Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images 
 
 Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has decided to take a stand against a major party’s presidential candidate in a way that she—and arguably no prior justice—has ever done before. Over the course of several interviews, the justice has spent the last few days hammering Donald Trump for his reckless campaign and outrageous policies, suggesting that a President Trump would pose a serious danger to the republic. Her explicitly political statements set off a familiar firestorm about whether Ginsburg had “crossed the line,” sending the conservative blogosphere in particular into howling fantods. Critics on the left and right have criticized Ginsburg’s comments as explosive, unprecedented, and unethical. 
 
 Mark Joseph Stern Mark Joseph Stern covers courts and the law for Slate. 
 
 They are. That’s the point. 
 
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 To recap the controversy, Ginsburg’s campaign began with a light jab at Trump in a Thursday interview, in which the justice admitted she didn’t “want to think about” the possibility of a Trump presidency. Then, on Friday, Ginsburg told the New York Times’ Adam Liptak, “I can’t imagine what this place would be—I can’t imagine what the country would be—with Donald Trump as our president.” Days after her Times interview, Ginsburg told CNN’s Joan Biskupic that Trump is a “faker” with “no consistency” and she criticized his refusal to release his tax returns. “He really has an ego,” she said (correctly and understatedly). 
 
 There is really very little to debate about the ethics of Ginsburg’s comments. They were plainly a violation, the kind of partisan partiality that judicial ethics codes strive to prevent. But Ginsburg, who is a quietly canny judicial and political strategist, surely knows that her comments were an ethical error. That leads to a fascinating question: Why would the justice risk her reputation and good standing—and even her power to hear cases involving Trump—for a few quick jabs at the candidate? The answer, I suspect, is that Ginsburg has decided to sacrifice some of her prestige in order to send as clear a warning signal about Trump as she possibly can. The subtext of Ginsburg’s comments, of her willingness to comment, is that Trump poses an unparalleled threat to this country—a threat so great that she will abandon judicial propriety in order to warn against looming disaster. 
 
 To be clear, what Ginsburg is doing right now—pushing her case against Trump through on-the-record interviews—is not just unethical; it’s dangerous. As a general rule, justices should refrain from commenting on politics, period. That dictate applies to 83-year-old internet folk heroes as strictly as it applies to anybody else who dons judicial robes. The independence of our judiciary—and just as critically, its appearance of impartiality—hinges on a consistent separation between itself and the other branches of government. That means no proclamations of loyalty to any candidate, or admissions of distaste of any other. 
 
 Ginsburg’s comments also set a dark precedent for other justices with equally strong political inclinations. 
 
 You don’t need to be a judicial ethicist to see the wisdom of this principle. Trump is a litigious man; should he take a campaign-related lawsuit to the court, Ginsburg will now surely be pressed to recuse herself. And of course, more significantly, these calls for recusal would accompany every case involving a possible Trump administration. (Through the Department of Justice, the executive branch is tasked with defending federal laws and presidential actions in court.) Moreover, Ginsburg’s comments all but begged Trump to respond—which he did on Tuesday, with a surprisingly coherent rebuke. 
 
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 “I think it’s highly inappropriate that a United States Supreme Court judge gets involved in a political campaign, frankly,” Trump told the New York Times. “I think it’s a disgrace to the court and I think she should apologize to the court. I couldn’t believe it when I saw it. … It’s so beneath the court for her to be making statements like that. It only energizes my base even more. And I would hope that she would get off the court as soon as possible.” 
 
 This rejoinder transforms the Ginsburg-Trump feud from a one-sided roast to a full-on debate. That is quite alarming, because in the United States, politicians and judges are not supposed to debate. Will Ginsburg respond? If she does, her actions will severely tarnish her legacy; if she doesn’t, she may look craven. Best-case scenario, this feud gives Trump license to drag Ginsburg through the mud and turn her into an election issue; worst-case, it delegitimizes Ginsburg’s judicial authority. And since Ginsburg’s criticisms will change exactly zero minds, the benefits of the debate will flow almost exclusively to Trump. 
 
 Ginsburg’s comments also set a dark precedent for other justices with equally strong political inclinations—in other words, every justice ever to sit on the bench except David Souter. I can’t imagine, for instance, that Notorious RBG–loving liberals would be as pleased to hear Justice Samuel Alito bash Hillary Clinton as they are to hear Ginsburg diss Trump. Had Ginsburg said something similar about Mitt Romney, or John McCain, or George W. Bush, her slights would have been profoundly inappropriate. Here, progressives might point out that Sandra Day O’Connor declared her distaste for Al Gore on election night in 2000. (When Gore appeared to have won Florida, she reportedly said aloud, “This is terrible.”) But her comment that night was neither as deliberate nor as brazen as Ginsburg’s; it was more of a slip than an intentional campaign to impugn her disfavored candidate’s character. 
 
