The late Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia was a fan of President Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, Bryan Garner a friend and now biographer of Scalia told The Wall Street Journal Monday.
Garner, a long-time literary collaborator with Scalia and friend, said that the late justice “thought it was most refreshing to have a candidate who was pretty much unfiltered and utterly frank.”
He had spent two weeks in 2016 traveling with Justice Scalia through several Asian countries just a week before his death.
Garner added that while Scalia liked Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, “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.”
Garner did go on to specify that Scalia’s approval of Trump’s campaign were during the “early days in the campaign,” and “shouldn’t be looked at through the lens of everything that’s happened since.” He declined to speculate on how the late justice would have viewed other aspects of the Trump presidency.
His decade-long friendship with Scalia is captured in Garner’s book “Nino and Me,” which comes out Tuesday.
Garner is a legal dictionary editor who collaborated with Scalia to produce a book on legal persuasion, “Making Your Case,” and a book on statutory construction, “Reading Law.”
“It looked for a time that we might actually break up the collaboration over contractions,” Garner said of their, sometimes rocky, partnership. He argued contractions help readability while Scalia thought they diminished the dignity of court opinions.
Interestingly, Garner, a Republican with libertarian sympathies, does not share Scalia’s views on abortion, same-sex marriage, and gun control. Their friendship flourished nonetheless.
“It’s fundamentally a book about friendship,” Garner said of his book.