especially being all bound up in his dress slacks, coat, and tie.

Trouble is, Cassidy Hutchinson isn’t believable — no matter how breathlessly our state-run media hangs on her every utterance. The Washington (Com)Post’s headline this morning tells us all we need to know: “Trump’s had bad moments, but few worse than Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony.” Ooooh.

And then an inconvenient truth materialized. Two men who were in the car with the president at the time of Trump’s alleged outburst — the driver of the vehicle and Bobby Engel, the head of Trump’s Secret Service detail — are prepared to testify before the January 6 sham committee that the president didn’t do anything of the sort. We’ll see if that rigged committee has the decency to let either Engel or the driver appear on camera.

As NBC chief White House correspondent Peter Alexander declared late yesterday, “A source close to the Secret Service tells me both Bobby Engel, the lead agent, and the presidential limousine/SUV driver are prepared to testify under oath that neither man was assaulted and that Mr. Trump never lunged for the steering wheel.”

Hmm … imagine that. Where’ve we seen this sort of thing before?

Oh, yes, it was during Donald Trump’s impeachment trial — the first one. You remember: when Democrats tried to impeach him for what Joe Biden actually did. That’s where we got our first glimpse of a portly, pasty-faced Ukrainian ex-pat, Pentagon pencil-pusher, and deep-state Trump-hater named Alexander Vindman. During that farcical impeachment trial, Vindman testified that he overheard Trump’s phone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and felt it to be impeachable. Said he: “I was concerned by the call. I did not think it was proper to demand that a foreign government investigate a U.S. citizen, and I was worried about the implications for the U.S. Government’s support of Ukraine.”

The truth, as we later learned when Trump released the transcript of the call, is that he didn’t “demand” anything. But he did give our nation advanced warning about the corruption of Hunter Biden.

Alas, if only those (ahem) 81 million Biden voters had listened. If they had, there’d be reasonably priced groceries on our store shelves, gas prices wouldn’t have doubled, our 401(k)s wouldn’t be in the crapper, we’d have left Afghanistan on our terms rather than the Taliban’s, and Vladimir Putin wouldn’t have invaded Ukraine. But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln enjoyed the play.

As for President Trump’s take on yesterday’s spectacle, here’s what he had to say on Truth Social:

I hardly know who this person, Cassidy Hutchinson… 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 — Wouldn’t even have been possible to do such a ridiculous thing.

George Terwilliger, the attorney for Hutchinson’s former boss, Mark Meadows, affirmed Tuesday’s testimony “would not in my judgment withstand five minutes of even basic cross-examination of where the knowledge comes from, precisely who said what to whom, and whether or not its firsthand knowledge, and so forth.”

Of course, Nancy Pelosi doesn’t allow such things as cross-examination during her “Select Committee” “hearings,” nor does she even allow the calling of defense witnesses, nor even a defense. Thus, anyone who purports to claim even a hint of legitimacy to these shammy show-trial proceedings should be tarred, feathered, placed in the stocks, and pelted with rotten fruit.