 Given all of these compelling reasons that Ginsburg should have refrained from speaking her mind about Trump, why did she take the risk? It seems clear that Ginsburg has made a very conscious decision to cash in her political capital after years of holding her fire. The justice is 83, and while she remains healthy and sharp, she probably won’t sit on the court for much longer. She won’t be impeached—Supreme Court justices must do much worse to suffer that sorry fate—and she can’t be voted out. In effect, Ginsburg has nothing to lose but her good name. And that, it seems, is what she has decided she is willing to risk if it might potentially rally her admirers against Trump’s looming peril. 
 
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 Romney and McCain had qualities and policies that Ginsburg surely loathed as well. But they always had America’s best interests at heart. That is altogether untrue of the sinister and self-interested Trump. For Ginsburg to treat Trump with the same respect—that is, complete silence—that she afforded previous Republican nominees would acquiesce to the premise that his candidacy is just like theirs. It would suggest that this is an election like any other, a run-of-the-mill election rather than a battle for America’s soul. It would legitimize a fascist. ||||| Washington (CNN) Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's well-known candor was on display in her chambers late Monday, when she declined to retreat from her earlier criticism of Donald Trump and even elaborated on it. 
 
 "He is a faker," she said of the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, going point by point, as if presenting a legal brief. "He has no consistency about him. He says whatever comes into his head at the moment. He really has an ego. ... How has he gotten away with not turning over his tax returns? The press seems to be very gentle with him on that." 
 
 Ginsburg's comments came in a previously scheduled interview related to my research for a book on Chief Justice John Roberts. I took a detour to raise the reverberations from her criticism of Trump to The Associated Press and The New York Times in recent interviews. "I can't imagine what this place would be -- I can't imagine what the country would be -- with Donald Trump as our president," she had said in the Times interview published Monday. 
 
 Trump responded Wednesday morning by calling on Ginsburg to resign. 
 
 "Justice Ginsburg of the U.S. Supreme Court has embarrassed all by making very dumb political statements about me. Her mind is shot - resign!" Trump tweeted. 
 
 Justice Ginsburg of the U.S. Supreme Court has embarrassed all by making very dumb political statements about me. Her mind is shot - resign! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 13, 2016 
 
 It is highly unusual for a justice to make such politically charged remarks, and some critics said she crossed the line. House Speaker Paul Ryan told CNN's Jake Tapper on Tuesday night the comments were "out of place." 
 
 "For someone on the Supreme Court who is going to be calling balls and strikes in the future based upon whatever the next president and Congress does, that strikes me as inherently biased and out of the realm." 
 
 Having met with Ginsburg on a regular basis for more than a decade and sometimes been struck by her frankness, I found her response classic. The 83-year-old justice expressed no regret on Monday for the comments or surprise that she would be criticized. Any disbelief she expressed stemmed from the fact that Trump has gotten so far in the election cycle. 
 
 "At first I thought it was funny," she said of Trump's early candidacy. "To think that there's a possibility that he could be president ... " Her voice trailed off gloomily. 
 
 "I think he has gotten so much free publicity," she added, drawing a contrast between what she believes is tougher media treatment of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and returning to an overriding complaint: "Every other presidential candidate has turned over tax returns." 
 
 Ginsburg was appointed to the high court by President Bill Clinton in 1993, and is now the senior member of the liberal wing and leading voice countering conservative Chief Justice Roberts. She has drawn a cult-like following among young people who have nicknamed her The Notorious R.B.G., a play on American rapper The Notorious B.I.G. 
 
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 I have witnessed her off-bench bluntness many times through the years. During 2009 oral arguments in a case involving a 13-year-old Arizona girl who had been strip-searched by school administrators looking for drugs, she was troubled that some male justices played down any harm to the student. "They have never been a 13-year-old girl," Ginsburg told me. "It's a very sensitive age for a girl. I didn't think that my colleagues, some of them, quite understood." 
 
