President Donald Trump and Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images white house Trump milks the Kavanaugh backlash The president and his aides are latching on to the new controversy as a hot-button emotional issue that riles up the GOP base.

President Donald Trump, like most of the conservative sphere, is riled up about the treatment of Justice Brett Kavanaugh a year after the judge’s hyperpolarizing confirmation hearings.

And he’s channeling that energy into his key 2020 tactic of leaning heavily on political grievances and divisive moments to excite his base.


In both public and in private this week, the president has been harping on a recent New York Times piece, drawn from a book that contains new allegations of sexual misconduct by the judge who Trump feels has been falsely accused.

Trump brought up Kavanaugh in roughly 15 tweets this week, at his rally in New Mexico on Monday night and again with reporters on Tuesday in California.

“They’ve hurt that man and his family so badly. He has been just really devastated by the hurt that’s been caused to him, his beautiful daughters, his fantastic wife,” the president told reporters. “He’s a good man. That wasn’t supposed to be in the cards.”

Democrats see the new allegations as further evidence of the lack of vetting by the FBI and Senate, leading to the confirmation of a judge whose background and past treatment of women Americans do not fully understand.

But to conservatives, the new Kavanaugh allegations are an effort by Democrats to smear a sitting Supreme Court justice and place an asterisk next to his future opinions — casting a political pall over them.

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For Team Trump, the ongoing focus on Kavanaugh is a political gift. The president and his aides are latching on to the uproar to energize conservatives about another hot-button emotional issue that resonates with the base, a move that can support GOP fundraising and ultimately bolster get-out-the-vote efforts.

“Grabbing guns and smearing Supreme Court Justices? Next the Democrats will hold up a dismembered eight-month-old fetus!” said Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president. “They are handing the election to President Trump.”

The Kavanaugh allegations continue to carry such weight because they will set the tone for the next Supreme Court vacancy and nomination process regardless of the president in office.

“This is a warning to anyone who will put their names out there for Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat when it becomes vacant. This is all about Ginsburg,” said one conservative activist. “This is not going away. This ripped the scab off of what happened last summer and that is why people are so upset.”

A senior administration official rebutted this idea, however. “The White House is not concerned that the shameful episode involving The New York Times will impact the quality of future federal court appointees at any level.”

Still, conservatives warn they are prepared to mobilize if the Kavanaugh narrative continues. “It is a huge, huge threat to our whole constitutional structure,” said David McIntosh, president of the Club for Growth and a co-founder of the Federalist Society. Such smear tactics have “to be stopped. Groups like ours will absolutely develop plans to counter it.”

Over the past several years, Republican voters have been much more animated by Supreme Court appointments as the single most important issue in choosing a presidential candidate. In 2016, according to exit polling, 56 percent of Trump voters listed that as the key factor in backing his candidacy whereas just 41 percent of Democratic voters called it the most important issue.

Progressive leaders hope this will change for the upcoming presidential election. Several 2020 Democratic presidential candidates have called for Kavanaugh’s impeachment — though top Democratic leaders have been killing that idea behind the scenes.

“An important message from the Kavanaugh confirmation is that the sham process that the Republicans used to minimize transparency and curtail investigations and to do all they could to hide his record, that cannot become normalized,” said Daniel Goldberg, legal director of the Alliance for Justice and former chief of staff at the Department of Justice’s Office of Legislative Affairs under President Barack Obama. “I have not seen progressives galvanized around the issue of the courts like I have in recent years.”

Then-Judge Brett Kavanaugh during his tempestuous Senate confirmation. | Jim Bourg/Getty Images

The Times came under intense scrutiny for its Kavanaugh story, which ran as an excerpt in the book review section, because it left out a crucial detail that the woman who was allegedly harassed by Kavanaugh at a drunken Yale party has told friends she does not remember the incident, and she declined to be interviewed by Times reporters.

The newspaper also put out an insensitive tweet, since deleted, promoting the Sunday story. Both liberal and conservative activists criticized it because they said it trivialized sexual assault, misconduct and victims with its breezy tone.

Since the article’s publication, Trump has kept bringing it up in public.

Majority Leader Mitch McConnell took to the Senate floor on Tuesday to call it a “one-year anniversary reenactment” of the Kavanaugh battle and a pattern, he said, of the media and Democrats overreacting. “Shoot first and correct the facts later,” McConnell said.

Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) highlighted what she saw as liberals’ efforts to undermine the Supreme Court. “Politicians, journalists, activists are leveraging unfounded criminal allegations against a duly confirmed Supreme Court justice. I repeat that. They are leveraging unfounded criminal allegations against a duly confirmed Supreme Court justice in an effort to undermine not only his work, but ultimately the entire court as an institution,” she said Tuesday on the Senate floor.

McConnell’s campaign team also unveiled a new red bumper sticker this week: “I stand with Kavanaugh, Team Mitch.” It highlights that McConnell, too, intends to lean on this as a key 2020 campaign issue.

Conservatives have been in overdrive trying to elevate boogeymen out of the Times’ Kavanaugh piece. They’ve used the publication’s snafus as an opportunity to bash and try to weaken the integrity of the institution, which has published a raft of critical coverage of the Trump administration.

Just as Trump continues to view the courts as a key campaign message and part of his legacy, liberals say their base is also becoming equally riled up about judicial picks.

“Progressives across the country are seeing what the stakes are now — with the assaults on our health care, assaults on women’s rights, protections for clean air and water, and whether LBGT have rights under the law,” said Goldberg of the Alliance for Justice. “I think the American people are seeing the stakes of what the courts mean. That is how the Kavanaugh confirmation fight really hit home to many Americans.”