In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the GalaxyZaphod Beeblebrox, a two-headed main character, becomes fed up with a confused receptionist who does seem to not make sense. “Don’t try to out-weird me, lady,” he growls. “I get stranger things than you free with my breakfast cereal.”
That pretty much pegs where I’m at today. In a land where Donald Trump was and could again be president, where a huge swath of the populace angrily denounces BandAid-level technology meant to thwart a murderous pandemic, and where a slap at the Oscars merits equal press ink with a civilian massacre in Europe, one must eat their Wheaties in triplicate and bank eight good hours of sleep before daring to reach the new and utterly terrifying threshold of modern-day “weird.”
Ginni Thomas, the wife of Associate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Please ensure that your tray tables and seat backs are in the correct positions. Prepare for some turbulence and tell your mom how much you love her.
Ginni Thomas is not the first politically active spouse in the history of Washington D.C., but she is the first one I’ve come across who does a superlative impression of a mid-sermon Pentecostal minister with a live snake up her nose, preaching the Gospel of Trump.
According to a February reportIn The New York Times:
Ginni Thomas insists, in her council biography, that she and her husband operate in “separate professional lanes,” but those lanes in fact merge with notable frequency. They have worked together from the bench and in the political trenches to achieve targets like Roe V. Wade and affirmative actions for the three decades that he has served on the Supreme Court.
Together they believe that “America is in a vicious battle for its founding principles,” as Ginni Thomas has put it. Her views were once seen as fringe views but now they dominate the Republican Party. And with Trump’s three appointments reshaping the Supreme Court, her husband finds himself at the center of a new conservative majority poised to shake the foundations of settled law. The Thomases are a rare find in a nation plagued by division and upheaval.
Justice Thomas’ political leanings are so extremely freighted to the right that he makes the other conservatives on that court look like Che Guevara, and his wife is even farther out beyond the Oort Cloud than he is. Her true time to shine came when she hitched her wagon to Trump’s WE WUZ ROBBED train all the way to the steps of the Capitol Building on January 6 and beyond.
Ginni Thomas kept some very interesting company during this time. The most notable example was Mark Meadows, White House Chief Of Staff, who began exchanging texts messages with Thomas immediately after the election. Before diving into the subtext, you should read the actual texts in all of their frothing apocalyptic Christian glory.
Thomas to Meadows, 11/10/21: “Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!! … You are the leader, with him, who is standing for America’s constitutional governance at the precipice. The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History.”
Meadows reply, 11/24/21: “This is a fight of good versus evil. Evil is always the victor until King of Kings triumphs. Do not let yourself get discouraged by the good things you do. The fight goes on. It is the reason I have staked everything on it. Well at least my time in DC on it.”
Wait, what? King of Kings? Is he referring either to Trump or God? The Beeblebrox Standard of Weirdness is met by the fact that the question must be asked. accordingTo The Washington PostThere are at least 29 more similar examples. “They didn’t just approach the election fight with religious zeal,” writes David French for The Atlantic, “they approached it with an absolute conviction that they enjoyed divine sanction. The merger of faith and partisanship was damaging enough, but the merger of faith with lawlessness … represented a profound perversion of the role of the Christian in the public square.”
The House select Committee investigating the Jan. 6, Capitol insurrection would appreciate a conversation with Thomas about those texts, among others. “In a series of text exchanges with Meadows,” reportsThe Post, “Thomas sought to influence Trump’s strategy to overturn the election results and lobbied for lawyer Sidney Powell to be ‘the lead and the face’ of Trump’s legal team. Thomas’s repeated outreach to Meadows came at period when Trump and his allies sought to enlist the Supreme Court to negate the results of the election. The revelations of his wife’s texts have drawn calls from Democrats urging Clarence Thomas to recuse himself from cases related to the 2020 election.”
It would be nice to have the option of recusal. It would be more appropriate to resign in disgrace and then be expelled from public life. Modern Republicans have mastered the art of disdaining rules, traditions, laws and moral codes whenever doing so benefits “the cause.” The Thomases, working in tandem both inside and outside the Supreme Court to usurp the rule of law in the name of Jesus or Whatever, have taken the practice to its most extreme point to date.
Thomas is not allowed to sit on the high bench.
Trump’s margin of victory in 2016 was the evangelical vote, represented in near-caricature fashion by Ginni Thomas. Trump has been hard at his work keeping these voters in the foldThey are his most menacing weapons, the evangelical radicals who have, paradoxically, Jesus in both their eyes and hatred in their hearts. Ginni Thomas’s connection to the activities of the highest court serves as a stark warning: The Trump virus is everywhere, just like COVID.
