The Elephant in the Room

The most powerful Republican in the country wasn't on the debate stage last week...and he wasn't with Tucker, either. He sits on the Supreme Court, and his wife is named Ginni.

The first Republican presidential debate of the 2024 campaign was held in Milwaukee last week. Ho-hum candidates like Mike Pence and Nikki Haley attempted to present as Republicans in the traditional mode, while the media bent over backwards to pretend that this was a traditional Republican debate in advance of a traditional election—a “return to normalcy,” to quote the traditional Republican Warren G. Harding, whose reassuring but hapless presence in the face of rampant corruption Pence, Haley & Co. are trying desperately to channel. The word DEMOCRACY hung prominently above the dais, as if to counteract the ugly reality that the GOP is the party that wants to make it harder for Americans, and non-white Americans especially, to vote.

The whole spectacle was an exercise in magical thinking.

The elephant in the room (to continue our Republican motif) was not even in the room. He was holed up at Bedminster, preparing his imminent surrender to the Fulton County sheriff’s office—although he made it seem like he was in a studio with Tucker Carlson. (That interview, broadcast on the social media site formerly known as Twitter, was recorded the previous weekend, before Carlson flew to Central Europe to spend a week fluffing his favorite dictators.)

The moderators, to their credit, did ask if the candidates would support Trump if he were the nominee (although not much mention was made of FPOTUS’s four indictments or his imminent surrender). Everyone but Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson raised a hand—including Haley, who resigned from Trump’s cabinet the day after Jamal Khashoggi was murdered, and Mike Pence, who [checks notes] Trump tried to have killed. “Sure, he tried to whack me and my family, but I signed a pledge.”

In the long run—heck, even in the short run—none of that matters. FPOTUS is still the commanding GOP frontrunner, polling at the same 58 percent after the debate and after the circulation of his sneering, trying-too-hard-to-look-hard mugshot that he was previously. The “winner” in Milwaukee, meanwhile—if we can apply that term to this gaggle of losers—was the candidate who best channeled the hate-fueled outrageousness of Donald Trump: Vivek Ramaswamy, the runtish, Putin-loving fascist apparently shat out by über-libertarian weirdo Peter Thiel. So much for traditional Republicans!

But here’s the twist. For all his power over the GOP electorate, and therefore the Party entire, Donald Trump doesn’t occupy the top spot on the Republican power rankings. Presidents, after all, have term limits. Supreme Court Justices, like Soviet bureaucrats of old, serve until they die.

“The most powerful Republican in the country is Clarence Thomas, because he is forever,” the former GOP Congressman Denver Riggleman told me on Friday’s PREVAIL podcast. “He’s younger than Trump. He’s going to be on the Supreme Court, more or less, way after Trump’s dead.” This had not occurred to me before, but Riggleman is spot on.

Clarence Thomas is not a vocal leader. We don’t see him out on the stump. Hell, we didn’t hear a peep out of the guy for years on the Court. He just sat there in his ridiculous black robe, glowering, and agreeing with everything Antonin Scalia said. Behind the scenes, though? He makes his presence felt. And the party is drifting in the direction Thomas wants it to, which is to say: backwards.

Despite his retrograde thinking and jurisprudential mediocrity, Thomas has his superfans. Leonard Leo loves him. So does Mark Paoletta. And Harlan Crow is not the only rightwing billionaire to lavish him with gifts.

For a long time, the relationship between Thomas and his ultra-high-net-worth chum puzzled me. Was it a simple case of Crow buying himself a Supreme Court Justice, like he buys old statues of Iron Curtain figures and Nazi dinnerware? Or was Thomas rinsing him, like Holly Golightly did her mobster benefactors?

I’ve come to realize that this is the wrong way of looking at it. Clarence Thomas isn’t Holly Golightly. Clarence Thomas is Audrey Hepburn. He’s a movie star—one of the very few humans who can reliably put fannies in the seats. Harlan Crow and his ilk are the studio heads. They have more money, sure, but so what? Money can’t buy Thomas’s star quality. Stars have gravity. Stars are orbited around. That’s why they fawn over him and give him whatever he desires. Anyone with cash to spare can underwrite a motion picture. But without Clarence Thomas, the movie doesn’t get made.

