If Amy Coney Barrett is ‘evil,’ then only those who’ve given up thinking are safe | Opinion
A month before Justice Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed to the Supreme Court, I wrote a column defending her as a) not a cult member and b) more independent-minded than either the left or right seemed to believe.
“Nobody tell him,” — Donald Trump, that is — I wrote in Sept. of 2020, “but I don’t think she’s the political hack he’s hoping for.”
Today, Justice Barrett is being vilified by MAGA bros as a) alas, not nearly enough of a cult member and b) more independent-minded than those truer to Trump than to the U.S. Constitution feel they have every right to expect.
This because she sided with the majority on the Supreme Court who said that the government does have to pay USAID $2 billion for work already completed. Paying for work already done has never been how Trump does business; every third New Yorker walking down the street has a story about this, and a 2016 investigation by USA Today found hundreds of people, from dishwashers to attorneys, who said he never did pay them what they were owed. But it is how legally binding contracts are supposed to protect us all.
What I wrote in 2020 is that I couldn’t “help wondering whether a wholesome person like Barrett, who doesn’t curse or enjoy hearing others do so, is really the fan of our p-grabbing, soldier-mocking, handicap-denigrating president that he expects all of his nominees and appointees to be.”
She is, however, an extremely conservative jurist. The former Notre Dame law professor voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, expand gun rights and end affirmative action in college admissions. Last summer, she helped make Trump legally bulletproof in a ruling that the Brennan Center’s Michael Waldman said “grants the president the power of a monarch” and amounts to “an instruction manual for future lawbreaking presidents.”
Yeah yeah, say Trumpers, but what has she done for him lately? The Trump freeze on humanitarian aid hurt vulnerable people. It threw relief efforts into chaos and left undelivered food rotting in ports around the world. Farmers in Kansas, where Food for Peace began, were among those who were stiffed. But for siding with those who said we should pay what we owe, Barrett too is an enemy now.
Trump’s gotten worse side-eye from Melania
It’s true that this was not her first offense against right thinking. In January, she also voted with the majority in rejecting Trump’s request not to be sentenced for 34 felonies on charges that he falsified business records. In February, she did not disclose her vote but did not join the dissent in a decision against immediately removing the head of the watchdog agency that protects federal whistleblowers. He was fired anyway, and stopped fighting his removal last week. But it was paying up for aid for dying children that could not be tolerated.
“She is evil, chosen solely because she checked identity politics boxes,” Mike Cernovich posted on X. “Another DEI hire,” said the pro-Trump conspiracy theorist. In MAGA world, women and minorities can never do well for any other reason. So when planes fall out of the sky, well, the president knows where to look without a single fact in hand, doesn’t he?
Jack Posobiec, the white nationalist influencer with longstanding ties to foreign neo-fascists who was recently invited to travel to Ukraine with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, also tagged Barrett as a “DEI judge.”
On former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, Mike Davis, a lawyer who during the transition advised the president on “Justice Department issues,” called her “a rattled law professor with her head up her a**.”
Then Bannon played a video clip of Barrett and excoriated her for — basically, just standing there after greeting the president following his recent address to Congress: “That’s about as close to stink-eye as you can get — not a happy — I’ve had a couple of my ex-wives look at me like that,” Bannon said. I’ve seen Donald Trump’s current wife give him worse side-eye, and that was just at his first inauguration.
‘All gas, no brakes’ not founders’ intention
Given that Trump had just jokingly justified his favorite brutal dictator, repeated the lie that many dead people are being sent Social Security checks, pretended that fentanyl is pouring in from Canada and that his tariffs, if they ever happen, will require only a “little bit of an adjustment period” from American farmers, who will then “have a lot of fun,” I thought Barrett’s tight, tense expression actually showed heroic restraint.
But, Bannon was exercised: “That is not a look of admiration and what a great speech and what a magnificent president.”
It wasn’t, but adoration is not part of the job, or never used to be, anyway. Just because the guy sitting behind Trump that evening, House Speaker in Name Only Mike Johnson, has made Congress pointless does not mean that the judiciary is quite there yet, and Bannon’s great fear is that it might remain independent.
“How can we depend — I mean, c’mon man, are we going to lose these 5 to 4?” Bannon asked Davis. “Everything is going to hang on these decisions that are going to take place over the next 6 months. … This is all gas, no brakes.”
The entire point of having our three branches of government is having checks and balances — in other words, brakes. But breaking the system created by our founders is Trump’s point now, and anybody who gets in the way of that is not just wrong but someone who deserves whatever happens to him.
This is why a mob called for Mike Pence’s head and why Trump’s former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former national security adviser John Bolton no longer have security details, despite serious threats from Iran.
Bolton, of course, has been intensely critical of his former boss, but Pompeo’s only known offense was accusing Trump of “staring into the rearview mirror, claiming victimhood,” when he was considering running for president in 2024. That was enough, though, for Trump to say let him keep himself from being assassinated.
“There’s risks to everything,” Trump said in explaining the decision to pull their protection, along with Anthony Fauci’s.
Only those who are sure that they would never disagree, about anything, because they’ve given up on thinking, are not at risk of becoming the new Amy Coney Barrett — or Comey Barrett, as Bannon kept calling her, because he’s forgotten her name already. And that’s risking the whole American experiment, in ways that those running the country either intend or don’t much mind, and those letting them won’t allow themselves to see.
This story was originally published March 10, 2025 at 6:02 AM.