 Photos: Today's Supreme Court Photos: Today's Supreme Court The justices of the US Supreme Court sit for an official photograph on June 1, 2017. In the front row, from left, are Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Anthony Kennedy, Chief Justice John Roberts, Clarence Thomas and Stephen Breyer. In the back row, from left, are Elena Kagan, Samuel Alito, Sonia Sotomayor and Neil Gorsuch. Hide Caption 1 of 10 Photos: Today's Supreme Court In 2005, John Roberts was nominated by President George W. Bush to succeed Sandra Day O'Connor as an associate justice on the US Supreme Court. After Chief Justice William Rehnquist died, Bush named Roberts to the chief justice post. The court has moved to the right during Roberts' tenure, although Roberts supplied the key vote to uphold Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act. Hide Caption 2 of 10 Photos: Today's Supreme Court Anthony Kennedy was appointed to the court by President Ronald Reagan in 1988. He is a conservative justice but has provided crucial swing votes in many cases. He has authored landmark opinions that include Obergefell v. Hodges, which legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. Hide Caption 3 of 10 Photos: Today's Supreme Court Clarence Thomas is the second African-American to serve on the court, succeeding Thurgood Marshall when he was appointed by President George H. W. Bush in 1991. Thomas is a conservative and a strict constructionist who supports states' rights. Hide Caption 4 of 10 Photos: Today's Supreme Court Ruth Bader Ginsburg is the second woman to serve on the Supreme Court. Appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1993, she is a strong voice in the court's liberal wing. Hide Caption 5 of 10 Photos: Today's Supreme Court Stephen Breyer was appointed by Clinton in 1994 and is part of the court's liberal wing. Hide Caption 6 of 10 Photos: Today's Supreme Court Samuel Alito was appointed by President George W. Bush in 2006 and is known as one of the most conservative justices to serve on the court in modern times. Hide Caption 7 of 10 Photos: Today's Supreme Court Sonia Sotomayor is the court's first Hispanic and third female justice. She was appointed by Obama in 2009 and is regarded as a resolutely liberal member of the court. Hide Caption 8 of 10 Photos: Today's Supreme Court Elena Kagan is the fourth female justice to ever be appointed, and she is counted among the court's liberal wing. She was appointed by Obama in 2010 at the age of 50. She is the court's youngest member. Hide Caption 9 of 10 Photos: Today's Supreme Court Neil Gorsuch is the court's newest member. He was chosen by President Donald Trump to replace Antonin Scalia, who died in 2016. Hide Caption 10 of 10 
 
 Earlier in 2009, she was being treated for pancreatic cancer yet made sure to attend President Barack Obama's televised speech to a joint session of Congress, explaining that she wanted people to know the Supreme Court was not all men. "I also wanted them to see I was alive and well, contrary to that senator who said I'd be dead within nine months." She was referring to Sen. Jim Bunning, a Kentucky Republican, who had said she would likely die within nine months from the pancreatic cancer. Bunning later apologized. 
 
 It was evident in our interview on Monday that when Ginsburg imagines who would succeed Obama, she does not expect Trump to prevail over Clinton. 
 
 Acknowledging her own age and that Justices Anthony Kennedy and Stephen Breyer will turn 80 and 78, respectively, Ginsburg said of the possible next president: "She is bound to have a few appointments (to the Supreme Court) in her term." ||||| In the early hours of Nov. 9, as stock markets began to rally on the news of Donald Trump’s upset win, there was another dramatic spike afoot. Interest in the bone density and cholesterol levels of an 83-year-old woman from Flatbush, New York, was also soaring. 
 
 Many people wanted to know whether two-time cancer survivor Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the oldest and perhaps the most liberal justice on the Supreme Court, had enough gas in the tank to outlast the Trump presidency, or whether Trump would get a chance to fundamentally alter the balance of the court by replacing her, a possibility he dangled successfully to entice wary Republicans to vote him. 
 
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 As it turns out, the answer to that question lies largely in the hands of a staffer in the clerk’s office of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. 
 
 Asked earlier this month about the most important person in her life, Ginsburg, who was widowed in 2010 and lost a close friend with the 2016 death of Justice Antonin Scalia, responded, “My personal trainer.” 
 
 That would be Bryant Johnson, 52. You could think of Johnson’s sturdy limbs as a fourth branch of government, grafted onto the judiciary, keeping it aloft. When Johnson is not helping run the District courthouse or fulfilling his duties as a Sergeant First Class in the Army Reserves, he moonlights as a physical trainer to local jurists, including not only Ginsburg, but also Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan, two of the high court’s other three reliably liberal votes, as well as several appeals court judges. 
 
