Kavanaugh’s confirmation and the arrival of The Squad

In the ninth instalment of our series recapping an unprecedented presidency, Joe Sommerlad looks at an angry Senate, a bogus immigration scare and a blue wave

Shaking things up: (from left) congresswomen Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, also known as ‘The Squad’ (Getty)

The retirement of US Supreme Court justice Anthony Kennedy gave Donald Trump the chance to nominate his second conservative to the highest court in the land and he did so on 9 July 2018, tipping the nod to appellate court judge Brett Kavanaugh.

The Senate Judiciary Committee held his confirmation hearings from 4 to 7 September and scheduled a vote on his candidacy for the 20th.

But, on the 12th, Senate Democrats announced they had received an accusation of sexual assault against Kavanaugh, leaving the Republican-led committee with no choice but to delay and hear testimony from the complainant.

Despite Trump’s refusal to withdraw his candidate’s nomination and attempt to discredit the allegation via tweet, California psychology professor Christine Blasey Ford bravely came forward before the panel on 27 September to allege Kavanaugh had drunkenly assaulted her at a high school party in Maryland in the summer of 1982.

A fierce debate ensued, in which panel chairman Lindsey Graham won the president’s affection with a staunch defence of Kavanaugh, before the justice was finally confirmed on 6 October in a close partisan vote of 50-48.

Trump himself has been accused of no fewer than 26 incidents of “unwanted sexual contact” and 43 instances of inappropriate behaviour towards women to date, heaping added significance on the Kavanaugh case, which came a year on from the fall of movie mogul Harvey Weinstein and the rise of the #MeToo movement.

If the president enjoyed notching up another long-term victory for conservatives, the smile was quickly wiped off his face when Stormy Daniels appeared as a guest on Jimmy Kimmel’s chat show that October to discuss her new memoir Full Disclosure, dwelling on an extract in which she recalled Trump’s “smaller than average” penis resembling “the mushroom character in Mario Kart”.

As millions reeled in disgust from that image and considered burning their Nintendos, focus turned to news of the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul and to November’s midterm elections.

Keen to avoid having to challenge Saudi Arabia over the killing (or resolve the ongoing problem of healthcare funding) and seeing national security as a winning issue for Republican candidates, Trump instead hosted an excitable and Maga-capped Kanye West at the White House to talk hydrogen-powered planes and ramped up his rhetoric about the threat posed to the US by illegal immigration.

The president had needlessly dispatched 2,100 members of the National Guard to the southern border in April as a posturing show of force and now sent a further 5,200 troops as reinforcements to meet a “migrant caravan” of Central American refugees wending its way slowly across Mexico in search of a better future in America.

The group, numbering 7,000 at its height, was making the perilous journey on foot from San Pedro Sula in Honduras to a checkpoint in McAllen, Texas, and laying itself at the mercy of drug cartels, human traffickers and corrupt officials en route through Guatemala and Mexico.

“Criminals and unknown Middle Easterners are mixed in,” Trump insisted on Twitter on 22 October, offering no evidence for the improbable claim and telling the press corps when challenged on it: “There’s no proof of anything. There’s no proof of anything. But they could very well be.”

“Many Gang Members and some very bad people” were also disguised among its ranks, he tweeted a week later, returning to the theme as Fox News picked up his pre-midterm scare story, aiding and abetting the lie.

The Independent’s own Andrew Buncombe, reporting from Pijijiapan, Mexico, characterised the caravan rather differently, saying it consisted of “Families pushing toddlers in strollers. A group of skinny young men who say there are no jobs in their country. A young woman from Guatemala being helped by medics by the roadside, her ankle twisted and swollen after six days of walking.”

Trump and the right-wing media nevertheless continued to stoke conservative fears right up until election day on 6 November, after which both the president and his allies at Fox immediately dropped the subject and never mentioned it again.

Gratifyingly, the results themselves were a disaster for Republicans anyway, with a blue wave washing over them and delivering the House of Representatives back into Democratic hands.

This presented Trump with a fresh cast of enemies on Capitol Hill, notably veteran California congresswoman Nancy Pelosi as the new House speaker and four young progressive women of colour who would come to be known collectively as “The Squad”.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC to you), Ayanna Pressley and the lower chamber’s first Muslim represenatives Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib each scored stunning victories in their respective races and would together challenge not just Trump but the ageing, safe, centrist wing of their own party represented by Pelosi and Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, a man who considers it daring to treat himself to New York cheesecake.

Trump found further enemies like CNN reporter Jim Acosta, whose press pass was revoked after he refused to hand over a microphone to a White House intern and was then falsely accused of shoving her away when a manipulated video of the incident was circulated.

Another was Justin Trudeau, who again fell foul of Trump on 3 December when they attended a Nato gathering in London, after which a clip went viral of Trudeau, Boris Johnson, Emmanuel Macron, Mark Rutte of the Netherlands and Princess Anne gossiping at Buckingham Palace and ridiculing the president’s long-winded press conferences.

Fuming, Trump singled out the Canadian prime minister as the ring-leader, called him “two-faced” and left the Watford summit early in a huff.

Read the full The Trump Review series here