Second lady Usha Vance has come to the defense of Supreme Court justices who have been attacked by President Donald Trump.
In an interview with ABC News Live Prime anchor Linsey Davis, the wife of Vice President JD Vance was asked how she feels about the nation’s highest court facing the wrath of Trump, sparking concerns about a potential constitutional crisis.
Vance previously clerked for Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Chief Justice John Roberts on the District of Columbia Court of Appeals.
In March, Chief Justice Roberts expressed concern about the rise in personal attacks against Supreme Court justices and federal judges, saying it was “dangerous and has got to stop,” without mentioning Trump by name.
“I have a lot of respect for the justices. I think that they have a hard and challenging job being in the public eye, just like a lot of other people in Congress, in the media, in the executive branch. So I do want people to treat them with respect,” Vance said.
“I think that there has been a lot of personalization of feelings towards judges and the courts across the country that probably didn’t exist, you know, 150 years ago when they were less in the public eye,” she added.
“So I’m hopeful that people will continue to treat them with a sense of humanity and, you know, without the kind of anger that’s led to some attacks on judges.”
Roberts voiced his concerns about personal attacks amid Trump’s repeated attacks on the Supreme Court justices who voted down his sweeping tariffs in February, including calling them “disloyal,” “unpatriotic,” and “fools.”
Trump has also taken particular umbrage with Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, two conservative justices whom he appointed to the bench, for siding against him in high-profile decisions.
“Certain Republican Appointees let the Democrats push them around, always wanting to be popular, politically correct, or even worse, wanting to show how ‘independent’ they are, with very little loyalty to the man who appointed them or, more importantly, the ideology from which they came to be Nominated and Confirmed,” Trump wrote in an April Truth Social meltdown.
Roberts was previously accused of taking a thinly veiled swipe at Trump in his 2024 end-of-year report, when he condemned elected officials who had “raised the specter of open disregard for federal court rulings” after months of Trump berating judges’ handling of his various legal cases before he reentered the White House.
Late last month, Trump continued this habit by launching a furious attack against an Obama-appointed federal judge who ruled the president must remove his name from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
“Unfortunately, Judge [Chris] Cooper and the Radical Left would rather see it DIE than have President Trump transform it into something that everyone could be proud of, much as I have done, in many cases, throughout my life,” Trump wrote in an unhinged Truth Social tirade lasting nearly 600 words on May 29.
“Judge Cooper should be ashamed of himself!”