 Since Trump’s election, Ginsburg’s continued survival has become a matter of severe anxiety for liberals, many of whom pressured her in vain to resign during the Obama years to ensure that a Democrat appointed her successor. On Thursday night, during an appearance at George Washington University, she vowed, "I will do this job as long as I can do it full steam." Worried about just how long that will be, people have been offering to send her kale or donate blood or clad her in protective padding, and it’s not entirely clear they are joking. 
 
 To address their concerns, I set out to investigate the world’s most important workout, an endeavor that the chambers of Ginsburg, Breyer and Kagan all promptly declined to have anything to do with.1 
 
 This was a setback. But there was a loophole. Though the justices wouldn’t touch this, Johnson was free to cooperate. Was there some way to simulate the RBG workout without Ginsburg herself? 
 
 I determined to undergo the workout myself, and to write about it. To meet a sufficient evidentiary standard to prove this actually happened, we would also have to film it. 
 
 I’m no athlete, but I’m young and reasonably fit. I thought the workout would be pattycake, but it was much harder than I expected. Ginsburg’s personal trainer, it turns out, is no joke. 
 
 *** 
 
 Muscular and bespectacled, Johnson clocks in at 5-foot-11 and just over 200 pounds. He grew up on a farm in Virginia and played football in high school, enlisted in the military in 1983 and began working in the clerk’s office three years later. In 1997, he was certified as a personal trainer. Rather than open his own gym, Johnson trained clients from his workplace—judges, deputy U.S. marshals and other court personnel—at the facility inside the E. Barrett Prettyman Federal Courthouse, which houses Washington’s district court, its appeals court and the U.S. FISA Court. Word of Johnson’s prowess spread in Washington’s legal circles, and in 1999, after she recovered from colon cancer, Ginsburg began working with him at the urging of her late husband, Marty. At the time, Ginsburg has said, “I looked like a survivor of Auschwitz.” Aside from a three-year deployment in Kuwait, Johnson has trained Ginsburg nonstop since then, adding the other two justices along the way. 
 
 Personal trainer Bryant Johnson takes POLITICO's Ben Schreckinger through the workout routine he designed for Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. poster="http://v.politico.com/images/1155968404/201702/1672/1155968404_5333705626001_5333671114001-vs.jpg?pubId=1155968404" true 
 
 Johnson’s niche makes him perhaps the world’s only personal trainer whose job it is to ensure that his clients keep riding the bench, and probably the one whose work is most consequential, whether you’re rooting for or against the liberal justices staying on the job. A number of precedents that have long been fundamental to the American legal landscape, like Roe v. Wade, and more recent landmarks, like the 2015 split decision legalizing same-sex marriage, would likely be out the window should Trump get the chance to replace one of the court’s four liberal justices. 
 
 Trump has done little to allay those fears on the left, naming Neil Gorsuch, an originalist in Scalia’s mold, as his first Supreme Court pick. For her part, Ginsburg has not hidden her feelings about her contemporary from Queens. In an interview published last week by the BBC, she said, "Some terrible things have happened in the United States,” and “We are not experiencing the best times.” Last July, she was even more blunt, calling Trump a “faker” and saying, “I don’t even want to contemplate” a Trump presidency’s effect on the court, comments she later walked back. 
 
 2 Many people believe the long-lost twelfth article made clear the founders’ intent that the networks always show Mr. Trump’s tremendous crowds. 
 
 Of course, at the beginning of every one of his campaign rallies, a disembodied voice playing over loudspeakers reminds attendees that Trump is a “lifelong defender of the First Amendment” in case they had forgotten his threats to lodge frivolous lawsuits against journalists, his vows to “open up” libel laws and his relentlessly hostile attacks on the “lying media,” which he recently described as “enemies of the people.” In a meeting last summer with Republican lawmakers, Trump also reportedly proclaimed his commitment to protecting Article I, Article II and Article XII2 of the Constitution, displaying an admirable willingness to defend equally the existent and the nonexistent provisions of our founding charter. 
 
 3 Losers. 4 Trump has promised to choose all of his high court nominees from a list of 21 people, mostly respected conservative jurists. Trump has also seen his “world’s greatest memory” suddenly fail him when testifying under oath and suggested with a straight face on national television that the IRS is persecuting him for being a “strong Christian,” so you be the judge. 
 
