In the summer of 2016, shortly after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, Trump vowed at the Republican National Convention to fill his seat on the Supreme Court with “a person of similar views, principles and judicial philosophies.” After the election, Trump even went so far as to credit his victory in part to promising to nominate a successor “very much in the mold of Justice Scalia,” a pledge that endeared him to a GOP base opposed to abortion rights and same-sex marriage.
Now, in a book written by one of Scalia’s long-time friends, Bryan Garner, it seems as though Scalia may have also been a secret Trump supporter. In the book set to drop tomorrow, entitled “Nino and Me”, Garner says that Scalia respected Trump’s “unfiltered and utterly frank” language and found it to be a refreshing alternative to the “airbrushed” rhetoric of seasoned politicians. Per the Wall Street Journal:
“Justice Scalia thought it was most refreshing to have a candidate who was pretty much unfiltered and utterly frank,” said the late jurist’s literary collaborator, Bryan Garner, a legal dictionary editor who spent two weeks in 2016 traveling with Justice Scalia through several Asian countries.
The justice thought well of Scott Walker, the Wisconsin governor whose campaign for the Republican nomination stalled, said Mr. Garner, whose memoir of a decadelong friendship, “Nino and Me,” comes out Tuesday. “But he was fascinated by the fact that Trump was so outspoken in an unfiltered way, and therefore we were seeing something a little more genuine than a candidate whose every utterance is airbrushed,” Mr. Garner said in an interview.
Of course, as we pointed out nearly two years ago now, Justice Scalia died under somewhat mysterious circumstances. While his death was originally attributed to “natural causes” after he allegedly died in his sleep at a luxurious hunting lodge in West Texas…
A federal official who asked not to be named said there was no evidence of foul play and it appeared that Scalia died of natural causes.
According to CNN, Scalia died in his sleep. A government official said Scalia went to bed Friday night and told friends he wasn’t feeling well. Saturday morning, he didn’t get up for breakfast. And the group he was with for a hunting trip left without him.
Someone at the ranch went in to check on him and found him unresponsive.
…the story turned somewhat more mysterious when John Poindexter, the owner of the 30,000-acre luxury ranch where Scalia died, reportedly told the San Antonio Express that Scalia was found dead in his bed with a “pillow over his head” and his “bed clothes unwrinkled”…
“We discovered the judge in bed, a pillow over his head. His bed clothes were unwrinkled,” said Poindexter.
“He was lying very restfully. It looked like he had not quite awakened from a nap,” he said.
Scalia,79, did not have a pulse and his body was cold, and after consulting with a doctor at a hospital in Alpine, Poindexter concluded resuscitation would have been futile, He then contacted federal authorities, at first encountering a series of answering services because he was calling on a weekend.
Adding further to the questions surrounding the death, no autopsy was performed on Scalia.
Scalia’s death marked only the second time in sixty years that a justice died before retiring from the Court.
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