You Will Never Guess Which Supreme Court Justice Trump Loves Most (It’s Clarence Thomas)
At last, Ginni Thomas makes her triumphant return to the White House.
The Supreme Court is in the midst of a month-long break from oral argument, but its eldest, horniest justice has found ways to stay busy: As reported by Joan Biskupic and Jeff Zeleny at CNN, to date, four of Trump’s 13 confirmed Cabinet officials have had the privilege of getting sworn in by Justice Clarence Thomas. Secretary of Veterans Affairs Doug Collins and Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy did so at the Supreme Court, while the ceremonies for Attorney General Pam Bondi and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner took place at the White House. Luckiest of all was Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who got to swear her oath to uphold the Constitution in front of the stairs at Clarence Thomas’s house.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh, too, has been pressed into service at least twice, for Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin. But for the most part, vice presidents administer the oaths to Cabinet members, which makes the selection of Thomas to do the honors for almost a third of the nominees confirmed to date a little unusual. A White House official told CNN that Trump had “specifically requested” Thomas for the swearing-in ceremonies he performed; it is not clear whether Thomas was merely unavailable for Bessent and Zeldin’s big days, or whether Trump did not think them worthy of the full conservative legal movement superstar treatment.
In his remarks at the Bondi event, Trump took a moment to praise Thomas, whom he described as “very popular and respected,” and Thomas’s wife Ginni, who was also in attendance, as “incredible” and “highly-respected.” The brief pleasantries exchanged sounded considerably less awkward they were at Ginni’s visit to the White House back in 2019, during which she and other conservative activists, according to the New York Times, spent upwards of an hour trying to persuade Trump of things like “women should not serve in the military because they had less muscle mass and lung capacity than men.”
At the time, Trump was reportedly “taken aback” by the gaggle of unblinking creeps who had managed to worm their way into the White House Roosevelt Room and broke out in prayer at random intervals. It seems, however, that Ginni has managed to return to Trump’s good graces. Perhaps her enthusiasm for the effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election, which culminated in her sending the White House chief of staff a link to a YouTube video titled “TRUMP STING w CIA Director Steve Pieczenik, The Biggest Election Story in History, QFS-BLOCKCHAIN,” had something to do with it.
In the scheme of things, I do not especially care which famous Republican judge swears in which Fox News burnout to a job that, if the first Trump administration is any indication, they are decently likely to quit or get fired from in the not-so-distant future. But at the very least, as Trump begins his second term in the White House while Republicans enjoy a 53-person Senate majority and Vice President JD Vance’s tiebreaking vote, Trump appears to have decided on his favorite Supreme Court justice of all. The fact that his pick is the Court’s oldest, longest-tenured, furthest-right member whose strategic retirement would ensure that his seat remains in Republicans hands for decades to come is probably just a coincidence.
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