M.L. Nestel joined Raw Story in 2023. An award-winning writer and editor, his work has been published in New York Magazine, Los Angeles Magazine and The Guardian, among other titles. He also produces and writes for true-crime genre TV shows. Prior to that, he served on the Newsweek masthead as a senior writer, wrote as a correspondent at ABC News and held the titles of West Coast bureau chief and senior writer at The Daily Beast. Priors also include working as senior national correspondent at The Daily Mail and investigative reporter at all three NYC tabloids: The New York Post,The New York Daily News and Newsday. He traveled around the country as a national correspondent at The Daily. M.L. published hundreds of stories about underground music and cinema — most notably as a critic for Box Office Magazine and the New York editor at Soma Magazine. He also headed development at Fountainhead Films. M.L. splits his time between Los Angeles and New York.
Donald Trump's wake is littered with the fallen of those who pledged fealty.
That is the metaphor that Cassidy Hutchinson, the former aide to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, conjured during an interview on CNN's "The Source" with Kaitlin Collins.
"Look at how Mr. Trump has conducted himself through his business career and also his political career," she said. "I almost relate it to bodies around him, but he takes out everybody who is loyal to him because it's all about his personal gain and what he can gain from those people."
The comment struck Collins, who recalled interviewing Trump's Attorney General Bill Barr, who a year prior made a similar macabre comparison.
Collins recalled: "He was sitting in that same seat that you are now and he said, 'But Trump kinda like leaves this path of carnage in his wake of people who sign up to go work for him and then end up with their names in an indictment.'"
Indeed, Barr did mention the carnage, telling Collins: "He leaves in his wake, ruined lives, like this, the people who went up, to Capitol Hill, these individuals, many of the people, who served him, in government, that got sucked into things and he just leaves all this carnage, in his wake."
Meadows, along with Trump's former attorney and New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and several others, are facing conspiracy, fraud and forgery charges, related to their suspected efforts to manipulate the results of Trump's defeat.
Hutchinson said it was "really sad" to see that Meadows was being charged criminally because she saw him as a "principled person" and it was his character that guided her to "take job with the chief of staff."
"So it's difficult to see him in this position," she added.
Hutchinson has clearer eyes and some perspective since she testified before the House Jan. 6 committee tasked with investigating the designs what led to the deadly revolt on the Capitol back in 2021 in an attempt to thwart the certification of the election to Joe Biden.
"Donald Trump is inherently about himself," she said. "That's why America is in the position that it is today because he did not want to give up the presidency and now running again and he's been indicted in multiple jurisdictions."
