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in the Cruz movement,’’ she wrote. ‘‘We were
devastated at how he treated Ted’’ (Trump had
lobbed insults and insinuations at Cruz’s wife
and father), adding that it ‘‘does not bode well
for a President worthy to lead this nation.’’
But like many others on the right who opposed
Trump’s candidacy, she would become a believ-
er. Thomas and her colleagues at the Council
for National Policy had for years pushed for the
appointment of ‘‘constitutionalist’’ judges in her
husband’s image, with some even advocating the
impeachment of judges who did not meet that
defi nition. Few things were more important to
the conservative base than reshaping the close-
ly divided Supreme Court, and Trump did not
disappoint. First he replaced Scalia with another
conservative, Neil Gorsuch. Then, in July 2018,
Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh, a judge on
the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia
Circuit, to succeed Justice Anthony M. Kenne-
dy, the court’s swing vote, who was retiring. The
court’s balance of power was poised to shift. It
was the moment both Thomases had awaited.
The Kavanaugh nomination, however, was soon
imperiled amid unexpected sexual assault and
harassment allegations reminiscent of Thomas’s
own confi rmation hearings. With the nomination
in the balance, Ginni Thomas addressed the Coun-
cil for National Policy’s membership, mentioning
her husband no less than four times. Before intro-
ducing an off - the- record session at a council con-
ference in October 2018, Jerry Johnson, a member
of the executive committee, reminded attendees
to turn their cellphones off and ‘‘do not record.’’
(A video of the event later surfaced.)
Ginni Thomas invoked the shooting of Rep-
resentative Steve Scalise at a charity baseball
practice and the Kavanaugh nomination fi ght
to make a larger claim that conservatives were
under attack. ‘‘May we all have guns and con-
cealed carry to handle what’s coming,’’ she said.
‘‘And what they’ve done to Brett Kavanaugh,’’
she continued, ‘‘I’m feeling the pain, Clarence is
feeling the pain of going through false charges
against a good man, and what they’re doing is
unbelievable. I thought it couldn’t get worse than
Clarence’s, but it did.’’
Her anger building, she told the audience that
there were signs all around them of existential
threats. ‘‘You see rainbow fl ags throughout busi-
nesses, sending powerful, subtle messages to all
the customers that ‘We’re the kind, decent, com-
passionate, tolerant people, until the Republican
evil conservatives show up, and those are all auto-
matically hateful people,’ ’’ she said. ‘‘I see things
in my veterinarian: ‘Spread Kindness,’ ‘Build
Community,’ ‘Hate Is Not Welcome Here,’ ’’ she
continued. ‘‘Look how defensive we are, because
they have these cultural foundations.’’ Returning
to the battle at hand, the Kavanaugh fi ght, she
said, ‘‘Even if he gets in — I believe he’ll get in, I’m
hoping he gets in, but they’re not going to leave
him alone.’’ It was clear it was personal: ‘‘They’re
trying to impeach him. They’re coming for my
husband. They’re coming for President Trump!’’The invitation went out in the weeks following
Kavanaugh’s confi rmation. Would Justice Thom-
as care to join the president for what one for-
mer Trump aide described as a ‘‘working lunch’’?
Kavanaugh’s elevation had created an opening on
the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia
Circuit, considered a prime steppingstone to the
Supreme Court. The top contender for the post,
Neomi Rao, then serving as the administrator
of the White House Offi ce of Information and
Regulatory Aff airs, had been a Thomas clerk.
Trump had long been intrigued by Justice
Thomas. During the transition, in a meeting
to discuss the court with Leonard Leo, he
expressed an interest in learning more about the
justice. ‘‘At one point during the conversation,
he said to me, ‘You know, when I was out on the
campaign trail, you know, when I mentioned
Clarence Thomas, his name, sometimes the
guy would get more applause than I did,’ ’’ Leo
recalled. ‘‘ ‘What was that all about?’ And I said,
‘Well, you know, he’s a hero to a lot of people.’ ’’
A courting of Thomas followed, prompted as
well by rumors that he might retire. His roster
of former clerks became a go-to list for Trump
judicial picks. (‘‘You did appoint a lot of my
kids,’’ the justice would later thank McGahn,
Trump’s fi rst White House counsel, in his Heri-
tage speech.) Early on, there was also a photo- op
with Thomas and his clerks, who went to the
White House. And later, there was an invitation
for the justice, along with his wife, to join the
president and fi rst lady for dinner.
