Brett Kavanaugh beside the stump of a cherry tree

How the Supreme Court nominee flubbed Trump's George Washington standard

George Washington.

It seems like it was over 200 years ago, but it was only Wednesday that President Trump, at a press conference called to defend Brett Kavanaugh, compared his Supreme Court nominee to the father of our country. "Look," he said, "if we brought George Washington here ... the Democrats would vote against him. Just so you understand. And he may have had a bad past. Who knows, you know?"

In the wake of a Senate hearing into the sexual assault allegations against Kavanaugh that appears to have been a disaster for Republicans (and a highly predictable one), the comment reads as even more bizarrely risible than it did when the president first uttered it. Washington's legendary abstemiousness and reserve — and even more so his resolute determination to stand above faction or section — contrast just too blatantly with both Kavanaugh's hard-partying youth and his relentlessly partisan career path, to say nothing of the scorched-earth fury of his testimony. Political cartoons of Kavanaugh beside the stump of a cherry tree, saying "that never happened" practically draw themselves.

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Noah Millman

Noah Millman is a screenwriter and filmmaker, a political columnist and a critic. From 2012 through 2017 he was a senior editor and featured blogger at The American Conservative. His work has also appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Politico, USA Today, The New Republic, The Weekly Standard, Foreign Policy, Modern Age, First Things, and the Jewish Review of Books, among other publications. Noah lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son.