The New York Times Magazine 49Now her new group, Ground swell, took
shape, coupling a theatrical cloak- and- dagger
sensibility with an inability to keep secrets.
Early participants drew from a number of hard-
line interest groups, including Frank Gaff ney
of the Center for Security Policy, Tom Fitton of
Judicial Watch and Ken Blackwell of the Family
Research Council, as well as Leonard Leo and
Allen West, an outspoken former Florida con-
gressman, and a number of right-wing journal-
ists, including Mark Tapscott, then the executive
editor of The Washington Examiner. A trove of
internal emails was promptly leaked to Mother
Jones magazine, highlighting the group’s use of
tactical terms like ‘‘OpSec’’ (‘‘operations secu-
rity’’) and its hatred of establishment Republi-
can fi gures, in particular Karl Rove, whom they
reviled as a moderating infl uence on the party.
Ginni Thomas oversaw the group’s plan for
its ‘‘30-front war’’ as Ground swell became a
platform for far-right leaders, donors and media
fi gures — the people Bannon called the ‘‘honey
badgers’’ of the movement — to exchange and
amplify hard-line positions on immigration,
abortion and gun control. It was, as Bannon put
it, ‘‘all the stuff that became the foundational
stuff of the Trump movement.’’
Voting was an early focus. Among the
early Ground swell participants was Russell J.
Ramsland Jr., an infl uential Texas- based backer
of evidence- free voting- fraud claims who would
make a failed congressional run. So was James
O’Keefe, the founder of Project Veritas, a right-
wing group that has used deception and hidden
cameras to try to buttress claims of voter fraud.
Another participant was Catherine Englebrecht,
a Texas activist who in 2009 founded True the
Vote, a group that says it is battling ‘‘groups who
subvert our elections to serve their own pur-
poses’’ and has pushed for voting restrictions.
The activists were particularly infl amed after
Obama signed an executive order on March 28,
2013, that created a commission to study elec-
tions. ‘‘OBAMA TAKES TOTAL CONTROL OF
ELECTIONS,’’ one Ground swell member wrote
in an email to the group. Englebrecht warned
in response that the commission, which had no
authority beyond writing a report and making
recommendations, ‘‘has the capacity to wipe
out fair elections.’’
Bongino, another Ground swell member,
wrote: ‘‘We need to reframe this. The narra-
tive of the Left has already taken hold.’’ He
added, ‘‘The words ‘Voter ID’ are already lost
& equated with racism.’’ Thomas weighed in,
listing key House staff members working on
elections matters, and asked, ‘‘Who else are
key working group members on ELECTION
LAW, ELECTION REFORM and THE LEFT’S
NARRATIVES, Ground swell???’’
Three months after the email exchange, Jus-
tice Thomas provided a critical vote in the court’s
5-to-4 Shelby County v. Holder decision, which
eff ectively stripped the Voting Rights Act of lan-
guage that protected voters in places that had
historically disenfranchised them on the basis
of race. The act had required states and coun-
ties with a history of discriminatory practices,
mostly in the South, to get federal pre clearance
of such measures. The case was led in part by one
of Thomas’s own former clerks, William Conso-
voy, whose arguments echoed the justice’s views.
In fact, Thomas had advanced the argument for
Shelby four years earlier, when he raised concerns
about the constitutionality of pre clearance in a
case from Texas, arguing that there was no lon-
ger ‘‘a systematic campaign to deny black citizens
access to the ballot through intimidation and vio-
lence.’’ Four years later, in his concurring opinion
in Shelby, he wrote, ‘‘Our Nation has changed.’’
The ruling was cheered on the right, with
The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board calling
it ‘‘a triumph of racial progress.’’ Civil rights
groups were dismayed. ‘‘The Shelby decision
is one of the biggest aff ronts to our democracy
in modern history,’’ said Janai Nelson, associate
director of the NAACP Legal Defense and Edu-
cational Fund, arguing that it ‘‘unleashed a wave
of voter suppression that is like what we wit-
nessed in the Jim Crow era.’’ The decision freed
states to enact restrictive laws, she added, that
were ‘‘often based on mythical justifi cations’’ of
supposed voter fraud and ‘‘by no coincidence
disenfranchise minority voters at alarmingly
disproportionate rates.’’