 Suffice it to say some people3 are concerned that Trump, who has described the 150-year-old Geneva Conventions against torture as “the problem” and famously attacked a federal judge in Indiana for having Mexican parents, might reshape the Supreme Court in his own image based on ideas he got from watching the shows.4 
 
 Trump has little discernible constitutional philosophy, though he said in September that his appointees would “need to preserve the very core of our country and make it greater than ever before.” 
 
 The future of the Supreme Court was perhaps the biggest prize up for grabs in last year’s election, and depending on attrition, Trump could get a historic chance to implement his vague vision for it. 
 
 Justice Ginsburg, who will be 84 in March, is not the Supreme Court’s only octogenarian. The court’s swing vote, Anthony Kennedy, is 80 years old and Breyer is 78—making it plausible that Trump could get the chance to place as many as three reliable conservatives, or three Trumpists, in seats they do not currently hold. Last week, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz said “the odds are very good” that another Supreme Court seat will open up this summer—though he professed not to have any inside information. 
 
 *** 
 
 My investigation of RBG’s gym regimen promised to answer all sorts of questions. What is the world’s most physically fit profession, judges or journalists? And while we know that Justice is supposed to be blind, is she also ripped? 
 
 5 A government building somewhere in the D.C.-Maryland-Virginia area. 6 Rates vary. Email Bdyjustice@Gmail.com. “We take the O out for obesity.” 
 
 Johnson agreed to meet me on Presidents Day at an undisclosed location.5 
 
 He came dressed in a T-shirt advertising his business, BJ’s Body Justice (“It all begins with attitude”6), under his windbreaker, with an airborne pendant, a parachute with wings worn by paratroopers, hanging from his neck. 
 
 Ginsburg usually works out with Johnson twice a week, on whatever days are mutually convenient, for about an hour per session. Normally, the workouts start around 7 p.m. at a gym inside the Supreme Court, and she listens to PBS NewsHour while she exercises. If the workout has to be squeezed in at another time, she will stoop to turning on cable news. 
 
 Johnson and I began around 10:30 a.m. with a five-minute warmup on an elliptical machine. When Ginsburg uses the elliptical, Johnson stands at her side, ready to catch her in case she loses her balance. “I’m kind of like the security blanket, the lifeguard,” he said. “I’m just here making sure nothing happens.” 
 
 You can think of Bryant Johnson’s sturdy limbs as a fourth branch of government, grafted on to the judiciary and keeping it aloft. | Getty Images 
 
 Five minutes on the elliptical was a snap, leaving me unimpressed. But we were only getting started. 
 
 We know a lot about Supreme Court justices’ ideological flexibility—think of the party-line ruling to end the 2000 Florida recount or John Roberts’ pragmatic vote to uphold Obamacare—but surprisingly little about their physical flexibility. After the elliptical came some light stretching, and as it turns out, Ginsburg is more flexible than I am. I was unable to bend over and touch my toes, or even grab my ankles, from a seated position with my legs extended. 
 
 After some lecturing about my need to improve and a butterfly groin stretch, we proceeded to the strength training. 
 
 When Johnson informed Ginsburg he would be leading me through her workout, she told him, “I hope he makes it through.” This was obviously some sort of coded instruction to humiliate me, because after the stretching, Johnson announced he would make me use double the weight that Ginsburg did on the strength exercises to achieve the same effect.7 
 
 7 Johnson said he was doing this because I am 27 and a male, or in his words, “a young ThunderCat.” Because it took place in a government building, this was arguably a violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, according to many people. 8 If Johnson were put in charge of New Hampshire’s elections, the Trump administration would have a lot to investigate. 9 A little Supreme Court humor. 
 
 For most of the exercises, Johnson said Ginsburg performs three sets of 10 to 13 reps, depending on his judgment of what her body is up to on a given day. Sometimes he engages in what he called “counting funny” to customize the length of a set, a habit I noticed when he would mumble a count of “four” under his breath after what felt like at least eight reps.8 
 
 The strength exercises started with a machine bench press, where Ginsburg normally puts up 70 pounds. From there it was leg curls and leg presses, chest flies and lat pull-downs, all on machines, while stretching the muscle groups being exercised in between sets. I performed three sets of seated rows and three sets of standing rows. It was so many rows I asked Johnson, “What about Wade?”9 
 
 He didn’t take the bait or hold forth on his own judicial philosophy. “I stay in my lane,” explained Johnson, who swore he never gave in to the temptation to play shadow clerk by offering his clients his two cents on matters before the court. 
 
