There’s a torrent of books coming out about Trump’s presidency, which tend to focus on the home stretch, when he lost re-election and became the first to pretend like he hadn’t. We’ve heard such stories as Eric Trump blaming data analysts for his father losing, but now we know about something that happened much earlier. According to Michael Wolff’s Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency (as per Axios), among the many who’ve come under 45’s easily stoked ire were Brett Kavanaugh, the second of three justices he named to the Supreme Court for a lifetime gig.
Kavanaugh, like Neil Gorusch and Amy Coney Barrett, Trump’s other two Supremes, hasn’t been the nightmare many on the left expected — so far. That’s left Trump arguably as furious with him as progressives. He told Wolff, during interviews for the book, that he was “very disappointed,” whom he thought “hasn’t had the courage you need to be a great justice.”
Trump essentially had buyer’s remorse. “There were so many others I could have appointed, and everyone wanted me to,” he told Wolff. He then all but admitted that he wasn’t fit to serve on the highest court in the land. “Where would he be without me? I saved his life. He wouldn’t even be in a law firm. Who would have had him? Nobody. Totally disgraced. Only I saved him.”
Among the cases Kavanaugh didn’t lean pro-Trump on was the most important of all: overturning the election. Instead the Court quickly dismissed cases that made their way to the top as frivolous. Trump was big mad at all three justices, but, Wolff says, he “reserved particular bile for Kavanaugh.”
“I had plenty of time to pick somebody else,” Trump told Wolff. “I went through that thing and fought like hell for Kavanaugh — and I saved his life, and I saved his career. At great expense to myself … okay? I fought for that guy and kept him.”
Kavanaugh was seen as a safe choice for Trump until he went through the confirmation hearings that resulted in his Supreme Court seat. That’s when he was accused of sexual misconduct from an alleged incident during his high school years. But this certainly lends credence to the claim that Trump wanted his three Supreme Court appointees to bend the law in his favor.
(Via Axios)