Media Mention

George Conway on Trump’s attack on SCOTUS justices

March 1, 2020

Note: this piece was originally published in the Washington Post, and was written by Checks & Balances member George Conway. 

President Trump is treating the judiciary the way he treats the media. But the harm created by these attacks could be far greater.

In 2016, CBS “60 Minutes” correspondent Lesley Stahl asked Trump off camera why he persisted in going after journalists. In one of those sporadic moments in which he reveals the raw truth, Trump replied, according to Stahl, “I do it to discredit you all and demean you all, so when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you.”

That’s just what Trump did the other day, and what he has been doing for some time, with judges. We all remember Judge Gonzalo P. Curiel, the federal district judge in San Diego who handled the case against the president’s now-defunct Trump University. Trump derided the Indiana-born Curiel as having an “absolute conflict” because he was “Mexican” (and thus “a hater of Donald Trump”). More recently, Trump went after Judge Amy Berman Jackson, who presided over the trial of felonious presidential friend Roger Stone. Trump claimed she was biased because she supposedly put another of his criminal associates, former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, in solitary confinement. (She didn’t.)

Continue reading at The Washington Post.