 Ginsburg also performs one-legged squats, an exercise that illustrated just how intimate the trainer-justice relationship could get. While he held my hands, Johnson instructed me to raise one leg in the air between his legs and to stand up from seated position on a bench using the other leg until I was standing, practically embracing him, 10 times for each leg, three times. This was not easy, and caused me to look at Johnson — who has jumped out of helicopters, planes and a hot air balloon in the service of this country — in a way he found deeply unsettling. He asked me not kick him in the groin, something that, for the record, Ginsburg has never done. 
 
 From there, we went to the floor. Johnson said Ginsburg takes great pride in progressing from horizontal pushups against a wall when he first began working with her, to pushups with her knees down on the ground, to full pushups. 
 
 “Justice Ginsburg does 10 pushups and she does not do the so-called ‘girl pushups,’” explained Georgetown Law Professor Mary Hartnett during an appearance with the justice earlier this month at the Virginia Military Institute. “She does not use her knees.10 And then she stretches back for a very brief pause and she does 10 more.” 
 
 10 Johnson doesn’t call these “girl pushups” because some of his male clients do them. 
 
 I was able to match Ginsburg’s pushups feat with only a little grunting, though Ginsburg never grunts, as Johnson felt compelled to tell me at one point. He also let me know, as I peppered him with questions, that unlike me, Ginsburg barely rests between sets. 
 
 Then came planks: 30 seconds of a standard plank and 30 seconds on each side. These are a recent introduction for Ginsburg, who previously performed sit-ups, and not her favorite exercise. While I planked, Johnson nudged my waist from side to side, instructing me to provide resistance, to further work my core. He does this with Ginsburg, and also stands ready to catch her should she experience muscle failure while planking. 
 
 After that, we broke out a giant exercise ball which I sat on while panting, sweating and performing arm and shoulder exercises with dumbbells. Then I pinned the exercise ball between my back and the wall and alternated sets of squats with dumb-bell curls. For this, Ginsburg pumps 12 pounds and I pumped 25.11 
 
 11 I pleaded to Johnson that 25 pounds is technically more than twice as heavy as 12 pounds and he granted me clemency on the number of reps. 
 
 Next, Johnson set up a platform about 18 inches high and had me step up on it while raising my knees and performing a variety of movements to promote leg strength and hip flexibility. 
 
 Somewhere in there, he also had me perform leg exercises on the floor as well as while standing and holding on to a staff to keep my balance. At one point he even had me standing on an upside-down bosu—the top of an exercise ball affixed to a flat platform—and falling off while attempting to squat. 
 
 Finally, he had me sit on a bench while holding a medicine ball, then stand up, toss him the ball and sit back down again after he flipped the ball back to me.12 “I told the justice that if you cannot do this exercise, you will need a nurse 24-7,” Johnson recalled. 
 
 12 With Ginsburg, he hands the ball back to her delicately. 
 
 This exercise is crucial, he explained, because it employs the motion needed to use a toilet unassisted. I passed that one with flying colors. After 90 grueling minutes, panting and red in the face, I had more or less successfully completed the Ginsburg workout. 
 
 After catching my breath, I asked Johnson whether he recommended that older people do a workout like the one we just went through or do Trump’s self-professed regimen: playing golf and giving stemwinder campaign speeches. “Do something. If you’re not doing anything then I advise you do something,” Johnson advised diplomatically. “It doesn’t matter what you do. You find out what is your niche and do something. Your body is made to move.” 
 
 But does Johnson believe Trump, who is 70, could complete Ginsburg’s workout? Wisely, he declined to comment. 
 
 13 I did not tell Johnson that in 2015 Trump explained his lack of workout regimen by saying that exercise had forced his friends to have their knees and hips replaced. 
 
 Trying a different tack, I asked Johnson what he made of older people who say they forgo vigorous exercise because their friends who work out suffer from all sorts of joint problems. Johnson compared muscles to a pair of pliers — which will get rusty from lack of use but begin to function like a fine-tuned machine if used regularly—and agreed that that sort of just sounded like an excuse.13 
 
 As for Ginsburg’s continued vitality, after going through one of her workouts I can confirm she could not be in better hands. Sore, disoriented and cranky, I didn’t feel a day over 65. 
 
 Ben Schreckinger is a reporter for Politico. ||||| NOTHING SUPREME Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has said in recent interviews about the presidential election should surprise anyone familiar with her biography and her career on the court. A lifelong left-of-center lawyer and feminist innovator who was appointed to the high court by President Bill Clinton in 1993, the 83-year-old Justice Ginsburg fits the profile of a Hillary Clinton supporter to a T. Obviously, she would rather have a Democrat appointing her next new colleague, and possibly her replacement. 
 
