was centrally coordinated rather than a popular groundswell.
The problem for the opposition was that Kavanaugh was a remarkably straight arrow in and out of the courtroom. His rulings were based on principle, whether they would help liberals or conservatives, as when he ruled in favor of the pro-abortion group Emily’s List in its political speech battle with the Federal Election Commission.39 Deputy Press Secretary Raj Shah was in charge of White House communications for the confirmation campaign. Within three days of the nomination, a war room was set up in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building staffed by former clerks, including Zina Bash, Claire Murray, and Chris Michel. Kerri Kupec was brought in as a spokeswoman from the Department of Justice. The office had eight computers, a wall of filing cabinets that were quickly filled with reams of court decisions, and a snack counter that was stocked on Monday and completely ransacked by the end of Friday.
The office’s early work was mostly responding to spurious allegations—one participant called it playing “whack-a-mole.” Geoff Bennett and Leigh Ann Caldwell of NBC tweeted that Justice Kennedy had negotiated his retirement with Trump to secure Kavanaugh’s nomination. After calls for a congressional investigation, the reporters backed away from the story, but not before major media outlets were openly discussing it. Conspiracy theories cooked up on the political fringes—like the Center for American Progress’s yarn about Kennedy’s son and Deutsche Bank—made their way into the mainstream.40
The Trump presidency had been profoundly disorienting to the media and the Washington establishment. Many had not thought it possible for someone whose views were so different from theirs to win the presidency. By July 2018, a Supreme Court appointment was hardly necessary to fuel the media hysteria that had become a feature of American life—Trump was a Russian agent, Trump was a threat to NATO, Trump’s confrontation with China over its unfair trade practices would plunge the United States into recession.
In such an atmosphere, it became popular to speculate that Kavanaugh was Trump’s “get-out-of-jail-free card” because of a law review article in which he had written that presidents should not be encumbered by investigations while they were in office. Kavanaugh had served on the special counsel staff that investigated President Clinton, but in 2009, during the presidency of Barack Obama, he wrote, “This is not something I necessarily thought in the 1980s or 1990s. Like many Americans at that time, I believed that the President should be required to shoulder the same obligations that we all carry. But in retrospect, that seems a mistake.”41
That month the feminist group UltraViolet attempted to link Kavanaugh to allegations of sexual harassment against Judge Alex Kozinski of the Ninth Circuit, for whom Kavanaugh had clerked more than a quarter-century earlier. Why hadn’t the young Kavanaugh reported the sexual predations that had now, so many years later, come to light? UltraViolet’s insinuations of complicity in sexual misconduct eventually evaporated when no one who worked in Kozinski’s chambers with Kavanaugh—including a female intern—could remember seeing any inappropriate behavior.42
If charges of tolerance of sexual crimes would not stick, there was always racism, and an activist group called Demos was ready with a counterintuitive theory to convict Kavanaugh of that ugly offense: “Kavanaugh has also made it clear that he buys into the problematic trope that the Constitution should be ‘colorblind’—a shorthand for the view that race-conscious efforts to remedy our long history of slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and state-sanctioned violence against people of color are themselves discriminatory.”43
The denizens of the left-wing fever swamps took it from there. In a “Rise Up for Roe” speaking tour, which featured Chelsea Clinton, Alyssa Milano, and Planned Parenthood’s Cecile Richards, the Teen Vogue columnist Lauren Duca fingered Kavanaugh for almost every mortal sin in the progressive catechism, telling an audience in Los Angeles, “This is a man that we know, from the way he has ruled in the past, that he wants to rule over this country with ‘textualist originalist’ mindset, which is a very safe way of saying, ‘white supremacist patriarchy.’ ” Kavanaugh’s nomination, she added, “marks the nativism, the ugliness, the lack of compassion for the marginalized, the authoritarianism, all of that that stains that on American life, like the cum stains that are probably all over my room at the Holiday Inn Express.”44
The manic search for anything negative related to Kavanaugh included requests by major media organizations for records of 911 calls from his home. The press submitted public information requests to the town of Chevy Chase for any