The Supreme Court’s closely divided decision this week to reject the Trump administration’s freeze on foreign aid unleashed a torrent of vitriol from the president’s supporters largely aimed at a single justice — Amy Coney Barrett.

On podcasts and social media, conservative allies of President Donald Trump called the former law professor and appeals court judge“evil,” a “closet Democrat” and a “DEI hire.”

Barrett and Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. joined the court’s three liberals in backing a federal judge’s order that requires the administration to begin repaying global health groups nearly $2 billion for completed work.

It was the second time in two months that the two Republican nominees had voted with Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jacksonto turn down a request from Trump, and the latest example of Barrett breaking with the high court’s conservative bloc on a closely watched ruling.

But while Roberts has drawn the ire of conservatives in the past, most notably with his 2012 vote to save President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, most of the anger on Wednesday and Thursday was directed at Barrett.

Barrett, who previously taught at Notre Dame Law School, was hailed by conservatives — and excoriated by liberals — when Trump nominated her in 2020 and cemented a 6-3 supermajority. She has voted with conservatives in landmark cases to overturn Roe v. Wade, end affirmative action in college admissions, andprovide Trump and other presidents broad immunity from criminal prosecution for official actions. The right nevertheless has come down hard on her as a traitor, and their criticism escalated this week.

“She is evil, chosen solely because she checked identity politics boxes,” conservative activist Mike Cernovich posted on X, suggesting Barrett was put on the bench because she is a woman. “Another DEI hire. It always ends badly.”

“She’s a rattled law professor with her head up her a–,” Mike Davis, a former law clerk to another Trump nominee, Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, said on Stephen K. Bannon’s podcast on Wednesday.

In a slew of other social media posts, Trump’s supporters suggested Barrett should be impeached, with Eric Daugherty, a conservative media personality, posting: “Democrats are loving Amy Coney Barrett lately. Tells you everything.”

Some of the attacks centered on interpretations of Barrett’s body language after she greeted Trump before his address to a joint session of Congress this week. While justices traditionally attend the annual address, they remain seated throughout the speech and usually take pains not to applaud or react.

On his “War Room” podcast, Bannon played a video clip widely shared online of Barrett, standing stoically alongside three other current justices, after shaking hands with Trump. Bannon suggested Barrett had given the president the “stink eye.”

“That’s not a look of admiration,” he said.

With Republicans controlling both houses of Congress, the federal courts have emerged as one of the only checks on the administration’s aggressive efforts to expand presidential power by shrinking the size of the federal bureaucracy, freezing federal spending and firing independent agency watchdogs. The administration is facing more than 100 lawsuits challenging its initiatives, with many facing pushback from lower-court judges.

Nancy Gertner, a retired federal judge in Massachusetts, said that criticism comes with the job but that the personal attacks targeting Barrett are sexist and cross the line.

“That’s offensive to the nth degree and clearly not something one would say about a man,” Gertner said. “That is so far from fair and legitimate criticism of an enormously accomplished woman and says something about the atmosphere Trump has created.”

Vice President JD Vance and Elon Musk have suggested Trump could ignore court rulings with which he disagrees, with Musk posting, “The only way to restore rule of the people in America is to impeach judges.” Trump’s allies in Congress have gone further, introducing articles of impeachment against three federal judges after they ruled against the administration.

That rhetoric has been called out by leading legal organizations and Democratic lawmakers who point to a rise in security threats against federal judges.

“[T]he intimidating words and actions we have heard must end,” William R. Bay, president of the American Bar Association, said in a statement this week. “They are designed to cow our country’s judges, our country’s courts and our legal profession.”

Even before the high-stakes legal battles, Roberts in his annual report in late 2024 lamented rising threats against judges that he said undermine judicial independence.

“Violence, intimidation, and defiance directed at judges because of their work undermine our Republic, and are wholly unacceptable,” wrote Roberts, who along with Barrett did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

The attacks were in full view this week in the hours after the Supreme Court announced its ruling that clears the way for the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development to restart nearly $2 billion in payments for work already completed by global health groups.

It was the second time the court acted against Trump since he returned to the White House — albeit in response to emergency petitions that did not address the underlying legal issues. In late February, the justices did not immediately allow Trump to remove the leader of an independent government watchdog agency. In that order, only Gorsuch and Samuel A. Alito Jr. sided with Trump.

In January, Roberts, before Trump took office, Barrett and the three liberals refused to delay his sentencing in New York for a criminal conviction in a case involving a hush money payment in 2016.

Barrett, the youngest justice at 53, was Trump’s third nominee during his first term, replacingliberal icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a strong supporter of abortion rights. Democrats were outraged when then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) pushed Barrett through just days before the 2020 presidential election, instead of leaving the seat open for the next White House occupant to fill.

Throughout her tenure, Barrett has usually joined conservative rulings, most often aligned with Roberts and Kavanaugh.

But she has also emerged as an unpredictable swing vote. She dissented last term when the court said federal prosecutors overstepped in using an obstruction statute to charge defendants accused of disrupting the electoral vote count on Jan. 6, 2021. This week, she again joined the liberals in dissent when the majority struck down rules regulating the discharge of water pollution in a decision narrowing the Clean Water Act.

Jeremy Fogel, a former federal judge in California, said judges bring to the bench their different life experiences and philosophies that affect how they do their job.

“But it’s inappropriate to expect them to decide cases based on the political preferences — right, left or center — of any group, including those that may have supported their appointment,” he said.

Criticism is fair, Fogel added, but it’s “it’s equally inappropriate to vilify them personally simply because they don’t adhere to political orthodoxy in every case.”

“It’s unfortunate that in today’s hyper-partisan atmosphere, she gets so little credit for doing exactly what judges are supposed to do.”

There is a long history of Republicans being disappointed in justices chosen by their party’s presidents. Conservatives turned on then-Justice David H. Souter, a nominee of President George H.W. Bush who became one of the court’s most liberal members. Roberts infuriated conservatives with his Obamacare vote and, during Trump’s first term, when he voted to blockeffortsto put a citizenship question on the 2020 Census and rescind an Obama-era plan to protect young undocumented immigrants known as “dreamers” from deportation.

Kermit Roosevelt, a University of Pennsylvania law professor who clerked for Souter, said it is perhaps unsurprising that Republicans are targeting Barrettover her independent streak.

Barrett reaches decisions, he said, after a “process of good-faith, analytical reasoning.”

“She’s able to tell when arguments don’t make any sense, when what someone is saying is BS,” said Roosevelt, who overlapped with Barrett during their respective clerkships at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. “When what they’re saying doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, she calls them on it and won’t go along with it just because it’s conservative.”

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