 Nor were any of Justice Ginsburg’s disparaging comments about the presumptive Republican nominee, Donald Trump, untrue, at least not as we read the evidence. When Justice Ginsburg, elaborating on her previous anti-Trump remarks to the New York Times, told CNN this week that Mr. Trump “has no consistency about him. He says whatever comes into his head at the moment. He really has an ego,” she certainly got no argument from us on the merits. (A brief dissent from the justice on one point, though: She rightly protested that Mr. Trump has not released his tax returns but incorrectly chided “the press” for being “very gentle with him on that.”) 
 
 However valid her comments may have been, though, and however in keeping with her known political bent, they were still much, much better left unsaid by a member of the Supreme Court. There’s a good reason the Code of Conduct for United States Judges flatly states that a “judge should not . . . publicly endorse or oppose a candidate for public office.” Politicization, real or perceived, undermines public faith in the impartiality of the courts. No doubt this restriction requires judges, and justices, to muzzle themselves and, to a certain extent, to pretend they either do or do not think various things that they obviously do or do not believe. As the saying goes, however, “hypocrisy is the compliment vice pays to virtue.” 
 
 As journalists, we generally favor more openness and disclosure from public figures rather than less. Yet Justice Ginsburg’s off-the-cuff remarks about the campaign fall into that limited category of candor that we can’t admire, because it’s inconsistent with her function in our democratic system. Only 16 years ago, a key issue regarding the outcome of the 2000 presidential election wound up at the Supreme Court, whose decision in favor of Republican nominee George W. Bush, backed by five conservative Republican appointees, was regarded as controversial by many and nakedly partisan by some. Think of how that situation would have played out if one or more of the justices had previously mused about leaving for New Zealand in the event of a victory for either Mr. Bush or his opponent, Democrat Al Gore. 
 
 When the story of Justice Ginsburg’s career is written, there will be many highlights — her pioneering work as a lawyer advocating women’s rights; her many trenchant opinions on the high court in defense of American society’s underdogs. Her performance this week, alas, confirms her fallibility. ||||| The supreme court justice, a hero to liberals as Trump’s second nominee threatens a right turn, spoke in New York on Sunday 
 
 'Flaming feminist' Ruth Bader Ginsburg wants five more years – at least 
 
 Supreme court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg called herself a “flaming feminist” on Sunday, and said she plans to spend “at least another five years” on the bench. 
 
 Her comments followed a performance in New York of The Originalist, a play about her former colleague and friend Antonin Scalia, who died in 2016. Scalia’s seat on the nine-member panel is now filled by Neil Gorsuch, another conservative who was nominated by Donald Trump. 
 
 Ginsburg, 85, was speaking a little more than a month after the announcement of the retirement of another conservative justice, Anthony Kennedy. Trump has nominated Brett Kavanaugh to replace him, aiming to push the court right for decades. 
 
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 “My dear spouse used to say the true symbol of the US is not a bald eagle,” Ginsburg said on Sunday. “It is the pendulum.” 
 
 She was responding to a question about how Americans have questioned the country’s institutions this summer. 
 
 “And when it goes very far in one direction,” she continued, “you can count on it coming back”. 
 
 With Congress mired in partisanship and dominated by money, the justices of the supreme court have gained a kind of celebrity. Ginsburg especially has gained notoriety for vehement dissenting opinions in which she criticizes bigotry or unfairness as she sees it. 
 
 She is the subject of a new documentary, RBG, and has even had her daily fitness routine scrutinized. Twice weekly, according to The RBG Workout, she conditions with planks, push-ups, chest presses and and leg curls. 
 
 When Ginsburg entered the 59E59 Theater, New Yorkers outside applauded. Even her accessories betrayed her celebrity. She carried a black canvas tote printed with a message: “I Dissent: Ruth Bader Ginsburg makes her mark”. That is the title of a picture book published after the success of “Notorious RBG”, a biography. 
 
 Ginsburg is a seasoned theatergoer and opera lover, interests she shared with Scalia, a Catholic arch-conservative. When Ginsburg sat down in the theater, a woman behind her remarked: “Ginsburg is sitting two rows in front of us. See her little head?” She was escorted by at least three secret service agents. 
 
