Who got the last word – Trump or Ruth Bader Ginsburg? I’ll let you decide

The president found out about the justice’s death after speaking at a campaign rally in Minnesota which John T Bennett and his reporters were covering for The Independent

A portrait of Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the Great Hall following a private ceremony for her at the US Supreme Court (Getty)

Donald Trump and Ruth Bader Ginsburg had a feud of words. It would not have been the late Supreme Court justice’s style to have a full-blown war of words with a sitting president of the United States.

After Utah Republican senator Mitt Romney announced on Tuesday that he supports considering and voting on the conservative nominee to replace her that Trump is set to announce on Saturday, barring a major development, it is almost a certainty that the president will get the last word.

But, make no mistake, RBG got one final jab at a president she once called “a faker”.

“He has no consistency about him,” she said in July 2016, four months before Trump would defeat the wife (Hillary Clinton) of the president who nominated her to the high court (Bill Clinton). “He says whatever comes into his head at the moment. He really has an ego.”

Trump fired back at that time, tweeting this: “Justice Ginsburg of the US Supreme Court has embarrassed all by making very dumb political statements about me. Her mind is shot – resign!”

So it felt fitting that she seemed to know just when to let go, when she could slip into whatever might be waiting for our souls when our time – sentence? – on this stressful, strange and sometimes amazing world expires.

The high court announced her death around 7.30pm on Friday evening. There was a certain poetry in the split screen on the cable news networks with which the president is so enchanted. One side featured various images of Ginsburg in her black justice’s robe in the stately Supreme Court building in Washington. The other featured Trump gesticulating wildly while wearing a winter coat at a campaign rally in 60-degree weather surrounded by his mostly unmasked and not-at-all-socially distanced supporters.

Moments before the court’s announcement, the president of the United States was kicking his largely fear-based campaign for a second term into high gear. “Your state will be overrun and destroyed if Biden and the radical left win,” the president said at the start of a rally in Bemidji, Minnesota, a community with a large Somali population. “One of the most vital issues in this election is the subject of refugees – you know it, you know it perhaps better than almost anybody,” he told the crowd of white faces at an airport there. “Good luck, Minnesota. You having a good time with your refugees?”

Your correspondent had just published an article on the president’s baseless and race-baiting claims. The next hours and a half were all about Ginsburg’s death, what it means for the US presidential election, then crafting an obituary I hope does her life – which even Trump later called “amazing” – some justice. Trump was still ranting and raving in Minnesota, with no sign his staff had even tried to alert him of the death of such a big presence in US political life.

It was over an hour later, just before 9pm, when your correspondent curiously tuned his television from one cable network that had long since ditched the rally to reminisce about Ginsburg’s death. It was dark by then in Bemidji. But the president was still behind the blue lectern and his loyalists were loving his act.

“Your football team is going to win in the Big Ten they say, right? No, we’re going to keep on winning in Minnesota and you’re going to get so tired. You’re going to say, ‘Jason, Jason, please, Jason, go to the president, see him in the Oval Office, stop him from winning. We’re winning too much in Minnesota. We can’t stand it, Jason. Please, please, Jason, stop him from winning so much for Minnesota. We can’t take it’,” an animated Trump said, referring to Congressman Jason Lewis, seeking a US Senate seat in November.

“And I’m going to look at Jason, I’m going to say, ‘No, Jason, I’m sorry. The people of Minnesota want to win. You’re wrong, Jason. They want to win’,” the president said. Back on the other network, friends and colleagues of Ginsburg were recalling how she fought gender discrimination, first in her own career, then on behalf of millions of Americans.

RBG won Friday night. Don’t think so? The look on the president’s face, after his putting on his usual carnival barker act for over an hour, looked like a deer in the proverbial headlights when reporters – not his staff – told him of her passing. Your correspondent, who has covered every second of Trump’s term, saw something new: a shred of what looked like embarrassment.

Yours,

John T Bennett

Washington DC bureau head