The question then becomes: what does Clarence Thomas want? His extreme conservative leanings can be gleaned by his tenure at SCOTUS, which Moscow Never Sleeps beautifully described on PREVAIL three years ago:

Clarence Thomas has been on the court for [32] years. In that time he has performed three judicial functions: First, he is a reliable conservative vote who has rarely if ever swung to join a liberal foursome. Second, he has avoided anything remotely resembling original and persuasive legal writing that might ever be used by anyone in lower courts as precedent in any gray area of Constitutional law. And third, once he had confirmed his title as the dumbest reactionary on the Court in the Twentieth Century, he graciously stepped aside to allow Samuel Alito to claim that honor for the Twenty-First. In other words, he is a total load.

And then there is his wife. She, too, has enormous power in Washington—much more than people realize. As Riggleman explains, “Nobody can refuse Ginni Thomas in any GOP meeting. They can’t refuse her. She has access on a level nobody can imagine. Everybody has to listen to her. Everybody has to respond to her. Everyone has to respond to Ginni Thomas because her husband is Clarence Thomas.”

If we aren’t sure what Clarence thinks on any number of topics, Ginni’s opinions are quite clear. We know her feelings about the Big Lie, for example. Recall the text message she sent to Mark Meadows, the White House Chief of Staff and her old pal, two days after the election:

Biden crime family & ballot fraud co-conspirators (elected officials, bureaucrats, social media censorship mongers, fake stream media reporters, etc) are being arrested & detained for ballot fraud right now & over coming days, & will be living in barges off GITMO to face military tribunals for sedition.

Then she added, “I hope that this is true.”

Ginni Thomas, as Riggleman points out, has unparalleled access to Beltway insiders. She is in a position to know almost anything about almost anything—all the tea. And yet she holds with the same easily-disproven bonkers QAnon garbage your drunk uncle posts on Facebook.

“Insane might not be a good enough definition,” Riggleman says of Ginni’s text messages. “It is hysterical, it’s crazy, but it’s almost a copy-paste from QAnon conspiracy theories. . . . So we have her just sort of copy-pasting and cribbing from multiple conspiracy theories to come up with this initial text message to Meadows.”

Is it safe to assume that Ginni and Clarence share opinions on a great number of things? Or that in the course of her hateful political activism, Mrs. Thomas is doing what Mr. Thomas would like done? While she says she doesn’t involve him in her work, they are, as she has said many times, “best friends.”

“If people really knew how deep she was into the activist, the crazy activist portion of the far right,” Riggleman tells me, “you’d have to be so deliberately obtuse in your own thinking to think that a lot of this isn’t being sort of pushed right into Clarence Thomas’s frontal lobe.” And in said frontal lobe, these crazy QAnon-tinged ideas likely find purchase—if they weren’t already there to begin with.

“If you spoon with somebody, you usually share some of the same opinions, right? So I call it the Spoon Theory,” Riggleman says. “Whether she’s the big spoon or the little spoon, we need to understand right now that we need to look a lot more into the Thomases.”

The Republican Party has become the Party of Alternative Facts. (That term, incidentally, is the coinage of Kellyanne Conway, a longtime Ginni associate.) Some of this reality-rejection is Trump’s doing, to be sure. But Clarence and Ginni Thomas shoulder a lot of the blame.

How can we argue with crazy? How can we arrive at compromise when the other side won’t concede any of the baseline facts? How can Pence and Haley participate in a debate on a stage with candidates who are batshit? What do we do when one of our nine Supreme Court Justices trucks with nutters?

“It’s hard to keep up with the interminable crazy and the energy that it has,” Riggleman tells me, “because that energy is always so much more than the energy of the stable and the sane.”

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