 After the play, Ginsburg said: “One change in my life is I am now recognized.” When people approach her, she said, to pile on praise – “Justice Ginsburg, you’re my idol!” – she often responds: “Yes, so many people have told me I look just like her.” 
 
 The audience was polite throughout the play, which explores a fictionalized relationship between Scalia and a liberal clerk. During Ginsburg’s talk, it was rapt. People clapped, laughed or, with an occasional outburst, affirmed her stories. “Yes!” shouted one audience member, when Ginsburg described roadblocks she had faced as a Jewish woman. 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest Edward Gero plays Antonin Scalia in The Originalist. Photograph: Joan Marcus 
 
 The Originalist, by John Strand, was first produced in 2015 but it seemed apt in 2018. An early line sees Scalia say Roe v Wade, the 1973 decision which guaranteed the right to abortion, is “on its deathbed”. That elicited groans. Kavanaugh’s nomination is seen as a direct threat to Roe. 
 
 Giuliani: 180 tapes seized from Cohen but Trump only speaks on one Read more 
 
 In the discussion that followed the play, most questions focused on Ginburg’s relationship with Scalia, her “sparring partner”. Others asked what she thought was the most important case of the last 20 years: it is Obergefell v Hodges, the 2015 ruling that legalized same-sex marriage. 
 
 The audience’s favorite question may have been about Dean Dixon, a conductor who introduced Ginsburg to opera in 1944, when she was 11. Dixon, who was African American, said he was never called “maestro” until he went to Europe, a history chronicled in the book “Negro at Home, Maestro Abroad”. 
 
 Ginsburg said she looked at Dixon’s story as one example of America’s 20th-century fight with discrimination, from a time when when segregated troops fought “odious racism” in Europe during the second world war. For the court, that fight culminated in Brown v Board of Education, the 1954 ruling that stopped segregation in schools. 
 
 “Having been a woman and being a Jew, I know what it’s like to be the object of unfair discrimination,” she said. 
 
 America’s demons, in Ginsburg’s estimation, reared their heads again in 2013. She dissented a decision that gutted the Voting Rights Act, one of the most enduring achievements of the civil rights era. It turned Ginsburg into a liberal icon. 
 
 “The genius of the constitution is it has become more and more inclusive,” she said on Sunday. “Now, ‘we the people’, embraces all the people.” 
 
 She added: “Courts never lead a social change. They only catch up to a change.”
– Ruth Bader Ginsburg would probably need something harder than a bottle of fine California wine to get her to vote for Donald Trump in November—in fact, she doesn't even want to think about him as president, as she told the AP in an interview last week before piling on the Trump disparagement even further with the New York Times and CNN. The jury is now in on her remarks, and she may want to appeal. Some thoughts from around the internet: Mark Joseph Stern writes for Slate that Ginsburg's comments have been called "explosive, unprecedented, and unethical," by both liberals and conservatives, and he agrees that what she did was "dangerous" as well as a breach of ethics. But he says that's exactly Ginsburg's point, and it may be a strategic one in which she's willing to give up her "good name" and "sacrifice some of her prestige … to send as clear a warning signal about Trump as she possibly can." Ginsburg "abandoned judicial propriety to wrestle in the mud with a candidate she detests," he writes. "It is not pretty, it is not pleasant, and it may not even be that smart. But it may be the one thing the justice can do to help prevent a President Trump." His entire take here. The New York Times editorial board notes that Ginsburg has done nothing illegal—but it's sort of siding with Trump on this one. The paper points out that Antonin Scalia's recent death in an election year makes a new president's possible influence in picking a new justice especially critical. It calls it "baffling" that Ginsburg would stoop to his level and "call her own commitment to impartiality into question," adding that DC already has enough partisan issues "without the spectacle of a Supreme Court justice flinging herself into the mosh pit." The Washington Post adds that not only were Ginsburg's remarks not illegal, they weren't surprising, given her feminist history, nor were they necessarily untrue. But it agrees with the Times that her "off-the-cuff" statements were "inappropriate" and probably best never spoken. "Politicization, real or perceived, undermines public faith in the impartiality of the courts," the editorial board writes, citing the Code of Conduct for United States Judges' section on refraining from political activity. "[Her comments] fall into that limited category of candor that we can't admire, because it's inconsistent with her function in our democratic system." Donald Trump himself addressed Ginsburg's shade with the New York Times on Tuesday, but he added more thoughts on Twitter early Wednesday, tweeting, "Justice Ginsburg of the US Supreme Court has embarrassed all by making very dumb political statements about me. Her mind is shot—resign!"