Samuel Alito’s Disdain Helped Make Him Donald Trump’s Reliable Ally
A new biography examines how the Supreme Court justice’s sense of cultural loss and distrust of elites parallels Trump-era politics.
Illustration: Adara Sánchez for Bloomberg
All was right with the world as 9-year-old Sam Alito watched a bronze statue of Christopher Columbus being installed in the Chambersburg neighborhood of Trenton, New Jersey. On that October 1959 morning, young Sam proudly joined in the celebration of an Italian who’d dared to cross the Atlantic for an unknown future, much as Alito’s own grandparents had done before settling in Chambersburg.
Sixty-one years later, the statue was taken down, a casualty of the changing perception of Columbus’s legacy amid increased focus on the brutalities inflicted on the Indigenous peoples he encountered after “discovering” America. By then a Supreme Court justice, Alito told an interviewer that the removal was an insult to the Italian-American immigrants who saw Columbus as a symbol of their claim of belonging in their adopted country. “It is as if the Italian immigrants never existed and their history — what they endured and accomplished — counts for nothing,” he said.