That same year, Ginni Thomas turned her
attention to internal battles on the right. In
2013, the Republican National Committee came
out with a report after Romney’s loss that was
known as the ‘‘autopsy’’ of the party’s failures.
But its prescriptions — to broaden the base and
appeal to minorities and gay people — were
roundly rejected by Ginni Thomas and Bannon.
‘‘It’s a joke, and it has nothing to do with what
happened,’’ Bannon said in an interview, recall-
ing how he reacted to the report. ‘‘We have to
have something to counter it.’’
Ground swell, in a message circulated among
its members after the autopsy, said that ‘‘Priebus
is sending messages to the party,’’ referring to
Reince Priebus, the R.N.C. chairman at the time.
It continued: ‘‘If we were all gay illegal aliens,
the party likes us. He is preparing the way for
a change on social issues by giving a warning,
‘don’t go Old Testament.’ ’’
The Thomases faced other headwinds. In addi-
tion to Ground swell, Ginni Thomas had started
her own small fi rm, Liberty Consulting, but was
often relegated to symbolic gestures, as when
she wrote to the I.R.S. in 2014 protesting that
the Obama administration was ‘‘attempting to
force the disclosure of donors to conservative
organizations,’’ amid criticism from the right
that the agency was singling out conservative
groups for scrutiny. Justice Thomas, meanwhile,
wrote vigorous dissents from what seemed tobe a narrowing conservative position; in 2015,
he was the only justice to back Abercrombie &
Fitch’s dress code, which prevented the hiring
of a woman who wore a head scarf. (He said the
store was not intentionally discriminating but
simply refusing ‘‘to create an exception.’’)
For their 28th wedding anniversary in May
2015, Justice Thomas bought his wife a charm
bracelet. It had knots and ropes and a pixie,
because, as she later recounted, he thinks of her
as a pixieish troublemaker. But there was another
charm too. ‘‘I said: ‘Wait, there’s a windmill here.
What’s that mean?’ ’’ She was, after all, a former
attorney for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a
bastion of Big Oil, and has fumed aloud that kids
are being turned into ‘‘robots for climate change.’’
But her husband had an explanation, she said:
‘‘He goes, ‘We both tilt at windmills.’ ’’The death of Antonin Scalia in February 2016
left a void on the court and for Justice Thomas.
He delivered an emotional eulogy for his friend,
a longtime ideological ally, even if Scalia had
once referred to his own brand of originalism as
‘‘fainthearted.’’ ‘‘For this, I feel quite inadequate
to the task,’’ Thomas said, adding that the two
had ‘‘many buck- each- other- up visits, too many
to count.’’ He recounted gleefully chiding Sca-
lia for excoriating an opinion he came across:
‘‘Nino, you wrote it.’’ For years, Thomas was
overshadowed by his more voluble colleague,
but a reconsideration followed. ‘‘For the fi rst
year or two, Justice Thomas was seen as Justice
Scalia’s lap dog by some, which was wildly den-
igrating,’’ said John Malcolm, vice president of
the Heritage Foundation’s Institute for Consti-
tutional Government. ‘‘Now, in books and notes
that have been released, it seems that Justice
Scalia was just as infl uenced by Justice Thomas
as Justice Thomas was by Justice Scalia.’’
Thomas has warm relationships with many
of his court colleagues; he called Ruth Bader
Ginsburg ‘‘simply a joy to work with’’ and was
often seen helping her navigate the courtroom’s
steps. But after Scalia’s death, it seemed as if he
might become even more ideologically isolated.
Mitch McConnell made it clear that Scalia’s suc-
cessor would be left to the next president, even
though nearly a year remained in the Obama
administration. But with Hillary Clinton leading
in the polls, it seemed that the court could soon
see its ‘‘fi rst liberal majority in nearly 50 years,’’
USA Today wrote in October 2016.
Ginni Thomas attended the Republican
National Convention as a Virginia delegate,
this time on behalf of Senator Ted Cruz. There,
she backed a convention- fl oor eff ort to over-
turn the will of Republican primary voters by
awarding Trump’s delegates to Cruz. After the
plot failed, Thomas expressed her disapproval
of the party’s nominee in Facebook posts later
compiled by Trump aides. ‘‘Donald Trump will
have to WIN my vote, along with many others