Amy Coney Barrett becomes an unlikely hate figure for MAGA World
by Niall Stanage
Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett is the target of new ire from President Trump’s most fervent supporters after she bucked his position on a key case earlier this week.
Barrett joined — albeit only in part — a dissenting opinion penned by liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor on Monday. The case revolves around the highly controversial claim from the Trump administration that it is entitled to deport Venezuelan migrants under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.
The debate within the high court revolved around what the correct location was for the case being made on behalf of some of the detainees.
But Sotomayor left no real doubt about her disagreement with the underlying policy.
Barrett joined a part of her colleague’s dissent that noted “the Government cannot usher any detainees, including plaintiffs, onto planes in a shroud of secrecy, as it did on March 15, 2025.”
Regardless of the finer points of the legal arguments, the mere fact of Barrett’s position was enough to elicit vocal dismay from Trump loyalists.
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On social media, Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) pronounced her position “disappointing,” a message that was then amplified by Elon Musk in characteristically inflammatory style.
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“Suicidal empathy is a civilizational risk,” Musk opined.
Reaction from MAGA-friendly social media figures was even more shrill.
Rogan O’Handley, who is better known by his handle on the social platform X, @DC_Draino, accused Barrett of having joined the Court’s three liberal justices in a bid “to keep cartels here in America.”
The @catturd2 account, which has more than 3.5 million followers on X, referred to the justice as “Amy Commie Barrett” and complained that “Trump appointed her and gave her her dream job and complimented her and praised her — and she’s been an ungrateful, backstabbing POS since day one.”
The idea of Barrett as a communist, or anything remotely close to it, is untethered from reality.
Barrett’s vigorously conservative record won her a nomination from Trump in the first place. She soon became one of the justices who overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.
Barrett also joined the conservative majority last year in handing Trump a massive victory on the question of immunity from criminal prosecution for acts undertaken while in office — though she put some caveats on that immunity that other conservative justices did not.
All indications from her personal life are that Barrett is a deeply conservative Christian, while in her pre-Supreme Court judicial career she favored right-wing positions on numerous topics including gun rights.
When she was first nominated by Trump, data site FiveThirtyEight looked back at her record on the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and concluded that she was “one of the more conservative judges on the circuit — and maybe even the most conservative.”
Still, the FiveThirtyEight assessment also predicted — with some prescience, as it turned out — that “if she’s confirmed, it seems fairly safe to assume that she would continue that [conservative] pattern — even if she’s occasionally willing to break from her fellow conservatives.”
This propensity to break not merely with conservatives but with Trump has now drawn enmity upon her head.
Republicans who stand aside from the MAGA fold look at the situation rather ruefully — and as one emblematic of a broader pattern.
“For the folks of MAGA world, they don’t really care about the label of ‘conservative,’ they care about your loyalty to the president,” said Doug Heye, a former communications director of the Republican National Committee, when asked about Barrett.
Heye also cited a parallel from the world of electoral politics.
“The definition of conservatism has changed for a lot of folks — Liz Cheney is a perfect example,” he said.
Cheney, the former congresswoman from Wyoming, had been widely regarded as a fervent conservative on almost every issue. But she also became ever more vocal in her criticisms of Trump, ultimately becoming the most prominent figure on the House select committee that investigated the Capitol riot of Jan. 6, 2021.
Cheney ended up suffering a landslide GOP primary defeat to a Trump-backed candidate, Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-Wyo.), and went on to campaign for former Vice President Kamala Harris in last November’s election.
Barrett is, of course, a far less explicitly political figure — and one whose current feelings about Trump are unknown, even though Trump loyalists have widely circulated a video of her as the president passed by her at his joint address to Congress last month.
The pro-Trump side contends that Barrett’s facial expression and body language connote hostility, though such an interpretation is, at best, in the eye of the beholder.
That clip became so prominent in part because, the same week, Barrett offended the Trump base. On that occasion, a lower court had ruled that the Trump administration had to pay out almost $2 billion for foreign aid work that had already been done, even as the president and his allies clamped down massively on the U.S. Agency for International Development, scything down expenditures and canceling programs.
The Supreme Court declined to lift the lower court’s order, with Barrett and another conservative, Chief Justice John Roberts, joining the three liberal justices: Justice Elena Kagan, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sotomayor.
A dissent authored by Justice Samuel Alito declared he was “stunned” by the decision.
In the immediate aftermath, the prominent online Trump backer Mike Cernovich called Barrett “evil” and dismissed her as “another DEI hire.”
Mike Davis, a Trump ally who some observers thought could become attorney general, went on Steve Bannon’s podcast and called the justice “a rattled law professor with her head up her a–.”
The MAGA forces have no obvious way to actually do anything about Barrett, given her lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court.
Given she is just 53, she can reasonably expect to be rendering verdicts for many years after the president leaves office.
But the white-hot rage of the MAGA base can’t be comfortable to bear.
The Memo is a reported column by Niall Stanage.
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