The lunch following the Kavanaugh battle,
however, was supposed to be a private aff air
between the justice and the president. But when
Thomas arrived, Trump aides said, they were
surprised to see that he had brought an uninvit-
ed guest — his wife. Trump world was learning,
as others have, that the two are a package deal.
The accounts of the Thomases’ meetings
and conversations with the White House are
based on interviews with nine former Trump
aides and advisers, most of whom requested
anonymity in order to speak frankly about how
the courtship of Thomas created an opening for
his wife. (One said he didn’t want ‘‘the Ginni
prayer warriors coming after me.’’) Several
said they were never clear as to whether she
was there as an activist or a paid consultant.
They recounted how she aggressively pushed
far-right candidates for various administration
jobs and positioned herself as a voice of Trump’s
grass-roots base. ‘‘Here’s what the peeps think,’’
she would say, according to one of the aides.
‘‘We have to listen to the peeps.’’
Shortly after the lunch meeting with her hus-
band, she got a meeting of her own with the
president, at her request, arriving in the Roo-
sevelt Room on Jan. 25, 2019, with a delegationthat included members of Ground swell in tow.
‘‘It was the craziest meeting I’ve ever been to,’’
said a Trump aide who attended. ‘‘She started by
leading the prayer.’’ When others began speaking,
the aide remembers talk of ‘‘the trans sexual agen-
da’’ and parents ‘‘chopping off their children’s
breasts.’’ He said the president ‘‘tried to rein it in
— it was hard to hear though,’’ because through-
out the meeting attendees were audibly praying.
It was an event with no precedent, and some
of the details of what transpired soon leaked: the
wife of a sitting Supreme Court justice lobbying
a president when several cases involving trans-
gender rights were making their way through
the federal courts. (The following year, Justice
Thomas would join a dissent that asserted that
the Civil Rights Act did not cover people on the
basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.)
The meeting grew chaotic. Ginni Thomas and
other attendees complained to the president
that their favored hard-line job candidates were
being blocked and that his own personnel offi ce
should be purged, depicting some of his aides
as closet liberals and Never Trumpers.
Before the meeting, Trump’s aides assembled
the research document outlining concerns with
Ginni Thomas and some of her preferred job
candidates, the contents of which they shared
with the president.
The document, obtained by The Times,
detailed how Crystal Clanton, a friend of Ginni
Thomas’s whose name had been advanced, had
been forced out from Turning Point USA, a con-
servative student group on whose advisory board
Ginni Thomas once served, after The New Yorker
reported that she wrote in a text: ‘‘I HATE BLACK
PEOPLE. Like [expletive] them all. ... I hate
blacks. End of story.’’ (Ginni Thomas subsequent-
ly hired Clanton, and Justice Thomas, who has
called the allegations against Clanton unfounded,
helped her get a federal clerkship and wrote in
a letter of support that he would consider her
for a Supreme Court clerkship.) Other names
advanced by Ginni Thomas included Bongino,
whom she recommended for a counter terrorism
position, and David A. Clarke, a Black former Mil-
waukee County sheriff whose oversight of a local
jail was the subject of multiple investigations and
lawsuits, whom she supported for a top post at
the Department of Homeland Security.
The report reminded the president that
Ginni Thomas had once called him ‘‘a non-
conservative candidate’’ whose populism was
‘‘untethered and dangerous’’ and whose tactics
did ‘‘not bode well for a President worthy to
lead this nation.’’ It even included a photo of her
at the 2016 Republican National Convention,
where she supported the eff ort to strip Trump
of his delegates, holding her delegate badge,
which was decorated with a yellow ribbon
emblazoned with the words ‘‘trouble maker.’’
‘‘In the White House, she was out of bounds
many times,’’ one of Trump’s senior aides said.