President Trump was supportive of his nominee to the Supreme Court during a radio interview set to be broadcast on Monday morning, in which he characterized Brett Kavanaugh as a “fantastic, fantastic man” and called into question allegations of sexual assault.
In the interview — recorded on Sunday, prior to the release of the New Yorker article in which a woman alleges that Kavanaugh harassed her when he was at Yale — Trump acknowledged that Kavanaugh will likely receive no Democratic support. The president was nevertheless optimistic about the judge’s prospects for confirmation.
“We’ll get almost no Democrat,” said on the debut show of “Geraldo in Cleveland” on WTAM radio. “We may get a couple in states where I won by many, many points — you understand that — but we’ll essentially get no Democrat.”
Returning to a familiar rebuttal, Trump questioned why Ford didn’t report the assault, which she claims occurred in the summer of 1982. “This went 36 years without a complaint,” Trump said.
Kavanaugh and Ford are scheduled to testify publicly on Thursday before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
“I want her to have her voice,” Trump said of the impending hearing. “Let her have her voice, let her say whatever she has to say. Let him say what he has to say and that in the end these senators will make a choice.”
Trump was speaking without the benefit of having read the New Yorker article detailing allegations that Kavanaugh, then a freshman at Yale, drunkenly thrust his penis into the face of Deborah Ramirez during a dorm party. Senate Democrats reportedly began investigating Ramirez’s claim after learning of it independently.
Kavanaugh has vigorously denied the allegation, and there has been no corroboration from an eyewitness. The New York Times reported on Sunday that its reporters interviewed “several dozen people in an attempt to corroborate” Ramirez’s allegations but could not do so.