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President Donald Trump said he had no knowledge of his supporters piling on Justice Amy Coney Barrett in recent days, after she ruled alongside the Supreme Court’s majority to reject the Trump administration’s freeze on foreign aid funding.
“She’s a very good woman,” Trump told reporters Sunday. “She’s very smart, and I don’t know about people attacking her; I really don’t know.”
Barrett, a conservative who was elevated to the high court near the end of Trump’s first term after the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, has become an unlikely target of MAGA supporters over some of her court decisions. As I wrote last week, after the court’s ruling on payments to U.S. Agency for International Development contractors, prominent far-right activists singled out Barrett, calling her a “DEI” hire and combing through her brief interaction with Trump at his joint address to Congress to try to find evidence of her supposed disdain for the president. Chief Justice John Roberts, another conservative who joined the 5-4 majority in that ruling, did not face the same kind of criticism.
Barrett has given no indication that she holds any sort of vendetta against Trump. She reliably sides with her conservative colleagues most of the time, though among the court’s GOP-appointed 6-3 majority, she voted with her liberal colleagues the most in the last term, according to The New York Times.
Trump’s loudest supporters, however, have taken her rulings as a sign that she is neither aligned with Trump nor loyal to him — neither of which is a prerequisite for the job.