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'Titan Of The Law': Trump Reacts To Ginsburg's Death

President Trump reacts to the news of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's death on Friday at Bemidji Regional Airport in Minnesota. He told reporters on the tarmac after his rally that he learned the news from them.
Brendan Smialowski
/
AFP via Getty Images
President Trump reacts to the news of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's death on Friday at Bemidji Regional Airport in Minnesota. He told reporters on the tarmac after his rally that he learned the news from them.

Updated at 10:56 p.m. ET

President Trump called Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg a "titan of the law" in a statement late Friday night on her death.

"Renowned for her brilliant mind and her powerful dissents at the Supreme Court, Justice Ginsburg demonstrated that one can disagree without being disagreeable toward one's colleagues or different points of view," the statement said.

The White House has also lowered its flag to half-staff.

The news of Ginsburg's death broke about 10 minutes after Trump launched into a campaign speech before a large crowd at an airport hangar in Bemidji, Minn.

Trump continued on, for more than an hour, before returning to Air Force One, where reporters were waiting. As Elton John's Tiny Dancer played from the nearby stage, a reporter broke the news.

"She just died?" Trump said. "I didn't know that, you're telling me now for the first time," he told a reporter.

"She led an amazing life, what else can you say? She was an amazing woman — whether you agreed or not — she was an amazing woman who led an amazing life," he said.

"I am sad to hear that," he said before boarding the plane to return to Washington, D.C.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Tamara Keith has been a White House correspondent for NPR since 2014 and co-hosts the NPR Politics Podcast, the top political news podcast in America. Keith has chronicled the Trump administration from day one, putting this unorthodox presidency in context for NPR listeners, from early morning tweets to executive orders and investigations. She covered the final two years of the Obama presidency, and during the 2016 presidential campaign she was assigned to cover Hillary Clinton. In 2018, Keith was elected to serve on the board of the White House Correspondents' Association.