Jenna Ellis, a senior legal advisor to the Trump 2020 campaign, is doubling down on the campaign’s outreach to social conservatives by telling those who are unhappy or distressed over recent Supreme Court decisions that they should re-elect President Trump.
In a June 24 interview on The Eric Metaxas Radio Show, a radio show geared towards religious conservatives, Ellis lamented some recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings on immigration policy and LGBTQ rights that went against the Trump administration’s stated position.
Ellis claimed that Chief Justice John Roberts, who she derided as a “liberal,” and Justice Neil Gorsuch, who, respectively, wrote the majority opinions in the cases, had “abandoned” the Constitution by violating the separation of powers and legislating from the bench to produce certain outcomes.
“You can’t input your own political agenda and your politics into the law,” Ellis said in the video clip, obtained by Right Wing Watch, a project of People for the American Way, and posted to YouTube.
Referring to the Supreme Court’s decision finding LGBTQ people are protected from discrimination by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Ellis said: “So [the justices] took this 1964 law and said ‘Even though we all agree that the term “sex” means the biological difference between men and women, we’re just going to go ahead and decide for the legislature that we are going to add into that definition more protected categories, including sexual orientation and gender identity.'”
Ellis, a fellow at Liberty University’s Falkirk Center, said that she and other social conservatives, as well as President Trump, were “shocked” by Gorsuch’s decision in the LGTBQ workplace discrimination case, noting that social conservatives had initially cheered Trump’s appointment of Gorsuch.
But she argued that the solution was to appoint more conservative justices to the Supreme Court, thus requiring that social conservatives turn out in droves in November’s election to re-elect Trump.
“We have to understand that the comprehensive nature of how much goes up in front of our Supreme Court, we have to make sure that jurists comprehensively are originalists, and what I think we have to do for the next four years, including voting for President Trump in November and making sure that he gets more Supreme Court appointments, is to hear from other groups outside just the Federalist Society that are concerned about mechanics,” Ellis said, referring to a right-wing legal organization that is primarily concerned with promoting a libertarian economic doctrine among the nation’s judges.
“We also have to be concerned about the social issues to make sure that the Supreme Court stays in their lane,” Ellis said. “But we have to give President Trump another four years because — listen, no justice is ever going to get things 100 percent correct all of the time.
“And even though what Gorsuch did in this decision was absolutely terrible, he has had a stellar track record over the last three years on the bench,” she added. “And if President Trump was appointing two or three more conservative justices, if we had a wider margin, then when one or two justices get one decision wrong, they will always be in the minority, and we could have a Supreme Court that we could depend on to actually interpret the Constitution as meant and stay in their lane.”
Ellis noted that Trump, as he did in 2016, has promised to release a list of possible Supreme Court nominees to fill any vacancy that arises on the high court, and has been incorporating suggestions from various groups, including those affiliated with the Religious Right, to ensure that those on his short-list are acceptable to social conservatives.
“He, of course, was very disappointed in this decision. He’s saying, ‘I’m going to go back and re-evaluate the list. Let me know, faith groups that are concerned about religious liberty, concerned about preserving the Constitution,’ and I have no doubt that that list is going to be more comprehensive, and we can rely on President Trump to continue to protect religious freedom, protect the principles of the Constitution and the text of the Constitution. With his next appointments, we’re just going to keep getting better.”
See Right Wing Watch’s video of Ellis’ comments below:
The year's nearly out. Sometimes that calls for taking sweet stock of the past months' wonderful events. Coming to the end of 2025, on the other hand, is more like getting to that denouement in the action movie where the survivors take a breath and pat each other on the back for having made it out alive. At this stage, we are Newt getting tucked-in to her Sulaco hibernation tube.
With some effort and a pinch of luck, may we all fare better in 2026 than poor Newt's end at the start of Alien 3.
Why such a shitty year? So much of it, obviously, can be laid at the feet of Lame Duck Donald. Not that he hasn't had loads of assistance in his evil efforts to erase our transgender family and friends, colleagues, and leaders during 2025. The purge, as promised, began right out of the gate on Inauguration Day.
The Department of Justice has ordered prison inspectors to stop evaluating key protections created under the 2003 Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) that are designed to prevent sexual violence against transgender, intersex, and gender-nonconforming inmates.
As first reported by NPR, a newly disclosed memo says the change is part of an effort to revise PREA standards to comply with President Donald Trump’s January executive order denying federal recognition for non-cisgender identities.
According to the memo, detention centers undergoing PREA audits -- including federal and state prisons, juvenile facilities, and immigration detention centers -- will no longer be evaluated under the LGBTQ-specific standards meant to protect transgender, intersex, and gender-nonconforming inmates while the revisions are underway.
History was made in Pennsylvania several weeks ago, when Erica Deuso became not only her town's first transgender elected official, but the first transgender mayor to be elected in Pennsylvania history.
Deuso's identity -- and the historic nature of her candidacy -- were not the focus of her campaign for mayor of Downingtown, Pennsylvania. Instead, the 45-year-old focused on kitchen-table issues and the nuts and bolts of governing a small city in an exurban county outside Philadelphia.
"After I won my primary, The Philadelphia Inquirer did a story about it, noting, 'This person could be the first trans mayor in Pennsylvania.' But that's not what I was running on," says Deuso. "Everybody I met was really focused on what was in it for their families. What was I going to do about flooding? What am I going to do about public safety? And I kid you not, the first person who approached me, after I found out that I won, was talking to me about a speed bump in their neighborhood."
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