Trump’s joy as his man voted on to Supreme Court despite sex claims
US President Donald Trump has celebrated the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the highest court in America.
At a rally in Kansas Mr Trump condemned Democrats for what he called a “shameless campaign of political and personal destruction” against his nominee for the US Supreme Court.
To the cheers of supporters at the Kansas Expocentre in Topeka, Mr Trump declared it a “historic night” not long after he signed the paperwork to make Mr Kavanaugh’s status official.
He said: “I stand before you today on the heels of a tremendous victory for our nation.”
Mr Trump thanked Republican senators for refusing to back down “in the face of the Democrats’ shameless campaign of political and personal destruction”.
Mr Kavanaugh was sworn in as a justice on Saturday evening in Washington after an extraordinarily fraught nomination
From left: Donald Trump, Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford
that sparked angry protests, knife-edge votes and a national reckoning about sexual assault allegations and who should be believed.
Mr Kavanaugh staunchly denied the allegations, but nearly all Democrats in the US senate voted against his confirmation.
The final vote took place on Saturday afternoon as the President was flying to Kansas aboard Air Force One.
He invited travelling reporters
to his private office to watch the climactic roll call, which was interrupted several times by protesters in the Senate galleries before Capitol police removed them.
When the vote was confirmed, Mr Trump delivered a double thumbs-up from his desk while several aides applauded.
“Very, very good,” Mr Trump said. “Very happy about it. Great decision. I very much appreciate those 50 great votes and I think (Mr Kavanaugh is) going to go down as a totally brilliant supreme court justice for many years.”
Mr Trump had insisted Mr Kavanagh would not be tainted by the sexual assault allegations from Christine Blasey Ford and others that nearly derailed his nomination. Mr Trump said he was “100%” certain Mr Kavanaugh was innocent.
“I have no doubt,” Mr Trump said, telling reporters that he had chosen Mr Kavanaugh, in part, because “there’s nobody with a squeaky-clean past like Brett Kavanaugh”.
He said the FBI had carried out seven background investigations and argued that had there been an issue, it would have surfaced sooner.
“If there was even a scintilla of something wrong — he was a very big judge for many years on what they call the second highest court — that would have come out loud and clear,” he said.
Throughout the day Mr Trump also kept his focus on the opposition, saying Mr Kavanaugh had withstood a “horrible, horrible attack” that “nobody should have to go through”.
He told supporters in Topeka that “radical Democrats” have become “an angry, left-wing mob” and “too dangerous and too extreme to govern”.
“You don’t hand matches to an arsonist and you don’t give power to an angry left-wing mob. And that’s what they’ve become,” he said.
Mr Kavanaugh’s nomination sparked protests across the Capitol. When the vote was over, hundreds of protesters massed on the steps of the supreme court, chanting: “We believe survivors.”
Mr Trump, who was criticised for mocking Christine Blasey Ford’s Senate testimony, added: “We have a lot of women that are extremely happy — a tremendous number — because they’re thinking of their sons, they’re thinking of their husbands and their brothers and their uncles and others, and women are, I think, extremely happy.”